Reader feedback: "bad" names, !main(), and Mastodon

Reader feedback: "bad" names, !main(), and Mastodon

Questions, questions, questions. Sometimes I have answers. Here we go with more reader feedback.

M.D. asks if I could share a story about when a company "did something really wrong".

OK, how about yet another case of "real names" gone wrong? I'm talking about the thing where some derpy programmer writes a filter to "exclude naughty words" and ends up rejecting people with names that HAPPEN to match a four-letter English word. My canonical example is "Nishit" because that's what actually happened at another job back around 2009.

But that's old news. I'm talking about "yet another case". This one is from right at the end of 2019. It seems like someone decided they were going to "move a metric" from the support queue. There were a TINY NUMBER of customers who had deliberately signed up with obviously offensive names. They were being handled by reasonable bags of mostly water (i.e., people) who could look at it and figure out what to keep and what to purge.

Well, the derpy programmer with a goal to hit by the end of the quarter apparently struck again, and they wrote a thing to ban anyone who matched a short list. Then they ran it, and - surprise - it banned a bunch of real people who weren't doing anything wrong. Of course, those people have probably had many problems on other services, and now THIS company was the latest one to show how damn stupid and unfeeling it could be.

"My last name really is 'Cocks'. How would you like me to proceed?"

Unsurprisingly, this pissed off a bunch of people and generated a blip in the news cycle. Internally, it was brought to the weekly review meeting that I was somehow still running at that point. Someone was there and presented the case, and it was pretty clear they were going through the motions because we called them on the carpet.

For some really stupid reason (literally every other senior engineer and manager was at some offsite planning thing that morning, and *someone* had to run this meeting), I was the most senior person in the room, and so I felt I had to ask them the question as "the voice of the company" (whatever that even means):

"Can I get you to promise to never do this again?"

They wouldn't commit to it. I got no reply. They just looked at me. Conclusion: this will definitely happen again. Nobody gave a damn about what happened to the customers, and how bad the whole thing looked.

Afterwards, I talked to some friends who had worked in the trenches in customer support. They knew what was happening in terms of the "trouble reports" that would come in from people using the app. They had a good feel for what was actually a problem and what was clearly "OKR scamming".

Near as we can figure, they decided to code this up because it would let them claim to have automated some class of tickets that were being filed. It's like, sure, it would in fact remove the handful of tickets that get filed about this. It would also generate a godawful amount of hurt (and bad PR and so on) a few hours or days later, and would have to be turned off. But, the person managed to ship the feature, and so they can get their bonus, or promotion, or whatever.

Of course, karma is a bitch. A few months later, COVID hit and the company started laying people off in droves. I bet all of those people are gone now. Unfortunately, this also means anyone who learned a lesson from this event is probably gone, too. Hmph.

For anyone who's in today's "lucky 10,000" set, have some additional reading on this topic.

A reader responded to my "mainless" program post and asked if you could avoid the segfault by putting "_exit()" into the destructor or similar. They're totally right. If you make the program bail out instead of trying to carry along into uncharted territory, it will in fact exit cleanly. You already have unistd.h in my example, so go for it.

Another reader commented on the same post, asking just "The file name is a bit worrying. Is everything alright?". I guess they missed the link to knowyourmeme.com, or are generally unfamiliar with the notion of "things that aren't really trolling but are sort of funny kind of".

When it comes to that kind of stuff, that lizard is my spirit animal.

Hhhhhehe.

Jeff asks if I'm on Mastodon. I am not using that (or any other aspect of the "Fediverse"). I am also not on Twitter. I used to have a "business" account out there for a while, but never really used it, and deleted it last year when it became apparent where Twitter was headed. I stand by that decision.

I should mention that there are some dubious parts of the whole Fediverse thing, as someone who runs a site that occasionally gets links shared around. Posting a link to one of these things basically summons a giant swarm of (bot) locusts who all want to generate a link preview at the same time. I was going to write a post about this a while back, but it would be short and kind of threadbare, so I'll just mention it here instead.

Now, since all of this /w/ stuff is just a bunch of flat files on disk, all of it gets served out of memory and it's like ho hum. I can't run out of database connections or anything like that. I'm basically limited by the level of bandwidth I pay for on my switch ports. Eventually, they all have what they came for and it stops. But, for a minute or two, it can be interesting to watch.

There's a certain "cadence" to a web server's activity logs as seen in "tail -f". When this happens, it scrolls so fast you can barely read it. You definitely notice.

This is far from a new issue. A report that it can collectively be used "as a DDOS tool" was filed back in August 2017, when it was a far smaller problem.

It should not surprise anyone who's been doing this kind of thing for a while that the bug report in question (which I won't link here, but which people will still look up and try to brigade) has been closed since 2018.

Did anyone ever see the classic Simpsons episode where someone falls down a well, and at the end of the episode they "solve the problem" by sticking a "CAUTION WELL" sign in the ground?

"That should do it." - Groundskeeper Willie

I can hear his voice in my head any time I see a bug like that.