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The article appears to build up though a chain of bad business and technical decisions to something "delightfully and poetically dysfunctional", but what that t
by brazzy 3y ago
The article appears to build up though a chain of bad business and technical decisions to something "delightfully and poetically dysfunctional", but what that thing actually is stays frustratingly implicit and doesn't actually make sense to me.
As far as I can tell it's this: Their user management consisted of an excel sheet, but their billing was based on physical piles of filled out signup forms. A user cancelling their contract was implemented by (only) removing their physical from, but this was not communicated to the acquiring company, so they started billing customers who had cancelled.
But then how did they stop cancelled customers from using the service? How did they implement a user authentication mechanism in the first place? There must have been a software representation of user records somewhere in their system, which was kept up to date with cancellations. And the acquirer never learned about that, which would have just been a dub mistake, not exactly delightful or poetic.
Unless... they somehow managed to have the dialup system query the excel sheet directly and never stopped cancelled customers from using the service because they assumed those had switched to broadband anway and wouldn't want to use free dialup even if they could.
These would have been a much more interesting WTF than the mere existence of the Excel sheets and piles of physical forms, and I would expect them to be mentioned explicitly.
So... what gives?
- russdill 3y agoYes, there's a ton of build up but very little tying up at the end of the story.
- belthesar 3y agoUsually in these days, auth was done via RADIUS. It's possible that the company handoff was done by not-the-sysadmins, and the operators of the company only had the things they knew of how things worked, which was the spreadsheet, whereas the spreadsheet to the sysadmins was just the tool they used to create the RADIUS account information off of.
- lgeorget 3y agoIs it possible that the subscription came with a modem lended by the company which the customer had to send back to cancel their subscription? I think nowadays in the US people tend to buy their router (people more knowledgeable than me, please correct me) but in France for instance, one usually rents their router from their ISP as part of their subscription. Maybe it Dial-up World used to do the same in 1999?
- brazzy 3y agoHm, interesting idea. And then they might not have done user authentication at all. Also an interestingly bad practice, plausible, but non obvious and not in any way hinted at by the article.
- omgmajk 3y agoFrom the post: > one of the aggrieved chose to show their displeasure by posting the list of all Dialup World user accounts online – along with every password in clear text.
- relaxing 3y agoNo, subscription hardware was not done anywhere to my knowledge. You bought your modem at a local store like CompUSA or through a mail order catalog. Actually finding a service to dial in to was left as an exercise to the user. (Hence why AOL famously mailed out floppies (and later CDs) to every household in America on a regular basis.)