Password Complexity, Good or bad?
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@johnhooks said:
Also not the same. If they lost 25% of the service they paid for then that's understandable. That's the equivalent of 7.5 days. We are talking about .001% of their service. That's like saying you want the whole Big Mac free because they only gave you 3.5 pickles instead of 4.
The percentage simply doesn't matter. That's a red herring, mostly. Yes, "most" of the service was delivered. But was the part that they paid for delivered? What if you only watch 30 minutes of television a month? Did they lose .001% or 100%?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Also not the same. If they lost 25% of the service they paid for then that's understandable. That's the equivalent of 7.5 days. We are talking about .001% of their service. That's like saying you want the whole Big Mac free because they only gave you 3.5 pickles instead of 4.
The percentage simply doesn't matter. That's a red herring, mostly. Yes, "most" of the service was delivered. But was the part that they paid for delivered? What if you only watch 30 minutes of television a month? Did they lose .001% or 100%?
Their perception was 100% loss, but the service was still only a .001% loss. They are paying for the service as a whole, not the amount of time they will use it.
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@Dashrender said:
Assuming the average house hold has the TV on from 5 PM - 11 PM M-F and 9 AM - 11 PM Sat & Sun, the percentage of loss goes up by more than 50%.
Right, and to the "average" user, it is a trivial outage. But to someone, it is a significant one.
What about those of us who paid for Netflix and wanted to do special Christmas movie viewing on Christmas Eve two years ago and the service went out for the day. Sure, one day outage, but it was a special day where people were scheduling things around the service availability. I'm not saying that Netflix should refund the month or that people should be mad.. I'm just saying that the percentage of time that you are down does not equate to the percentage of service value that is lost.
Think about a pace maker that keeps you alive 99% of the time. Is it worth 99% the price of a better one?
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@johnhooks said:
Their perception was 100% loss, but the service was still only a .001% loss. They are paying for the service as a whole, not the amount of time they will use it.
That's your perception, but you cannot know what they were buying it for. The percentage of downtime does not tell us anything about the percentage of service lost.
What if you paid for backups and they only lost one file out of thousands. What if it was your database file? You'd say "well, I should only get a few cents back because only one file was lost"?
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Another example... you pay for television and it turns out that it only works during business hours or the middle of the night. 50% of the time. You can never use it during the morning or evening hours. So anytime you are not at work, it is off.
Did you get 50% of the service? Or did you get zero? Because you were only buying it for the times that you could use it.
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Of course - non of this matters. The SLA of the service should dictate what the vendor has to provide during service outages.
If the vendor says, sorry sir.. you get nothing because our SLA says you get nothing for an outage less than 24 hours... the vendor simply hopes that the customer won't leave them.
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Or how about a service bundle...
You pay X for television and Internet together. You only need Internet, it is all that you care about, but the television was bundled in for free so you got that as well, it was free (or really cheap.) Now that you are locked in and paying... turns out, no Internet available in your area. But there IS television. Now they give you a 50% discount since the Internet is not available. You are getting 50% of what you paid for in one way but 0% of what you actually were paying for.
When things come together (bundles, time, etc.) you cannot make statements about what portions are the free portions and which parts are the ones being paid for, because it is one thing and that one thing was not delivered, something else was. If that something else was good enough, is up to no one but the consumer. No one else has the capability of knowing.
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@Dashrender said:
Of course - non of this matters. The SLA of the service should dictate what the vendor has to provide during service outages.
If the vendor says, sorry sir.. you get nothing because our SLA says you get nothing for an outage less than 24 hours... the vendor simply hopes that the customer won't leave them.
Unless there is a monopoly in which case an SLA should be illegal.
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The problem with an SLA is that it is non-optional in these cases. The SLA doesn't change what was paid for or what was delivered or what is ethically owed to whom... it's purely a means of proactively hurting the consumer via the law, the law being the enemy of the citizenry in this case. There isn't an option for an SLA around what the consumer was buying the service for, the SLA is part of the service and so legally is an SLA but ideologically is not, it's just what there is. The consumer has no option but to agree to it in order to hope to get the service that they want.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Of course - non of this matters. The SLA of the service should dictate what the vendor has to provide during service outages.
If the vendor says, sorry sir.. you get nothing because our SLA says you get nothing for an outage less than 24 hours... the vendor simply hopes that the customer won't leave them.
Unless there is a monopoly in which case an SLA should be illegal.
What does that gain you? The ability to sue? In a consumer case like this, you'll have a hard time showing losses for more than the mins that John's talking about.
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@Dashrender said:
What does that gain you? The ability to sue? In a consumer case like this, you'll have a hard time showing losses for more than the mins that John's talking about.
Losses are pretty easy to show... it's the amount paid. If you pay $100 and don't get to watch the television that you paid for, it is the amount of the service that is in dispute.
