(no subject)

[jack]

My debit card has become cracked, and I phoned HSBC for a replacement. I was amazed -- I was sure they'd manage to introduce administrative faff somehow or other, probably by cancelling the old one immediately, but no, they took care of it immediately.

Though I suppose they won't be putting "I called with an extremely simple request and you said you weren't going to fuck it up" on their testimonials pages.

Comments

[robhu.livejournal.com]

LJ ate my comment :-(

Why must the admins at LJ be such incompetent clowns?

[simont]

With hindsight, this shouldn't have been too difficult for them; issuing a new card such that both are valid during the overlap period is after all what happens when a card expires, and since nearly all cards terminate their life by expiring this really ought to be something they already know how to do!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

*snork* I like the icon. Uh, what did your comment say?

Why must the admins at LJ be such incompetent clowns?

*Are* they? I don't know much about livejournal's organisation (if I had the time, I'd rather used a distributed lj rather than bully lj into being what I wanted) but I would have assumed it was more a case of "this got too big and it's not engineered to the hilt" rather than "bwuh! me dumb! deelete!" But I don't know.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

It is a good icon ;-)

Uh, what did your comment say?
I was asking what you meant by hacked. Do you mean it was cloned, or that someone got hold of the numbers and used them online, or something else?

"this got too big and it's not engineered to the hilt" rather than "bwuh! me dumb! deelete!"
There was a power cut in the financial district where LJs servers are hosted. The backup power at the data center failed to work and so LJ dropped off the net. This isn't their fault.

What is their fault is the loss of data that happened afterwards. No data should have been lost. I made my comment at least 30 minutes before the power cut which suggests either they do something very very stupid and don't commit things to disk very often (I can't actually imagine how they could do that over such a large period of time), or (far more likely) that their databases server(s) got corrupted so they had to restore a backup.

LJ seem to have a bad history when it comes to these things. During the last major outage it took them several days to get back online and in that time they discovered that the disks in the RAID arrays were not fsyncing properly so they had a lot of corrupted data. I would expect them to have fixed these problems since then and to run regular tests. This is basic stuff.

Brad Fitz said at the last USENIX conference that he thinks hot failover between multiple sites is a waste of money. I wonder if that reflects his general thoughts on engineering for reliability.

[simont]

He said cracked, not hacked. I assumed he meant the physical card had developed a physical crack in it which would eventually cause it to fall into two pieces.

(He could conceivably have meant "cracked" in the sense of electronic crime, but surely in that case he would have wanted the old card cancelled immediately?)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

oops.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes. Oops; I thought "cracked" was more specific than "broken", the potential ambiguity didn't occur to me at all. (I don't tend use "crack" that way.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed.

But most times I phone up I think it *ought* to be easy, but often it turns out to be minorly kafkaesque for either legitimate reasons I hadn't thought of in advance, or stupid or exploitative ones :)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I encounter 'crack' in the computer sense much more than in the physical sense :P

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I should point out, I have no evidence that they *haven't* messed it up -- I haven't used the card since, and the replacement isn't due before next week. But the guy sounded more confident that I would expect if he were just lying :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

LOL. I guess that makes sense -- obviously there are a lot of cracked objects, but you don't often have to *say* so. FWIW, I was amused enough to make an informal summary of my (and friends) uses of "crack" by counting my email account.

There were 41 emails, representing two to three fewer crack events (since some were only quoting previous usages -- eg. notification emails for this).

Excluding commercial messages, I found the senses of broken, cocaine (metaphor for addictive), whip, craic (Irish word for fun or a night out), crypto, a loud noise, to go crazy, "have a crack at", "crack team", "butt crack", and "crack out the ..." all once. Cocaine (crazy stupid) twice. And to laugh hysterically four times.

In commercial messages (generally from arts picture house) there were: cocaine (literally), "crack out" and go crazy once; crack team and broken twice; and crypto thrice.

It was never used where "hack" could be :) (Though the crypto sense is obviously related.) I obviously hang out in the wrong circles :)

It's actually really interesting: I wouldn't have realised that there were so many, nor which were most common. It's like verb tenses -- you get taught present tense as a child, but then you never ever use it again, even though you think you do.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. Sorry, I'd noticed the outage, but hadn't realised the implications. No, you *shouldn't* have data loss.

I guess I was imagining "administrator" as a technical person; possibly not a senior person able to authorise money for big changes. And being optimistically charitable -- I know if you plonked me down in the situation, depending what resources I had, I might not be able to do everything right, and that might be incompetence or might be ignorance.

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

I'm still bewildered as to why HSBC sent me a bank statement covering a whole 6 day period recently...

[yrieithydd.livejournal.com]

But wouldn't he have said `been cracked' not `become cracked' for that sense? (Or more likely hacked). I'd use cracked as it cracked the code, but not for hacking.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I also misread it ;-)

(ack! everyone is pointing out that I'm wrong! stop it! ;-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

FTR, I would, though I *might* have said "become cracked" for some reason or other.

But Rob, it was a perfectly reasonable reading, don't worry. If you know what the alternatives are, you could tell which, but of course you get stuck with the meaning you expected.

[minipoppy.livejournal.com]

OK, I don't actually know you so I shouldn't comment, but I love the way you always try and make everyone feel good and right in your replies to their comments. That is very sweet.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Aw, thank you. I feel like I know *you* -- maybe your username is just very evocative :)

Of course I do -- I don't like feeling wrong or stupid, so I don't suppose anyone else does either. I would have said everyone else does the same, I'm just worse at it so its more obvious and patronising :)

OK, that's not quite fair -- sometimes it is, but I always try to be both positive and fair. But even assuming you have the right to evaluate what someone else said is a bit patronising.

I'm glad it is appreciated :)