Great Moments in Computer Programming

[Flack]

Many years ago I went to log into my website and got a note that my monthly bandwidth had been exceeded. This was back when monthly bandwidth was a thing. After logging in to my console and looking through logs I found that someone had hotlinked a bunch of pictures from my UHF review, which ended up on Reddit, and then got spread like wildfire. I never implemented any hotlink-blockers on my site, but I did implement a watermark system. If people are going to hotlink my pictures, the least they can do is advertise my URL for me.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yahoo! deleted my original internet website (the "Knight Orc Home Page") and the only thing I could have possibly done was hotlink a couple pictures to Walrustitty's BBS. Which is incredible because that means that anyone could have hotlinked images I had up and destroyed my site. It was a different time back then. Also Yahoo never gave any specific reason why they deleted everything, they just let me guess. It was a different time.

[RealNC]

Now, though, Christ. Google and others managed to ruin it. I don't know what "webp" is, but it's all you see any more. Yaaaaaaaay they stopped people from using the images on their sites! Something that was costing them nothing! They made the web less usable!

What's wrong with webp? Here's a webp image:



Works fine.

[odyssia76]

Stardock IconManager presented the kind of behavior I'd expect from a piece of Malware, not an actual legitimate application.

I hear Stardock has been legendary for a long time with their absolutely absurd copy protection schemes that make trying to play their games a nightmare. I rememeber as s kid lots of people cursed them. It seems like they are one of those companies that is so petrified someone might play a pirated copy that they make the experience for regular customers a nightmare PITA just to prevent a couple people trying to rip them off.

[odyssia76]

Now, though, Christ. Google and others managed to ruin it. I don't know what "webp" is, but it's all you see any more. Yaaaaaaaay they stopped people from using the images on their sites! Something that was costing them nothing! They made the web less usable!

I think if you just save the webp file on your desktop you can open it in Windiows Paint 3D and then just save it as a regular imaged in another format.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

My bank implemented a moronic version of MFA without letting us opt-into it. It's as moronic as any other implementation and won't remember me for a week, so every goddamn week I gotta go through this now because I check my checking account and balance it every day.

The thing that really hit home on how stupid it is, is that I have a couple charges today that are ... DEBIT CARD. That's it. That's all it says - DEBIT CARD, 48.04.

If they actually cared about security and MFA wasn't theater, there is no way they'd let charges show up with no description other than DEBIT CARD. MFA is worthless, never forget that.

[odyssia76]

My bank implemented a moronic version of MFA without letting us opt-into it. It's as moronic as any other implementation

Yesterday I was trying to log into a web site I use all the time. Lastpass was filling in everything just fine but the site kept telling my "you must use a valid email address". I studied it and studied it and tried a bunch of time but each time it said it wasn't valid. Then just when I was on hold for tech support I thought "maybe I should type it in myself" and that worked. Turned out my address had had a space at the end. Motherfucker! I'm no expert coder but can't they just use what NUMBERS are there and ignore other shit?? Very dumb people!

[Tdarcos]

Turned out my address had had a space at the end. Motherfucker! I'm no expert coder but can't they just use what NUMBERS are there and ignore other shit?? Very dumb people!

As someone who is an expert coder, I know the correct practice is to sanitize inputs and thus you make sure the information is valid. If it is harmless, just filter it out. Since credit card numbers are normally separated by spaces or hyphens, just filter them out and rewrite the field. Spaces are not valid in e-mail addresses, so just remove them. But that requires people to think. There is a famous panel from the cartoon XKCD where a school allowed a student's name to be added without validation and it deleted their entire student record table.

[pinback]

As someone who is an expert coder

Audience: laughs

[Flack]

I thought for sure auto correct changed that from codine'r.

[Flack]

My wife and I went to the credit union on Saturday to open a new account. I want a separate account for all my eBay and book sales. After opening the account, the guy printed out a small business card with the account number on it. When I got home, I could not get the account to work. When we logged in to the master account, we saw the number on the card was wrong by one digit. Apparently the card doesn't take the information from your account -- the guy just eyeballs it, and sometimes gets it wrong. Great system.

Also, it took the guy five minutes to find our account due to the apostrophe in my name. It's 2021. Can we please get a better system for people's names with apostrophes in them? Can we not create web languages that use one of the few non-alphabetic characters that appears in people's names? Who came up with that? (That's rhetorical; do not Google who came up with that, Commander.)

[AArdvark]

I couldn't connect to the BBC website because I don't have my date and time set automatically by the OS. Apparently its a security issue Firefox is implementing, or is enforcing.

An error occurred during a connection to www.bbc.com. The OCSP response is not yet valid (contains a date in the future).