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@Dashrender said:
Can I ensure the phone won't be calling them while sleeping/travelling/vacation - yeah, assuming they aren't trying to log in during those times LOL. Yes it would be limited to 2FA only.
If you can ensure that it will never go off unless they have possession of the device and are they themselves trying to log in, you don't need 2FA
The only value to 2FA is contacting them when they are NOT trying to log in.
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The point of the whole discussion around .001% loss of service is....
If the change in work requirements force me to...
- Always carry my phone
- Always keep my phone charged
- Buy specific types of phones or be on specific carriers
- Modify my phone plans
- Take calls or texts at times that I am not working
- Protect my phone in a different way that before
- Buy more batteries, chargers, etc.
- Not travel to where my phone doesn't work
Or things like that, what is a .001% of the time thing can have big impacts.
It's like the US government in the 1930s. Sure, they only let cyanide into .01% of the alcohol going into food products. What's the big deal?
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Another example... you pay for television and it turns out that it only works during business hours or the middle of the night. 50% of the time. You can never use it during the morning or evening hours. So anytime you are not at work, it is off.
I don't understand this. Did you know that the service only worked during those hours? How is a percentage a red herring, but not this convoluted scenario?
What if I get power that never goes off during the day but often goes out at night... when I need my CPAP to work. I'm paying the same power as people who are home during the day, but I need it at night. Would you say "well, but they need it during the day so you don't need it at night?"
No you're not. You only pay for what you use with power. So if they power goes out, you didn't pay for it.
You keep comparing 30 minutes of TV service to life altering scenarios like pace makers and large production databases that only have one backup. Or cyanide some how, which is not a service that anyone paid for.
Losses are pretty easy to show... it's the amount paid. If you pay $100 and don't get to watch the television that you paid for, it is the amount of the service that is in dispute.
Which is exactly what I said. Their loss was around $0.07. They paid for the whole month. Whether they only watch 30 minutes or 720 hours worth of TV, they paid for the whole month.
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@johnhooks said:
Another example... you pay for television and it turns out that it only works during business hours or the middle of the night. 50% of the time. You can never use it during the morning or evening hours. So anytime you are not at work, it is off.
I don't understand this. Did you know that the service only worked during those hours? How is a percentage a red herring, but not this convoluted scenario?
No, the idea what that you paid for 100% service but this is all that was delivered.
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@johnhooks said:
What if I get power that never goes off during the day but often goes out at night... when I need my CPAP to work. I'm paying the same power as people who are home during the day, but I need it at night. Would you say "well, but they need it during the day so you don't need it at night?"
No you're not. You only pay for what you use with power. So if they power goes out, you didn't pay for it.
That's not a valid way to look at it. Metered services are easy to excuse as "you only use what you paid for" but that's what you are doing to the other services - converting them to metered in your head then applying this logic.
But my willingness to pay $1/kW might be dependent on it being there when I need it, not just when it is convenient.
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@johnhooks said:
You keep comparing 30 minutes of TV service to life altering scenarios like pace makers and large production databases that only have one backup. Or cyanide some how, which is not a service that anyone paid for.
.The point of all of them is that it is OBVIOUS that while all of those things were 99% okay, the one case where they were not was the one that mattered. Which for all you know, is how the television situation works.
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@johnhooks said:
Losses are pretty easy to show... it's the amount paid. If you pay $100 and don't get to watch the television that you paid for, it is the amount of the service that is in dispute.
Which is exactly what I said. Their loss was around $0.07. They paid for the whole month. Whether they only watch 30 minutes or 720 hours worth of TV, they paid for the whole month.
This is just simply untrue. You cannot know what they were paying for. You cannot personally determine the histogram of value to the customer. The idea that the value is flat is simply absurd. We know that it is not.
We are in IT. No one should be more aware of this than us. Downtime at night is trivial, downtime during the day is big. The value is not flat.
Television at 3am is often trivial, television on Thursday night at 9PM is big. The value is not flat, you can't even begin to suggest that it would be flat.
The only case, ever, where you could suggest that they lost $.07 is in the one situation where you are assuming that the customer actively watching television 24/7 for the entire month. If you are not assuming that, i don't see how the $.07 can even be suggested.
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I don't have television nor do I like sports. But imagine if I did and the only reason that I pay for television service is to watch the Superbowl. Now imagine that the only outage is during the Superbowl's last thirty minutes. The value lost is very large.
The value of services is not flat. Plain and simple. There might be legal protections around that to keep companies from having to pay more and it is hard to know what consumers actually wanted to use it for, but you can't suggest to know how much value was lost to someone.
If the average family watches four hours of television a day (that's a LOT) then the idea that this was $.07 on that alone can't be true.
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And, of course, for tons of customers, the value of what was lost was $0. Just nothing. Tons and tons of people likely never turned on their televisions and had no idea that there was an outage.
