The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Named And

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-10-30

I do like it when submissions include the creator of the wtf, unless the specific kind of err is really spectacular and then it might be noteworthy regardless. This week we received a few who did tell us something about the responsible party. That being said, on with the party!"

An anonymous contributor shared with us this "Important order info from Ubbad HBG-ICS I", saying "I checked on Amazon but can't find order #{randnum(3)}-{randnum(6)}. This is worrisome though, because my credit card does end in **{randnum(4)}." Wild, so does mine!

4 comments - Last comment @ 08:09

Oh, K?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-10-29

Pierre found this cry for help:

 for (j = 0; j < DISTRICT_CARDINALITY; j++) {
    /*
    * A poor way to work around some sort of memory
    * violation.  k gets clobbered, so I buffer l with it.
    * Help?
    */
    for (k = 0, l = 0; k < customers; k++, l++) {
            /* c_id */
            FPRINTF(output, "%d", l + 1);
            METAPRINTF((output, "%c", delimiter));

13 comments - Last comment @ 06:16

Session Recording

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-10-28

We still get a fair bit of old school ASP .Net webforms code, which was cutting edge about twenty years ago, but remains a collection of bad choices that tried to make web programming feel like desktop programming. As an aside, what a reversed world we live in today, where everyone uses Electron and our desktop programming feels like web programming.

In any case, Thomas sends us some pretty ugly webforms code.

20 comments - Last comment @ 04:02

Security Fourth

by Remy Porter in News Roundup on 2026-10-27

A bit ago, I broke with my usual pattern and wrote up some security issues that I felt were particularly funny. It was a change of pace, a different thing, but not a thing that'd become a habit. After all, I'm not a security expert, this isn't a security site, and seriously, what are the odds that suitably funny security issues would crop up again less than a week later?

Well.

7 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-28

Securely Useless

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-10-26

Submitter Chops relates a tale of chasing "The Standard" at any cost:

A company had been forced, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century, and then into the 21st. Their range of dumb hardware was no longer being bought by customers who expected at least some way to get the data off it, and a USB stick wouldn't cut it.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-29

It's About Time

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-10-23

Usually I have to save up a few weeks' worth of error'ds to get five of a kind, but this week we got a rash of funky date entries! I guess we were due.

First up Tim R. reminding us here that "Dates are difficult! ...but when the entire purpose of your web site is to convert the time to different time zones, I'm not inclined to give you much slack for being one hour out."

25 comments - Last comment @ 04:14

Readable Formats

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-10-22

We all love format strings for generating human readable text. Certainly, they're a better choice than string concatenation. Even if I have a blind spot that keeps me from remembering the printf format tokens, I still prefer to use format strings.

Jasmine has a co-worker that does use format strings, but they also miss using string concatenation. So they've found a way to combine them, and avoid the perils of making readable code that describes the format of their text.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-27

Doing the Assignment

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-10-21

Today's code maybe isn't much of a WTF, but it does point in the general direction of, "Damn, you live like this?" Poor Nancy unfortunately does.

int x = 3;
int y = 4;
int z = 4;
x = y = z;

19 comments - Last comment @ 2026-10-22