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Comment by croemer | Hacker News Reader

Thanks that the most informative thing about this incident that exists at this point. Nothing on the website at all. It's terrible.

The blog mentions recently moving away from TCL. Could it have been related to that?

Do you have an idea why the emails arrive as a drip, spread over days?

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I don't think there's anything about tcl that is inherently insecure, but it indicates that the code might be quite old and from a time where many vulnerabilities and ways to avoid them were not well understood.

Tcl and Rivet to me says the code is from the 1990s or 2000s. Does FlightAware go back that far? Otherwise I am surprised at those choices for anything newer.

2005. There was still code and pages dating back to then running and being used. But over the years, more and more was built on top of it rather than a different stack.

Frontend code would vary with whatever flavor a developer liked at the time, but the backend was still always going through Rivet/TCL.

ICs would complain about it but the founders cashed out to the tune of 9 figures in the end, so it worked out for them.

I’ll agree that TCL isn’t inherently insecure, but you aren’t getting any libraries or frameworks with it either to make your life easier or safer.

The website still looks like the TCL monster it has always been, so I doubt it. But I have no intimate knowledge of the inner workings there soon after the Raytheon buyout.

Oh it is owned by Raytheon a huge listed company. That makes it more surprising that the communication is so bad. I'd expect a public company with market cap of $150b to have its act together regarding crisis communication.

It's part of Collins Aerospace which was bought by United Technologies which merged with Raytheon. Having been part of a merger with RTX, generally your IT systems change and that's about it. Most of management stays and as long as your group is hitting numbers, no one from RTX gives a shit what's going on. My guess if you called up RTX CEO and asked him for a comment about FlightAware, he's not aware he evens owns the site.

Also, Raytheon doesn't ever talk to the public. Most of the work is classified so yea, crisis communication involving the general public, internally, they are clueless.

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