The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

And we wonder why adblock/ghostery/priv3/noscript are popular...

JimM · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

OK, I call shenanigans on this one - that's got to be written specifically to get onto TDWTF. There's some remarkable stuff in there...

if ( 0==1 && browsertype!= -1 )

for a starter... Oo

Julia · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Nice browser compatibility work too (look at the original):

alert("do stuff for firefox 4");

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

I'm going to start using GUIDs, generated each page load, to name my form elements.

JimM · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

JimM:
OK, I call shenanigans on this one - that's got to be written specifically to get onto TDWTF. There's some remarkable stuff in there...
if ( 0==1 && browsertype!= -1 )
for a starter... Oo

OMFG, just realised - this is a pattern! A few lines earlier there's an "if ( 1==1 && ....) too! So presumably they're checking that the basic foundation of maths hasn't changed before committing their scraped data back to the homeworld?!?!

Argh, I have to stop reading that code ... it get worse every line... shudder

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Nick:
I'm going to start using GUIDs, generated each page load, to name my form elements.

Thanks for breaking autocomplete, myfriend

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

JimM:
JimM:
OK, I call shenanigans on this one - that's got to be written specifically to get onto TDWTF. There's some remarkable stuff in there...
if ( 0==1 && browsertype!= -1 )
for a starter... Oo
OMFG, just realised - this is a pattern! A few lines earlier there's an "if ( 1==1 && ....) too! So presumably they're checking that the basic foundation of maths hasn't changed before committing their scraped data back to the homeworld?!?!

Argh, I have to stop reading that code ... it get worse every line... shudder

most likely it's meant as an easy way to disable/enable conditions with a change of a single character. Because

true vs false

is too big a change, and

/** vs /**/

is not auto-scoped (it also messes up else if chains)

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Looks auto-generated to me.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

... that being said, I still prefer

if(true || ...)
if(false && ...)
if(...)

or, if you want to obfuscate, you can try some beauties like

if(11*12==132 && ..) //quick, and no calculator!
if(11^2>120 && ..) //yep, that's a XOR pretending to be an exponentiation
...

(without the comments of course)

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Autogenerated indeed. That's why you get blocks that are ignored by the 1 == 0 lines.

I never liked this way of generating as, imho, it adds bloat, non executed bloat, but bloat nevertheless.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Well at least, if you subcontracted your development to an Elbonian company, with Elbonian naming specs, the tracker would be fooled!

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Guess how they sleep in javascript? That's right, just loop a bit!

function pausecomp(millis) 
{
	var date = new Date();
	var curDate = null;
	do { curDate = new Date(); }
	while(curDate-date < millis);
}

setTimeout is too hard and too asynchronous?

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

I found it amusing that while they check for a single field named 'Organization' and 'organization', 'Organisation' isn't in there.

Kappa:
Guess how they sleep in javascript? That's right, just loop a bit!
function pausecomp(millis) 
{
	var date = new Date();
	var curDate = null;
	do { curDate = new Date(); }
	while(curDate-date < millis);
}
setTimeout is too hard and too asynchronous?

That's not even a sleep, that's a CPU burner. I have JS disabled by default, glad to see yet another reason to keep it that way.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Google would never be evil. Trust your Google.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Actually, given that Google knows lots about me, sites using Google Analytics and telling Google which page I visit and when is probably just as much of a privacy problem. Given the three-letter agencies are known to be slurping up data from Google (and similar very large companies), this is definitely an issue.

I suspect what makes it OK is that Everybody Is Doing It; am I right?

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Rick:
I found it amusing that while they check for a single field named 'Organization' and 'organization', 'Organisation' isn't in there.
Kappa:
Guess how they sleep in javascript? That's right, just loop a bit!
function pausecomp(millis) 
{
	var date = new Date();
	var curDate = null;
	do { curDate = new Date(); }
	while(curDate-date < millis);
}
setTimeout is too hard and too asynchronous?
That's not even a sleep, that's a CPU burner.

And it will probably make Firfeox freeze for a few seconds - pausecomp is called with 1000 millisecons inside a loop.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Kappa:
Guess how they sleep in javascript? That's right, just loop a bit!
function pausecomp(millis) 
{
	var date = new Date();
	var curDate = null;
	do { curDate = new Date(); }
	while(curDate-date < millis);
}
setTimeout is too hard and too asynchronous?

Funny thing is, they tried setTimeout, then commented it out and used pausecomp instead. And looking at TFM for setTimeout and and their code, yes, you might be right about the "too hard".

JimM · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

anonymouse:
Autogenerated indeed. That's why you get blocks that are ignored by the 1 == 0 lines.

I'd buy that if there weren't clearly manual amendments to the code, like commented out lines, dubious debugging code, a mix of both (i.e. commented out debugging lines!) etc. There is no way you'd autogenerate stuff like that.

I'd stick by my first assumption that this is someone deliberately trolling TDWTF, if I hadn't googled Trackalyzer and found indications that this is actually used. Best bet is that it's legacy and hasn't been maintained for a long time, and that most of the companies who used it are now defunct (or have abandoned their old websites) but it's still scary to think that this has actually been used, seriously, at some point.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

This reminds me of this article I came across the other day...

http://dotnet.dzone.com/articles/automatically-collect-and

I had to check the date on it wasn't 1st April

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

ANON:
Looks auto-generated to me.

