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Laurent Bercot

My flat is a special case when it comes to installing fiber. It's more complicated than "put a fiber through the pipe, plug it to the OPC and to the box, checks it connects".

ISPs are very bad at handling special cases.

Fortunately, the tech guy is supposed to call you the day before the installation. And mine did. So I explained all the peculiarities of the setup, telling him what he would need to do, etc. The guy was very understanding and patient, and assured me he had written down everything and would bring the proper tools. I was Starting To Believe.

Today, the tech guy texts me, saying the higher-ups at the company yoinked him from the case and would send another technician. He does not know whether all the information I gave could be transmitted to the other guy.

The installation was scheduled to begin 10 minutes ago. I haven't heard anything from the second guy yet.

The company doesn't care about its employees, obviously, and it does not care about end users because end users are not its customers. The company is a contractor for the ISP. And if I give a bad review of the contractor to the ISP, which would be my only leverage, 1. the ISP isn't going to do anything, and 2. if by miracle the ISP does something, the technicians, including the professional and conscientious one, will face the consequences, not the contractor's shitty decision makers.

This shit happens all day, every day, with every service in our society. Nothing works properly anymore, it is impossible to get anything done without a completely disproportionate amount of effort.

Capitalism is great.

My flat is a special case when it comes to installing fiber. It's more complicated than "put a fiber through the pipe, plug it to the OPC and to the box, checks it connects".

ISPs are very bad at handling special cases.

Fortunately, the tech guy is supposed to call you the day before the installation. And mine did. So I explained all the peculiarities of the setup, telling him what he would need to do, etc. The guy was very understanding and patient, and assured me he had written down everything...

VanillaSkunk

@ska At least they didn't glue it to the ceilings of the common hallways where anyone can rip it down like they did in my building. lol

Laurent Bercot

An update: the second guy showed up. As I expected, the file was not transmitted to him at all; he didn't even know there was a first guy. And the little amount of information the company had given him... was wrong.

Fortunately, this second guy was good - and, apparently, used to working with missing or incorrect information. He did all the needed tests to figure out the correct parameters. I served as his assistant to solve the biggest problem of my specific fiber installation... and against all odds, we succeeded. That was a pleasant surprise.

It is still not working, because the signal is too degraded between the OPC and the floor box, and he needs to find another line to use. But it was progress - much more progress than I expected. The dude left 4 hours after arriving (for a supposed intervention time of 45 minutes) and is coming back tomorrow to finish the installation. With a little luck, it will work tomorrow night.

It's the little ones, going above and beyond to do good work with zero help from their hierarchy. Remember them.

An update: the second guy showed up. As I expected, the file was not transmitted to him at all; he didn't even know there was a first guy. And the little amount of information the company had given him... was wrong.

Fortunately, this second guy was good - and, apparently, used to working with missing or incorrect information. He did all the needed tests to figure out the correct parameters. I served as his assistant to solve the biggest problem of my specific fiber installation... and against all...

:bun: Stellar 🇫🇷

@ska@social.treehouse.systems i hate this shit too,
- i have a problem with my ISP's router
- i call the help hotline (from france)
- the person in the call center recites a script and doesn't speak french or english when i'm trying to explain my problem, they hang up on me
- i get an automated email to rate the callcenter person instead -_-

Laurent Bercot

I said it before and I'll say it again, probably not for the last time: people who really care about security would take a long, hard look at the *design* of sudo, where its weaknesses are, why it is so hard to make secure. (Hint: it's the genericity and the sudoers file syntax.)

They would write other, better tools to implement privilege escalation, and they'd have a better time ensuring it's secure. They could even write them in a memory-safe language, if they consider that it's important.

But taking *sudo* as is, not questioning its interface, and simply rewriting it in Rust, only screams "we don't care about having a holistic approach to security, we just hate C".

I said it before and I'll say it again, probably not for the last time: people who really care about security would take a long, hard look at the *design* of sudo, where its weaknesses are, why it is so hard to make secure. (Hint: it's the genericity and the sudoers file syntax.)

They would write other, better tools to implement privilege escalation, and they'd have a better time ensuring it's secure. They could even write them in a memory-safe language, if they consider that it's important.

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Cinnamon

@ska@social.treehouse.systems most rewrites in rust actually change the interface in such cases though?

Matt Palmer

@ska @tychotithonus the downside of building a new tool with new semantics and configuration format is that in 20 years' time, it might have gotten sufficient adoption to start being considered as a replacement. Network effects aren't just for fax machines and social networks, after all.

The announcement blog post claimed 1/3 of sudo security bugs have been memory safety, so as long as the rewrite didn't introduce at least that many new bugs elsewhere, it's presumably a net-win.

Laurent Bercot

When we said it was a bad idea to let capitalism into the domain name business, WE MEANT IT.

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