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Nontraditional Red Teams

zachholman.com

77 pointsfeross27 comments

Another good one is someone using your website through chrome translation. Similar to adblock in that it messes with random bits of your HTML. There's a particular problem it can cause with react, where if a text node that's rendered conditionally gets changed then it breaks your site - easy to work around once you know what it is (just wrap it in a span with an id) but took a bit of time to catch.

Many moons ago as a young developer at Microsoft I was asked what I thought of a nice big poster advertising our team's offering, to be displayed around campus. The picture had a large background circle that was made out of various small words and symbols, looking really neat if you were up close to it, very stylish. From the distance and to me with my poor eyesight and my prescription that wasn't up to date, it looked like a gray ring left on the paper with a giant leaking coffee mug. I wasn't as polite as I'd be today and so I pretty much said "hey this looks like a coffee spill". The designer was a bit upset but they did fix it...

Diversity has its benefits because no where in my public/high school/university education did I learn what "goatse" is. :)

This is called "quality control". A lost concept in the era of continuous integration and "move fast and break things".

Tech has a long history of declaring things useless and then gradually bootstrapping them back up as we learn all the lessons that led to those things existing.

To be fair, QA is seen by a lot of folks as license to not fully test their code themselves.

So it's not necessarily that QA was useless, but that it was actively harmful

We don't need testing. We're "agile". Or something like that.

'"Tradition" is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.'

This is, by far, my most conservative opinion. Credit to Donald Kingsbury for the quote.

Honorable mention re: the same problem, "dogfooding"[0] is gone from the software industry, which is why users often feel like they're getting suckered by the companies they patronize; the decision makers, who don't themselves use the product, absolutely see the users as suckers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

Reminds me of that AI company that didn't want it's applicants too use AI in the process. Like... you made this monster.

Dogfooding is still alive in companies like Microsoft; they just ignore all the feedback. There have been numerous comments about that by its employees in HN threads here. I propose that process be called "dogshitting" instead.

Dogbarfing? They rejected the dogfood for poor quality, but they had to eat it again.

I found this on scurvy and forgotten traditions to be fascinating https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Imo: get the problem back is a small price to pay to learn the lesson again. If you didn't write it down the first time, remove the tradition and next time write it down. Now you do the right thing AND for the right reason.

Don’t forget to declare it an innovation, we have re-invented the way everyone was doing thing anyway!

Better that than doing the right thing at the wrong time IMO

Honestly I prefer this.

The alternative is what we see in politics and big corps:

1. tragedy happens

2. "leader" adds some checks to avoid the problem

3. the check literally will not stop the problem

4. everything sucks

And it's always a ratchet that goes in the same direction: More rules, more laws, more checks, more crap.

Example: Sweden had it's first mass school shooting and politicians suggest stuff like locking doors for unauthorized (the shooter was a student!).

A few years before that Sweden had a terrorist act where a dude jumped into a truck and drove into a crowd. What did the politicians do? Blame car companies for "not having a way to limit access to who can drive a car". Yes. They reinvented car keys. They also made everyone walk home instead of taking the subway. Did anyone die on the subway? No. Were the roads now CRAMMED with THOUSANDS of people in the middle of the road, making an extremely juicy terrorist target for someone with a truck? Yes, so much so that I was a bit scared walking home in a way I wouldn't have been if I wasn't now a part of a crowd for no damn reason.

chesterton's fence would like a word

The bike shed needs another coat of taupe paint though

Jesus that thing talks?!? That's reason enough to get rid of it.

This is the weapon of a good programmer. Not as clumsy or random as continuous integration or “move fast and break things”; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

Remember when Facebook Chat launched to a billion users and it worked perfectly with the load? They did a lot of quality control.

> So someone on your team should use a password manager. I mean, you all should, of course

Yeah, everyone who has any kind of online account should! It's number one on Ollam's preparedness checklist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ihrGNGesfI

Evergreen talk.

What's wrong with Season 2 of The Newsroom?

I'm a huge Newsroom sucker, but that one just felt weird. The whole "we used [clip] sarin" felt really drawn-out and kind of weird. On the other hand, my partner and I constantly say "we used sarin" to each other so maybe it has a way of sticking in your brain regardless. (And it might mean our relationship is... odd.)

> Someone to look for dicks

Speaking of, that "Use your eyes" image this ends with also could be boobs instead of eyes.

that's... that's the joke.

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