4 ms·

Software isn’t black and white. You weigh the impact of both options.

bastawhiz 3y ago
If there's a risk of exposing business secrets or user data, no, it's 100% black and white. It's weighing some downtime and/or annoyance against _unbounded risk_. It's unethical at best to choose uptime over revealing user data or the remote access to internal systems which you don't understand the complexity of.
- sunnybeetroot 3y ago
  I struggle to see when a business responsible for life support services in an industry like medical would choose to end lives over delaying the addressing of a data breach but maybe I’m not seeing the bigger picture?
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    1. Microsoft isn't in the business of life support systems. Turning off a system with exposed credentials isn't going to shut off all of Azure. Even if it did, are you really claiming that Azure downtime is life-and-death? 2. In what hypothetical universe does a life support system connected to the internet contain a trove of customer PII? And where disconnecting this hypothetical system from the internet _cause the patient it's supporting to die_?
    - sunnybeetroot 3y ago
      I thought the discussion was extending beyond Microsoft and applying to any software. But if you are asking if it’s possible for Microsoft Azure to be the hosting provider for very important systems ie government, medical, then yes, these could impact a high degree of quality of life for people, even now or in the future.
      - bastawhiz 3y ago
        > if it’s possible for Microsoft Azure to be the hosting provider for very important systems ie government, medical, then yes, these could impact a high degree of quality of life for people, even now or in the future. If you design a system that could cause significant personal harm or a meaningful degradation of quality of life for someone due to cloud provider downtime, you're just a bad engineer. There's no such thing as a data center that's failure-proof. If someone's well-being depends on a system, it's simply negligent to be intolerant of failure conditions.
        sunnybeetroot 3y ago
        I agree, there are many terrible systems around the world with terrible implementations that at best cause inconvenience to people and at worst lead to a loss of life. My point is if you are faced with a data loss you make a call that assesses the impact of downtime and don’t follow a blanket rule.

If there's a risk of exposing business secrets or user data, no, it's 100% black and white. It's weighing some downtime and/or annoyance against _unbounded risk_. It's unethical at best to choose uptime over revealing user data or the remote access to internal systems which you don't understand the complexity of.

sunnybeetroot 3y ago
I struggle to see when a business responsible for life support services in an industry like medical would choose to end lives over delaying the addressing of a data breach but maybe I’m not seeing the bigger picture?
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  1. Microsoft isn't in the business of life support systems. Turning off a system with exposed credentials isn't going to shut off all of Azure. Even if it did, are you really claiming that Azure downtime is life-and-death? 2. In what hypothetical universe does a life support system connected to the internet contain a trove of customer PII? And where disconnecting this hypothetical system from the internet _cause the patient it's supporting to die_?
  - sunnybeetroot 3y ago
    I thought the discussion was extending beyond Microsoft and applying to any software. But if you are asking if it’s possible for Microsoft Azure to be the hosting provider for very important systems ie government, medical, then yes, these could impact a high degree of quality of life for people, even now or in the future.
    - bastawhiz 3y ago
      > if it’s possible for Microsoft Azure to be the hosting provider for very important systems ie government, medical, then yes, these could impact a high degree of quality of life for people, even now or in the future. If you design a system that could cause significant personal harm or a meaningful degradation of quality of life for someone due to cloud provider downtime, you're just a bad engineer. There's no such thing as a data center that's failure-proof. If someone's well-being depends on a system, it's simply negligent to be intolerant of failure conditions.
      - sunnybeetroot 3y ago
        I agree, there are many terrible systems around the world with terrible implementations that at best cause inconvenience to people and at worst lead to a loss of life. My point is if you are faced with a data loss you make a call that assesses the impact of downtime and don’t follow a blanket rule.