Best posts made by LaoC
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RE: WTF Bites
https://twitter.com/ChinaAvReview/status/1114802018919411712
Hey, don't blame the Boeing software d00dz! The date was only known since about the seventies!
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RE: Programming Memes Thread
@Tsaukpaetra said in Programming Memes Thread:
@Gustav said in Programming Memes Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra, expert in the sense of fucking.
Status: mind fuck.
Also, can someone shut off this tinnitus? It's getting quite annoying...
The tinnitus hotline is currently not available. Please leave a message after the beep.
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RE: IT departments of the world
@loopback0 said in IT departments of the world:
@NeighborhoodButcher said in IT departments of the world:
Are IT departments TRWTF?
Is my luck TRWTF?
Is my career TRWTF?Yes.
Also they're probably understaffed, they'll invariably be the default target of blame for issues even when it's not their fault, they've probably had to deal with 493458 stupid questions for each sensible question, etc.
All of this.
My first project after moving from dev to ops was a monitoring system that would collect network port throughput from every single switch in production and graph it. It was kind of fun and at first I didn't quite get why everyone seemed to think it's stupid. Then I learned it needed to exist only because it was the umpteenth time the head of development (I did dev work in a different company so I didn't know him) blamed the network for the streaming dropouts in his Java software when it was quite obvious they were due to a combination of network programming that looked like my C from the early 90s and GC problems that they even knew existed but were adamant were totally mitigated by their JVM startup parameter voodoo.Also, about twice a day:
I can't reach my workstation via VPN. Can you fix that please?
It doesn't ping, so it's probably turned off. Don't turn it off if you're planning on using it remotely. I can send it a wake-on-LAN and if you're lucky it will come up; otherwise someone will have to go there and push the button.
Butbutbut it's like 5 km to the office and we're in lockdown!
Dude, every single one one of my team is at least 500 times, two national borders and another lockdown further away, so …I can't check out $foo from github!
So what's the error message?
Permission denied (publickey).
OK. Do you have your key on the machine you're on?
Key?
BOFH is a survival strategy.
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RE: WTF Bites
Instagram stored your passwords as plaintext (and we only got to know thanks to the GDPR).
Instagram. Part of fucking Facebook that runs like what, a quarter of all page impressions on the Intertubes? In plaintext.
When I buy a used car for $5000 I take it to a mechanic to make sure it passes basic security checks -- brakes doing what they should, no leaking shit in hidden places etc. Apparently Facebook has a CSO who doesn't see it as his job to do the same when they buy a used company for $1b. -
RE: UI Bites
Adaptive Design™
the menu says "Home" and "Our Story". If it fits that is. They do remove the logo for some narrower viewports but obviously they only tested with "very big" and "pretty small".
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RE: AI nope-ing out
@Zecc said in AI nope-ing out:
In the end, I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defence against AI.
That's what they all say after being trained on the script of War Games.
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RE: WTF Bites
Trusting the cat to keep the cream or the Netanyahu to keep the data?
Haaretz received an anonymous tip about the security lapse, allowing anyone to obtain the leaked information in its entirety without using sophisticated tools. Right-clicking on the Elector app's home page and choosing "view source" revealed the original code of the internet page. The code revealed all the usernames and passwords of system admins, allowing one to log in and download the registry.
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RE: WTF Bites
WTF: putting your application's private keys on Github
TRWTF: using someone else's example key from $REPO as your private™ key.
And the winner is: Lenovo -
RE: WTF Bites
Thanks VS, very helpful
My "favorite" is when it gives you a path to a log file "with more information" and when you open it it says something like "unknown error".
Also, "Error: Catastrophic failure (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8000FFFF (E_UNEXPECTED))".
Apple successfully brainwashed people into accepting error messages like
The program has been terminated because unexpected error -2 occurred
as the pinnacle of user-friendliness just so long as they're being shown in high resolution with proper kerning in a font designed by Susan Kare. Other people just don't kare about the font -
RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Gern_Blaanston said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
As David Ancalle opened video after video of diarrhea this year, it struck him: This is not what he expected to be doing for his Ph.D.
Ancalle, a mechanical engineering student at Georgia Tech who researches fluid dynamics
Sounds like fluid dynamics to me
The project is about as useful as Bill Gates' mosquito SDI—"these people are too poor to see a doctor when their kids have diarrhea which they get mainly because everybody is shitting in the river, so wait, let me just deploy this AI-equipped next-gen toilet all over the place and we can collect a lot of data and then maybe do something with it!"
Then again, writing scientific papers about a device called the SHART is pretty cool so I can understand why they'd come up with it.
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RE: In other news today...
@hungrier said in In other news today...:
Google says that auto-playing videos on store listings will “help more users discover your content at a glance.”
Ah yes, that's what people are saying about auto-playing videos. "They help more of us discover content at a glance. We love 'em!"
The next Stagefright exploit will bring autoinstallation to the Play Store, even taking the heavy burden of decision off users whether or not they want an app in the first place. Hallelujah!