I shouldn't think having the correct date and time on one's PC should be an issue with browsing. What if I don't want to have my date and time set automatically? huh? HUH? They are taking away my freedom of wrong time!


THE
44TH AMENDMENT
AARDVARK

[Jizaboz]

Oh wow that is stupid. I used to set my windows machine to JST so that Gundam Online wouldn’t think I still need a patch (US is about a day behind Japan time zone wise) and if I saw this I’d just say fuck your website. Much like the local journalnow.com website I worked for many years ago; these days you read like 3 articles and then it send you back to the homepage and demands you give them 5 dollars a month to read freely.. while being bombarded with spam articles and such. Fuck the journalnow site lol

[AArdvark]

I used to love Firefox as a browser but it's getting annoying now. One of my gripes is that I cannot open web pages in the same tab anymore. So now there's fifty tabs open, all with the same five pages. There's a way to fchange the setting but I shouldn't have to jump thru hoops to get it the way I want. Now there's this security thing based on my time setting. My flavor of Linux wants me to have a 24 hour clock and there's more hoops to jump through to change that, so I just ignore it and hide the clock display. Well, the fix might be to just change browsers.

[odyssia76]

Since credit card numbers are normally separated by spaces or hyphens, just filter them out and rewrite the field.

Yeah it drives me batshit crazy when I enter a credit card or phone number with spaces in it and the website just keeps saying WE NEED A VALID NUMBER WHINE WHINE WE ARE STUPID. As if my number were not perfectly valid. And i yell at the screen IT IS VALID MOTHERFUCKER!! Do they have extra-stupid programmers or what? I am not a programmer but I took some stuff in school and I recall there was some kind of function to do this stuff. If I knew it in high school why don't professional programmers know it? And besides just being annoying it seems to me that they might get more bad entries or lost sales because people with 1) get pissed off and give up or 2) enter the wrong data because people are not good at reading or copying long strings of numbers with no spaces in them. I read an article about how we remember number sin small groups and that makes a lot of sense when you think about how we say numbers.

[Flack]

It is incredibly difficult to extract only the numbers from a field if someone enters non-numeric characters.

Just kidding.

$field = $field -replace "[^0-9]" , ""

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I have to create a request to get my money back from the USPS because Jizaboz's Atari ST is lost forever.

I started the process when I was in Colorado but did not finish it. The webshit of the post offices's TIMED ME OUT when filling out their zillion questions. I had to find proof that it was worth what I said it was worth. Like I'm the dishonest one here. Well, that means going on eBay and taking screenshots I guess. I didn't start the process again before I left.

Now I'm trying to logon in NY. And of course the password that I used for the USPS site didn't save in LastPass. So I went to reset it. ALL that needs to be done is to send an email. That's it. That's the pattern. Now for the webshit that is the USPS. I have to answer two fucking challenge questions. Well, my wife setup our account for this. I don't know what she put as the secret answers for her first pet or favorite food. So no progress will be made here until I get back.

[Jizaboz]

Jizaboz's Atari ST is lost forever.

And I mean.. yeah. We could obviously blame Trump for fucking up the USPS system yet they continue to deliver useless shit to my mailbox every day. Let's just say you don't want to take me to the next horse race you planning to bet on.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I was trying to get Dad's Google account to not use two factor auth but also not have it use two factor auth for his phone. I'd like to not pay on his phone.

Google makes it as hard as possible. I will never understand awful MFA implementations. I used to think that it was done because it was "fun for the programmers" but where I work people hate dealing with MFA.

So, after clearing cache and history there is a button you can click on, a checkbox, that says "No longer use this device for MFA." You'll never believe this but it doesn't work. It just kept throwing check after check to his phone.

Eventually I figured out that there is a button to turn off MFA completely. GREAT. That did seem to finally solve it.

(I figured out that the old guy bought a phone that he paid $10 a month on. He had $178 left on his bill. Mom's phone number was tied to the account and costs 0 bucks. So... there really is no reason to disconnect his personal phone number, silly as that seems. If we transferred my mom's line to my account with Verizon I'm sure we'd have to pay the lump sum for Dad's phone. He was so great at getting stuff with minimal monthly payments, I remain quite proud of him for it.)

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Jizaboz's Atari ST is lost forever.

And I mean.. yeah. We could obviously blame Trump for fucking up the USPS system yet they continue to deliver useless shit to my mailbox every day. Let's just say you don't want to take me to the next horse race you planning to bet on.

To be totally honest, while I wish we could execute Louis DeJoy for treason, the Atari ST thing was so bad it transcends political power and motive and is just example of a garbage post office that apparently screwed everything up. I may end up getting $300 for it, which is not ideal - I'd rather you have the machine! - but hey, money is money.

I was going to ship an X-Men board to Arkadia Retrocade. I am not going to use the USPS for it.