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Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

(digipres.club)
294 points NotPractical | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 00:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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dylan604 ◴[16 Oct 24 02:26 UTC] No.41855041[source]▶
Take this as a lesson. If you've been a dev long enough, you've worked on a project knowing that how the project is being done isn't the best method with every intention of going back to make it better later, but not at the expense of getting the MVP up and running. You'll also have seen that never actually happening and all of those bad decisions from the beginning still living all the way to the bitter end.

I'm guessing not one person involved would have ever imagined their code being left on a machine just left out in the open exposed to the public completely abandoned by the company.

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flomo ◴[16 Oct 24 06:12 UTC] No.41856088[source]▶
They might have had the most perfectly developed decommissioning process. And nobody is going to care when their paychecks stop showing up, and everything suddenly gets trucked-off into receivership.

Given the era and constraints, I don't see how it was irresponsible or 'sloppy' to have a local database on these things. This most likely is not on development.

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1. mikeryan ◴[16 Oct 24 16:45 UTC] No.41861159[source]▶
The end of Chicken Soup for the Soul media (who owned RedBox and Crackle at the end) was a complete shit show. I’d be unsurprised if they just walked away from the DVD boxes leaving the whoever had them on their property with the job of dumping them.

CSS just stopped paying vendors before the Redbox acquisition to make their balance sheet look better then just never paid after that until going bankrupt a year later. (My company was a vendor who had to get our attorneys involved to reclaim some payment prior to their bankruptcy and will never get the rest)

I’ve seen a bunch of these SPAC style (there’s usually some sort of penny stock starting point so the company is publicly traded from the jump) rollups of bankrupt or failing media and entertainment brands over the years and they all blow up.