Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by LogicX 5333 days ago
Here's a fun anecdote which I think summarizes why people don't ask for help:

Two days ago I read an article about a local company; deciding my wife may find enjoyable work with them, I decided to visit their website and careers page. The careers page presented an SSL cert error. I decided to write an email to the DNS administrator explaining that their intermediary signing cert was expired, and why this is a problem, and even provided a helpful link.

Amazingly, I got a reply - within hours, but unfortunately it went like this:

Them 2) You're going to the wrong site, its here:

Me 3) The URL you've provided me 302 redirects to the URL I said is the issue. Here's a paste from wget of this action happening:

Them 4) What browser are you using? Works fine here.

Me 5) I've tested this on 3 machines in 3 different browsers, here's output from browsershots.org showing it doesn't work on 78 other browsers.

Them 6) I'm forwarding this to someone else.

... silence...

Now one must question -- would have I gotten a better response by publicly @mentioning this multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company that can't get SSL working on their careers site? (Just confirmed its still broken)

(edited for formatting readability)