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Comment by tekstar | Hacker News Reader

I used to work at a ~100 person company that provided satellite equipment, mostly to media companies - radio stations, movie distributors, that type of thing.

A senior customer service rep realized he had VPN access to a customer's, like.. T1 line. He started torrenting movies on it. On the CUSTOMERS network. Our entire company was nearly taken offline and the customer threatened cancelling the entire contract and suing us.

Dude got walked out the next day. A MEDIA company customer.

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I worked for a large cable company and usually once a week, a thumb drive went around with all the latest pay per view movies on it. Folks from every aspect of the business were apart of this, people who worked in security (had to get rid of logs), people with access to the files (stored in s3 buckets), and people with the decryption keys (set top video app guys). Once the videos were decrypted once, they were converted over to a normal mkv file. I wasn't in the right groups as I had been waging war on the people who were just comfortable at Charter. My team had their own supply of video sources, which was generally things that weren't even ppv yet.

Friend of mine had his brother working for a big ISP, they had an internal NewsGroup with everything you could dream of, only the tech people of the company were on it as you might guess though.

Wow, a classic case of "What were they thinking?"..

> a senior customer service rep

If an intern or new hire was guilty, it'd be more understadable. Perhaps, being senior, they got too comfortable with the power they wielded - but without the tech savvy to understand the consequences.

The fictional character “Dollar Bill” from the show Billions comes to mind.

> "What were they thinking?"..

It’s their own network, it’s the LAST place they’d look!!

> "What were they thinking?"

There were sites that tracked ratio which required maintaining a certain ratio to continue to be a member. Some members, however, took pride in having a ratio that skewed uploads over downloads.

I personally know people who paid for T1s just to maintain their "rep" of having the highest upload ratio. Not saying this is the case, but having access to a T1 back in the day was almost a way to "boost" their rep on these sites.

I can remember someone denying me an invite to a private tracker because I might “hurt his ratio”. He eventually relented but it was a hassle. My internet was faster than his at the time so it was a factor for sure.

Was he giving you access to his account? I can't see any way that inviting you to register your own account could let you affect his ratio.

The admins could mess with your ratio if someone you invited wasn’t seeding.

Many private trackers may ban you if one of your invitees misbehave.

Somewhat off topic, but a T1 line gave a full one-and-a-half megabit/second. "Back then", this was the second coming. Today I have 600 megabit/second in my apartment...

Back in the mid 90's, I upgraded an early ISP from a 56K dedicated line to a full T1. It was absolutely amazing, having all that bandwidth.

I had a friend who worked at an early dedicated hosting provider in the late 90's / early 2000's. He did "network security." He had his own servers on the network, serving up pirated warez and movies. Since he was in charge of the monitoring, this was never found out... until he was let go during the dot-com crash and needed to retrieve his equipment.

This customer service rep, how was otherwise his work performance / output? How was he like to work with?

I've fired people for having less wherewithal than to ask a question like this. His performance, output, or attitude are irrelevant. He knowingly used company property to violate federal law... IP law at that. Guy should be lucky he didn't get sued for gross negligence.

I might be misreading the comment above, but it sounds to me like it's asking, "Were there any signs of him being untrustworthy?" (and not "He shouldn't have been fired.")

It is precisely because of the magnitude of his error that it would have been nicer to fire him before he made it.

> like it's asking, "Were there any signs of him being untrustworthy?"

That's right -- I'm interested in hopefully recognizing such signs myself, sooner rather than later

If you fire people just for asking questions (possibly after misunderstanding the intent of the question like in this case), then it seems likely you'll end up with a team of sycophants that only tell you what you want to hear.

I had the first impression as you but IIUC they are saying the rep's poor ethics/judgement are enough to make them unemployable and we should all realize and agree or our judgement is also questionable.

E.g. Bob's super smart and gets 10 times the work done as anyone else but he also sexually harasses the secretary and dips into the petty cash drawer at least once a week.

It should be clear we don't want to have Bob as our employee. See Susan Fowler's experience with her boss at Uber who sexually propositioned her repeatedly but HR said they would not remove because he was a high performer... https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

My question was only to hopefully learn a bit about how people who do such weird things, can be like, otherwise at the workplace.

Wasn't suggesting anything related to firing or not.

@wcoenen you're right in that there's a misunderstanding of intent.

@ooobit2 I was asking, only to hopefully learn a bit about how people who do such weird things, can be like, otherwise at the workplace.

> I've fired people for having less wherewithal than to ask a question like this

Makes me wonder if you've fired people in the past, because of misunderstandings

>I've fired people for having less wherewithal than to ask a question like this.

Can you explain what this sentence means?

He was the right mix of gruff, smarmy, shady, and heroic to go pretty far at that company.

That company no longer exists except as a line item in some other company's deprecating assets

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