this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Technicians working on a firewall upgrade made at least ten mistakes, contributing to two deaths, according to a report on a September incident that saw Australian telco Optus unable to route calls to emergency services.

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[–] sola@aussie.zone -4 points 2 months ago (9 children)

If null references are a billion dollar mistake, firewalls are a trillion dollar mistake. It is a tool of oppression by despots. Each route needing an offering of fealty for passage.

I am not exaggerating when it has taken 6 months to get some simple firewall rules updated to activate a new internal service. Blew my mind! Some of these system admins are nuts with how much everything is locked down, complete masochists watching people struggling to get software to communicate over the network they control.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

My god man, you have no idea what you are talking about.

[–] sola@aussie.zone -1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I know exactly want I am talking about. What happened to Optus happens to me all the time when developing custom software for Australian businesses. Sys-admin is all outsourced to a huge Indian conglomerates who have no clear idea about the scope of the network and no incentive to know it. Consistently claim a ticket is completed when it has not been and repeat 5-6 times before they blame the software, repeat until I have a full Phd thesis of evidence demonstrating it is a sys-admin issue.

In the end it is all security theater because I write the software and could screw up the whole business if I wanted to be malicious.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

because I write the software and could screw up the whole business if I wanted to be malicious.

Which is why there is the general rule of zero trust in networks. You start with nothing and you need to prove why you need a hole poked in the firewall. Some IT departments are better at actioning those requests than others. You clearly have had the joy of working with IT departments that are on the worse end of the scale.

[–] sola@aussie.zone -1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Which is why there is the general rule of zero trust in networks.

Exactly. Hence I started with the trillion dollar mistake comment, it costs a truck load of money to get any changes for development with no security benefit in this context. I could feed businesses bad data and no network dictatorship can stop that.

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