We've seen this pattern many times here:

return (someCondition) ? true : false;

Governments have a difficult relationship with cryptography. Certainly, they benefit from having secure, reliable and fast encryption. Arguably, their citizens also benefit- I would argue that being able to, say, handle online banking transactions securely is a net positive. But it creates a prisoner's dilemma: malicious individuals may conceal their activity behind encryption. From the perspective of a state authority, this is bad.

Thus, you get the regular calls for a cryptosystem which allows secure communications but also allows the state to snoop on those messages. Of course, if you intentionally weaken a cryptographic system so that some people can bypass it, you've created a system which anyone can bypass. You can't have secure encryption which also allows snooping, any more than you can have an even prime number larger than two.

Some time ago, Roald started an internship on a ASP .Net application. It didn't take long to find some "special" code.

    public string RetrieveSessionString(string sessionName)
	{
		try
		{
			return Session[sessionName].ToString();
		}
		catch (NullReferenceException)
		{
			return null;
		}
	}

Anders sends us an example which isn't precisely a WTF. It's just C handling C strings. Which, I guess, when I say it that way, is a WTF.

while(modPath != NULL) {
    p = strchr(modPath, ':');
    if(p != NULL) {
      *p++ = '\0';
    }
    dvModpathCreate(utSymCreate(modPath));
    modPath = p;
} while(modPath != NULL);