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RE: Hacking News
Install IBM Security Guardium for superior user experience: instead of fucking around with complicated assembler exploits, you and everybody else on the internet get remote code execution by simply putting commands in a CSV file! ✨
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Carnage said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Oh lord. Me being curious and already on every watchlist I decided to test it,
Have I got a shirt for you
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RE: WTF Bites
@HardwareGeek That doesn't help with the output of
asin()
.asin(9)
always gives stupid resultsOK, I'll show myself out.
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RE: WTF Bites
@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
On a not unrelated topic if you speak to someone in a Fillipino call centre then, well, any strange names are usually their actual names.
When I lived there, the head of the Catholic church in the country was called Cardinal Sin. Instant win.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
Yo dawg, I heard you like JavaScript in your browser, so we used your JavaScript-enabled browser to put JavaScript in your browser so you can JavaScript while your browser JavaScripts.
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RE: Nope, you eat it
@cheong said in Nope, you eat it:
From news someone posted an image of the breakfast they had in a luxurious hotel at Doha.
This is what they get for £80 - 5 bottles of beer and 2 small burger sets.
They're British and complain about expensive beer
They go to a Muslim country and complain about expensive beer
They're British and complain about bad food -
RE: WTF Bites
I don't understand why anyone would expect anything else from a thing called
Adobe Experience Manager
Each of its constituent words alone is enough to make me retch, either because of itself ("Adobe") or because of the abuse it has seen at the hands of →managers (the other two). Their combination can hardly be anything less than a lovecraftian horror.
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RE: Scientific Science
@dkf said in Scientific Science:
@topspin said in Scientific Science:
But yes, after she’s presented the facts (and she’s doing a good job of actually looking into those) she gives her own conclusions a bit too strongly for my taste.
The one thing that physicists are pretty sure of right now is that we haven't got the final word on Physics worked out yet. We have two supremely accurate theories, and they're grossly incompatible with each other.
"Now, we’ve basically got it all worked out, except for small stuff, big stuff, hot stuff, cold stuff, fast stuff, heavy stuff, dark stuff, turbulence, and the concept of time"
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Rhywden said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you:
Must be a kind of tradition in German education.
Back in the day when they had just decided everyone would get an email address at one German university, the subdomain for students was "stud.uni-giessen.de" (it still exists). Then someone had the brillant idea to further subdivide it so institutes could administer their own student population. They did have X.500 and subtree privileges and stuff but those were probably too hard to train the non-technical staff on. "Staatsexamensstudiengänge" is even worse than "Schleswig-Holstein", so the official abbreviation was s-ex. Addresses in @sex.stud.uni-giessen.de were only used for a few months - not a single of those new-fangled "spam filters" accepted these senders, plus even Germans were giggling about them. -
RE: WTF Bites
Secret Service agent Samuel Ivanovich, who interviewed Zhang on the day of her arrest, testified at the hearing. He stated that when another agent put Zhang’s thumb drive into his computer, it immediately began to install files, a “very out-of-the-ordinary” event that he had never seen happen before during this kind of analysis. The agent had to immediately stop the analysis to halt any further corruption of his computer, Ivanovich testified. The analysis is ongoing but still inconclusive, he said.
Of course, when you confiscate a thumb drive from a suspicious person, the first thing anyone would do is stick it into a Windows computer. But hey, when it starts to "install files" (Autoplay turned on on your analysis machine, eh?), you just have to be quick enough with your cognitus interruptus to avoid having to reinstall your system!
Special™ agents -
RE: UI Bites
@boomzilla said in UI Bites:
Submitting for some reimbursement from my Health Savings Account. They have a table of claims I can pick. Most of them have $0.00 left on them, so I'm trying to sort the table. I click on the Date column and what do you know? It sorts the US formatted, mm/dd/yyyy date lexicographically.
That's actually a good business decision. Designed to make you give up trying to cut into their profits with your frivolous "claims" but with perfectly plausible deniability.
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RE: WTF Bites
About 2 years old but given the age of the systems involved it's probably still not fixed:
This guy sued his bank because they insisted on putting a Y in his name where it should read é. The bank argued its 1995 AS/400 used EBCDIC and therefore they couldn't.Court basically said, fuck you, its 2019, make it work!
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RE: WTF Bites
What the absolute fuck.
We knew that Tesla operates a fleet of creepy data hoovers, but what those other brands are doing was kinda new to me:Nissan earned its second-to-last spot for collecting some of the creepiest categories of data we have ever seen. It’s worth reading the review in full, but you should know it includes your “sexual activity.” Not to be out done, Kia also mentions they can collect information about your “sex life” in their privacy policy. Oh, and six car companies say they can collect your “genetic information” or “genetic characteristics.” Yes, reading car privacy policies is a scary endeavor.
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RE: Internet of shit
@cvi said in Internet of shit:
Having physical switches is neat, and when they're wireless, it's easy to place them wherever you want them (including next to the bed). Makes it easier when you have guests as well.
