US defence forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/us_army_reply_all_storm/

by JoachimS • 3 years ago

32 55 3 years ago

bell-cot3• 3 years ago

E-mail, designed in the mid-80's by and for computer geeks, in a tiny, trusting little pre-web internet, is a seriously crappy fit for the modern world.

But good luck replacing it.

Random idea: Add a few commands to ESMTP, which allow the mail server to tentatively accept an e-mail for delivery, then examine the message, then either handle it normally...or, optionally, do some basic back-and-forth with the sender. "Do you really want to sent this to 17,000 recipients?" "Your 50MB attachment is too large for reliable delivery." "Your system has the Zandu-j84 virus; an alert was sent to the IT Dept." Etc.

sam_lowry_• 3 years ago

This is a great business idea. No kidding.

aliqot5• 3 years ago

no, stop sending email that can be 'examined'. thats the first turd in the shitshow we call email.

dr-detroit2• 3 years ago

These are all features of the managed email service at my job

TheNorthman• 3 years ago

Hey man, just a heads up: You're currently shadow-banned on HN so your comments are automatically hidden. I don't think there's anything you can do about it but I'd want to know.

I feel comfortable telling you because most of your content isn't inflammatory, so I fear you might have been wrongly filtered out.

zahrc• 3 years ago

Mimecast and some M365 defender plans offer those features.

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 3 years ago

There's a whole lot of current computing that is just hacked together on top of unscalable bad-in-retrospect ideas from the 70s and 80s. If I had a couple billion dollars I'd be interested in hiring a small group of very bright people to see what building a computing platform and infrastructure from scratch with no concern for compatibility with the current paradigm would look like.

TheBigSalad2• 3 years ago

Honestly it would probably be just as bad, but in different ways.

chasd00• 3 years ago

Isn’t that Plan9?

eru• 3 years ago

I'm not sure the situation is all that dire.

Remember eg the battle of RISC vs CISC?

These days we accept that a reduced instruction set is a better idea, but those bloated instruction sets barely take up any any space on the chip anymore compared to all the caching we do.

bell-cot3• 3 years ago

If you only had mid-5-digit dollars to spend, I'm thinking that a well-thought-out ESMTP protocol enhancement, submitted RFC, and implementation in a few open-source email client and server software packages would be well within reach. Basic server-side implementation could mostly be done with existing-language scripts - "IF( Total_Message_Size > 50M ); THEN..."

mywacaday• 3 years ago

My personal favorite are the emails with a image at the bottom reminding me not to print to save the trees/environment with out realizing that in most cases the image has at least doubled the size of the mail and everything that goes with it from a a transfer storage and display perspective even if miniscule.

unsupp0rted• 3 years ago

I wonder if those messages have ever successfully prevented somebody from printing an email they otherwise would have printed

LinuxBender3• 3 years ago

Not exactly what you are asking for but many MTA's do have options to limit recipients and ways to make exceptions so there are ways to protect against this and limit who can send to many people. Many enterprise mail servers have something similar to this as well.

I have no idea what the military are using these days. They mention Outlook in the article so I assume they are using O365 or whatever it was renamed to. O365 has the ability to write rules based on AD group membership to limit who can mass email. Perhaps the military can temporarily take away those permissions until people have had training.

aliqot5• 3 years ago

article titles are dying a slow death these days.

hipsterstal1n• 3 years ago

My father-in-law works for a defense contractor around DC and works with and travels to allied countries on classified + items. He has several stories of him and his colleagues at his office being on the receiving end of un-intended reply-alls with the end result in most cases of a military team coming to the office and physically taking away all the computers that had been on the receiving end of the reply-alls.

boomboomsubban3• 3 years ago

For starters, the incident coincided with a Chinese spy balloon's journey across US airspace.

Something of nearly zero importance to the army. What were they going to do, send paratroopers at it?

Second, it was quite clearly far from a wise use of military resources.

While true, I doubt this caused a significant waste of resources.

The third issue is fair.

The original source opinion piece seems better than this writeup.

FartyMcFarter2• 3 years ago

What were they going to do, send paratroopers at it?

I think the balloon was flying at 60,000 feet. I'm not qualified to know if paratroopers can operate at that altitude, but it sounds tough. They'd need oxygen at the very least.

It would certainly make for a cool scene in a movie, although it seems pointless?

kube-system• 3 years ago

The sentence you quote is sarcasm. Jumping at 30k is risky. Not to mention, what would they do, run into it?

Daltzn• 3 years ago

Computer literacy is at no time covered while in the Army from my recent experience. It was required how ever to do a lot of those online Army classes each quarter. It would turn into entire days of people trying to figure out how to just login. Almost all admin duties from soldiers at any level has moved to a digital format and yet still often using Windows XP or the site requires running IE in a weird compatibility mode. All of this means we can quickly lose an entire day of work trying to get people to reset their passwords to do a 15min safety quiz or check if they have a dental appointment.

nightski• 3 years ago

FYI the Army does fly aircraft, and have pilots. We had rivalry with the Army ROTC during my time in Air Force ROTC.

hef198983• 3 years ago

Do Apaches fly high enough for an intercept of something flying at 60k feet? I woupd have rather called in the Space Force with an invisible F-45 or something.

boomboomsubban3• 3 years ago

Yeah, but their planes are primarily suited for cargo/troop deployment and the balloon was to high for helicopters.

TheBigSalad2• 3 years ago

Wow there was an email chain in the Army. Crazy stuff.

ravroid• 3 years ago

Does anyone have a link that isn't behind a paywall?

LinuxBender3• 3 years ago

ElReg should not have any paywalls. I am curious what you are seeing.

Here is an archive link [1]

[1] https://archive.ph/6TBGB

MarkusWandel• 3 years ago

Isn't that what bcc: was invented for? Who sends out a mass email with 13,000 listed recipients in the first place?

LinuxBender3• 3 years ago

Isn't that what bcc: was invented for?

Yes. I recently had to explain that to my bank. Now I have the names and email addresses of all my fellow customers of the bank.

hef198983• 3 years ago

Easy: Unintentionally subscribe an e-mail list to another e-mail list at Amazon. And unintetionally press reply all to unsubscribe...

m000• 3 years ago

Given the existence of bcc, this is as much a sysadmin failure as it is a tech illiteracy failure. This mail should have been bounced by the outgoing SMTP server.

throw0101c• 3 years ago

Isn't that what bcc: was invented for?

Meta question:

How many folks, or at what age cut-off, know what the "CC" stands for? And how many know where the 'carbon copy' term comes from?

For those that don't know:

A sheet of carbon paper is placed between two or more sheets of paper. The pressure applied by the writing implement (pen, pencil, typewriter or impact printer) to the top sheet causes pigment from the carbon paper to reproduce the similar mark on the copy sheet(s). More than one copy can be made by stacking several sheets with carbon paper between each pair. Four or five copies is a practical limit. The top sheet is the original and each of the additional sheets is called a carbon copy.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_copy

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

No, not for internal traffic.

If I receive an email because it's part of a mailing list it should be in 'To' or in 'Cc'.

Otherwise I have no way of filtering out the email based on its origin.

invalidusernam3• 3 years ago

I'm surprised email clients/sites don't warn you if you're replying-all to more than x addresses with an "Are you sure?" pop-up

xocdan• 3 years ago

The client is almost always unaware of the true size represented by an alias for a group it does not manage. These are the source of the big storms in my org.

micromacrofoot• 3 years ago

IMO the client shouldn't even be allowed to send to more than XX addresses

US defence forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All

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