AstraZeneca patients data exposed for over a year due to password snafu

techcrunch.com

48 points·mcdwayne··6 comments

When will devs stop hardcoding passwords? smh.

When will people stop being incompetent at their jobs?

In the case of computer engineers maybe they need to be legally responsible directly for this kind of stuff.

I think that for the public and medical sectors they already are. And in Europe they always are, in theory, thanks to privacy regulations.

> And in Europe they always are, in theory, thanks to privacy regulations.

Unless it was malicious (and you/government can prove it), it's companies fault.

> In the case of computer engineers maybe they need to be legally responsible directly for this kind of stuff.

Don't you think that management deserves a share of the trophy? If everything that goes wrong with software is blamed on engineers, then what do we need management for?

For example they may have failed to ensure that sufficient resources are available to do code reviews, or they may have cut corners by assigning a project to a junior that should have been assigned to a senior, or by assigning a project to one developer where three are needed, or by setting unrealistic deadlines that put people under unnecessary stress, or by telling them "It's just a quick PoC" and then later "We need that on production yesterday".

Management should, with some exceptions, always be the first ones to point the finger at, but software developers have such little respect in society that even they will throw their colleagues under the bus in this way. The day that a large scale disaster occurs because of a software bug will be the day that we will face greater scrutiny and regulation while the employers get more government funding and corporate welfare to cover their asses while lining their pockets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com