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Comment by redox99 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, who would also yell at you when customers can't access their cat pictures.

Of course it could be an accident, and you didn't know. But if it was clearly malicious compliance, personally and I think I speak for many, I wouldn't continue to have on the team somebody with these kinds of traits.

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I don't think I understand. A court orders you to block certain IP addresses: you have no options. If that block disallows access to unrelated pages there's nothing either the engineer or the boss can do. Should the engineer lose any sleep over this? Am I missing something?

you are missing the experience of an asshole manager pressuring you to 'just fix it' in an enraged state accompanied by their phone constantly buzzing from the sweet notification sound of getting bombarded by emails/tickets.

for context, i didnt experience this yet. I hope i never do.

Courts don't work like computer programs, if the court order would have clearly unintended outcomes then you have some option to in good faith not comply with the order, have your lawyers raise it with the right politicians or courts, and not end up in legal trouble.

The job if the engineer who notices this is to raise it to their boss and legal counsel and let them decide whether you should still execute the planned block or not. If they decide you should then you do, if they decide you shouldn't then you don't.

> The job if the engineer who notices this is to raise it to their boss and legal counsel...

...shouldn't the legal department be involved way before the issue reaches the engineer? Why should the engineer ever care about it in the first place? Chances are these orders do not come directly to their email.

> shouldn't the legal department be involved way before the issue reaches the engineer?

Possibly, but the legal department might not know what cloudflare is or the implications until the engineers explain it.

That seems like an extremely unlikely scenario for the legal department of an ISP in 2023.

In this case the court said to block illegal content, and here are the IP addresses where that content is served which should be blocked. It passes the sniff test of the lawyers as not much different than blocking domains of piracy sites. They pass the requirement on through the engineering org, it eventually reaches an individual contributor who is tasked to make it a reality.

Then that engineer looks at the specific IPs and realizes that some of them are cloudflare ips and the collateral damage of blocked content would be significant. Their job is to then escalate and pass it back to higher managers and the legal department to confirm they knew about that implication and want to move forward.

The legal department at the isp having specialists means that they could understand this situation in a single email from the engineer, not that they obviously have the foresight or capability to even find out that some of the IPs might be for cloudflare. Or sometimes the lawyer might even assume that's not a big deal but higher managers can realize that it is a big deal and then discuss options.

All that I mean is that even at FAANG companies with extensive and competent legal departments its not correct to just blindly execute a change like this if you think it looks wrong; it's not at all a safe assumption that what you know is somehow a subset of what they know.

Nah, you just put up a big splash page. Due to the order of court XXX judge XYZ…

Let them be hoisted by their own petard.

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