My sister in law has some of these. They make you realize how much of your daily life is on autopilot: you come into a dark room for the thousandth time (inb4 QOOC) and you don't think about the light switch, your hand just reaches for it and hits it precisely. And then there's the fucking Hue switch that you still fumble around with because a) it's different from all the others, b) of course they put three small, flat buttons in one, and c) it's stuck to a magnetic whiteboard so as to pretend it being wireless has some advantage besides the need for batteries, so it gets pushed around slightly all the time and your motor memory never even gets trained.
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RE: WTF Bites
@timebandit said in WTF Bites:
I'm on Debian stable (v.9.4), git version is 2.11.0
On CentOS 7.4 it's 1.8.3
https://youtu.be/8EI7p2p1QJI?t=32s
A couple of weeks ago we got rid of our last CentOS-4 system at work. Four. EOL for just over six years. Held together with gaffa tape, spit and handcrafted shellshock patches.
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RE: WTF Bites
I'm happy today that I don't have an account with WTFbank, one of our clients.
As a banking service provider, we regularly have to remind clients to send us fresh certificates for their sites. Maybe their Outlooks are too forgetful, their staff turnover is too high or two years validity is an unfathomably long period for them, anyway they rely on our monitoring to tell them when they should renew. Their certificates and obviously the corresponding keys live on our servers so theoretically we could just do it for them but for legal reasons we can't. We just generate a Certificate Signing Request for them so they can pass it on to the CA.
Two years ago, WTFbank ignored our CSR, generated one for the wrong domain name, and had a certificate issued for that. This year, we told them they could just reuse our old CSR and have a new certificate made from that. Instead they decided to stick their old certificate and the key in an unencrypted email and send it merrily across the intertubes. To us, who already have them. To do nobody-knows-what with them@LaoC said in Linux locks and a kinder, gentler Linus:
ATMs are an instructive example of the few IoTish devices that run Windows. They're also a pretty extreme example in that they're not cheap mass-market devices, buyers are usually not completely clueless, [...]
I'd like to qualify that:
… in relation to your average IoS user -
RE: The Most Important Question In The Universe
@CreatedToDislikeThis said in The Most Important Question In The Universe:
But water isn't diet! Do you want me to get fat?!
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RE: WTF Bites
Google's glorious preservation of the knowledge of the world
Yeah, it's a difficult text to OCR. 180 years old, with decorative type, gothic, dirty pages, library stamps and all. But you know it's not going well when the text starts wlth dg cribimg høw lt w4s carcfully scannod:
This is a digital copy of a book that was prcscrvod for gcncrations on library shclvcs bcforc it was carcfully scannod by Google as pari of a projcct
That's the easy part, the part that was obviously written by Google, then printed out, put on a wooden table and photographed back in to be 0CRd.
So behold the text:
9cro«tt«ii tm fiatmßvAt tin^ <^dl)ett. * VAA;1C.'-..n ! t i i V TM i t IT "^ 1 ö V^
To be fair, it doesn't go on quite as bad. Most of the book is recognizable as something vaguely resembling German if not comprehensible text:
3n biefcm ^tinji)) ip bie 5(u§fü^ning jebct gto§ättigen 3bee moglid^. 3)le 9lu8tottung i^ert^eetenbet «Jltanf^eiten , fd&ablic^et 3nfeften, bie 5SetebIung, ittaftigung unb Setfc^onetung beö menf(f)fid^en Äor^jerS. ®ie 23eri5;fitung öon 3Äange!, UeBetfd^ttjem* mung unb einet SRenge anbetet Uebel ijl nut allein in bet @e* meiufd^aft mpglic^. 6d^on batum, tt?eit alle befannte S^Jtad^en gtofe lln\)oUfommen^eiten an ftd^ ^aUn, ifl eS' not^injenbig, tint ganj mm, fd^one, too^lfUngenbe, öoUfommcne ©^tad^e gu etjtn* ben. Unb U>enn bie ßtfinbung betfelben mSglid^ ift, h?arum follte bie 5lnu>enbung betfelben nic^t mogfid^ fei^n; JD^ne baö $tinjip bet ©emeinfd^aft ifl biefe freilid^ nid&t moglid^. HfUinl bie ©egtiffe. ©^tad^en, (^tenjen unb QSatetlanb finb bet ' ?Kenfd[;^eit fo ttjejiig not^h?enbig, al3 alle befte^enben teligtefen JDogmen. 9ltle biefe Segtiffe finb ^etjäi;tte Uebetll^fmingen, beten SWad^ti^eil immet fü^Ibatet n>itb je länget fle Befielen.
There are 288 pages of this shit. Obviously Google has completely cut out any humans from the library-to-internet pipeline
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RE: WTF Bites
Lake Karachay, world renowned swimming lake!
5 stars too, would be a very energizing bath I have heard!
Nice reviews, too:
I'm currently swimming here and my mobile is charging itself. Very beautiful place! Will give full 1957/1957
Disappointing superpower acquisition. Got a spectacular sunburn and all I can do is cause near-permanant tune-bondage to those nearby. I can't control it well and may be stuck with Crocodile Rock forever myself. I was hoping for something along the line of levitation at least.
Took a dip in the lake, water was warm and wonderful. I grew four extra breasts and a tail, and my husband loves it!
10/10, would visit again.