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I do this all the time. At work, I'd consider what it would take to wipe all the servers, and all the backups (while creating enough of a distraction on the ne

I do this all the time. At work, I'd consider what it would take to wipe all the servers, and all the backups (while creating enough of a distraction on the network to delay people from pulling the power in the datacenters). We had way too many people with global root access that could have done something about it, so the point would be to consider engineering to restrict access (this was before kubertnetes took over the world). Walking down the street yesterday I saw someone had a little bucket full of dog treats for anyone to take and my first thought was the risk of someone spraying a bit of poison on them. I don't necessary "fear" things like that, but its just obvious to me that you're implicitly trusting the thousands of people who has walked past that box not to be pathological. Probably good that not everyone in the world thinks the way I do.

LorenPechtel 5y ago
It's an occupational hazard for us computer guys. It's the failure mode you didn't think of that brings the system down, so of course you learn to think of the failure modes.
themodelplumber 5y ago
> Probably good that not everyone in the world thinks the way I do. It's funny because HN (in contrast to the world at large) seems to be frequented by a lot of people who are gifted with the forward-looking contingency mindset. I'll bet that's why you got upvoted, and it's probably why the article was posted. One reason why a community like this would exist online is because it's effectively a saf...err I mean friendly place for people who are concerned about future events, but in a positive, problem-solving sort of way. The rest of the world doesn't always reward this or want to hear about it. IT, operations, and even software development need people who can think this way (particularly the opportunistic side of software dev, as it is more COTS-components oriented and thus less NIH and thus theoretically more battle-tested/hardened against future events). Sadly one of the things I've noticed about those with this mindset is that if they are not able to act on their perceptions constructively, for example if they were raised in an environment where it was considered a crazy way to think about things (focus only on past or present), it can turn into a more subjective, fear-based practice. In those cases it seems you get more outcomes like a stance where even just going outside feels to a person more like gambling with their life. Just observationally speaking...
- lamontcg 5y ago
  I think the fear response comes from people who don't assign probabilities to things, so they just see that everything is a risk (leading to disorders like OCD in the extreme). And at work you can see people focusing on mitigating the wrong security issues. There's a sort of maslow's heirarchy of security that needs to happen, and some people noodle way too hard on memory bit flipping attacks and not on just making sure you can't ssh into something with a guessable root password. Of course its more intellectually challenging to think about all the ways that the NSA could break into Google, but if you don't work at Google its all the boring shit you need to make sure you have in order.

LorenPechtel 5y ago

It's an occupational hazard for us computer guys. It's the failure mode you didn't think of that brings the system down, so of course you learn to think of the failure modes.

themodelplumber 5y ago

> Probably good that not everyone in the world thinks the way I do. It's funny because HN (in contrast to the world at large) seems to be frequented by a lot of people who are gifted with the forward-looking contingency mindset. I'll bet that's why you got upvoted, and it's probably why the article was posted. One reason why a community like this would exist online is because it's effectively a saf...err I mean friendly place for people who are concerned about future events, but in a positive, problem-solving sort of way. The rest of the world doesn't always reward this or want to hear about it. IT, operations, and even software development need people who can think this way (particularly the opportunistic side of software dev, as it is more COTS-components oriented and thus less NIH and thus theoretically more battle-tested/hardened against future events). Sadly one of the things I've noticed about those with this mindset is that if they are not able to act on their perceptions constructively, for example if they were raised in an environment where it was considered a crazy way to think about things (focus only on past or present), it can turn into a more subjective, fear-based practice. In those cases it seems you get more outcomes like a stance where even just going outside feels to a person more like gambling with their life. Just observationally speaking...

lamontcg 5y ago
I think the fear response comes from people who don't assign probabilities to things, so they just see that everything is a risk (leading to disorders like OCD in the extreme). And at work you can see people focusing on mitigating the wrong security issues. There's a sort of maslow's heirarchy of security that needs to happen, and some people noodle way too hard on memory bit flipping attacks and not on just making sure you can't ssh into something with a guessable root password. Of course its more intellectually challenging to think about all the ways that the NSA could break into Google, but if you don't work at Google its all the boring shit you need to make sure you have in order.