It was definitely generated by a complete and utter tool

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

THAT was not worse than THIS!

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Honnza:
Nick:
I'm going to start using GUIDs, generated each page load, to name my form elements.

Thanks for breaking autocomplete, myfriend

Autocomplete is the Devil anyway! Baaaaad autocomplete!

Captcha: inhibeo -- Autocomplete should be inhibeo in the browsers!

Steve The Cynic · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Ruddiger:
This reminds me of this article I came across the other day...
http://dotnet.dzone.com/articles/automatically-collect-and

I had to check the date on it wasn't 1st April

Nah, that's just the sort of "clever" cobbling-together of bits and pieces that we know and, um, well, er, not exactly love in so many articles on here. There's an XKCD on the topic of cobbled-together solutions, something about video files, which fits nicely in with the article you pointed us at.

JimM · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
... There's an XKCD on the topic ...

"If they say they've solved their problem, NEVER ask how".

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

JimM:
anonymouse:
Autogenerated indeed. That's why you get blocks that are ignored by the 1 == 0 lines.

I'd buy that if there weren't clearly manual amendments to the code, like commented out lines, dubious debugging code, a mix of both (i.e. commented out debugging lines!) etc. There is no way you'd autogenerate stuff like that.

"Autogenerated" can also apply to only some parts of the code. Like, when you run the stuff your webserver delivers through a template engine before delivery.

Original code:

<%set ON = 1%>
<%set Debugging = 1%>
if (<%Debugging%> == <%ON%>) {...

Delivered code:

if (1 == 1) {...

This is quote common in fact.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Kappa:
Guess how they sleep in javascript? That's right, just loop a bit!
function pausecomp(millis) 
{
	var date = new Date();
	var curDate = null;
	do { curDate = new Date(); }
	while(curDate-date < millis);
}
setTimeout is too hard and too asynchronous?

Trying to make anything work properly asynchronously in Javascript is a huge pain in the ass. Mostly because there doesn't EXIST a real "sleep" function... blocking until it returns, but not GUI-locking thread-blocking spin-waiting. setTimeout completely trashes your scope, so it forces you to either use a bunch of static/global variables or try to pass them all to the setTimeout callback.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

You know it's a good example of a true WTF when the code does the talking and you don't need a Hanzo story wrapped around it.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Rick:
I found it amusing that while they check for a single field named 'Organization' and 'organization', 'Organisation' isn't in there.

Might be because the code has been developed in the USA and not every coder makes a distinction between American English and Other English, as Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/organisation) does.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

anonymous:
Trying to make anything work properly asynchronously in Javascript is a huge pain in the ass. Mostly because there doesn't EXIST a real "sleep" function... blocking until it returns, but not GUI-locking thread-blocking spin-waiting. setTimeout completely trashes your scope, so it forces you to either use a bunch of static/global variables or try to pass them all to the setTimeout callback.

setTimeout is real asyncronicity and if you need a sleep in an asynchroneous function you are doing it wrong.

var foo = 'hello world!';
setTimeout(function() { alert(foo); }, 1000);

Does what is expected, shows an alert with "hello world!" in it after one second. foo is locally scoped, so what's your problem?

Actually, asynchroneous programming with Javascript is really simple as plenty of AJAX-driven webpages prove.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
Ruddiger:
This reminds me of this article I came across the other day...
http://dotnet.dzone.com/articles/automatically-collect-and

I had to check the date on it wasn't 1st April
Nah, that's just the sort of "clever" cobbling-together of bits and pieces that we know and, um, well, er, not exactly love in so many articles on here. There's an XKCD on the topic of cobbled-together solutions, something about video files, which fits nicely in with the article you pointed us at.

Yes, but it counts more because they felt the need to share it with the world....and I read it, which hurt my eyes.

nonpartisan · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

You should've seen the original code. It took 60 seconds to analyze a page. That was unacceptable, so Adam tried Google Analytics and it completed the task in only a few milliseconds. Nigel insisted that he could rewrite the code and not be beholden to Google. Now it only takes 20 seconds to analyze a page.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

the exec who thankfully stated, "No, we're not putting that on the site."

That's the real WTF, right? An exec who DIDN'T make a bone-headed, pointy-haired decision?

CAPTCHA: modo - modo is a polygon and subdivision surface modeling, sculpting, 3D painting, animation and rendering package developed by Luxology, LLC....wait, what?

Algorythmics · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

nonpartisan:
You should've seen the original code. It took 60 seconds to analyze a page. That was unacceptable, so Adam tried Google Analytics and it completed the task in only a few milliseconds. Nigel insisted that he could rewrite the code and not be beholden to Google. Now it only takes 20 seconds to analyze a page.

rightly or wrongly, thats just how it was back then. Meanwhile, the president's daughter...

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

I think the original purpose of that method is to send off an Ajax request and ensure that the request was actually sent out before allowing navigation to the next screen. If the user navigates away, often the Ajax request isn't sufficiently far along for the server to actually receive it before it's killed, and it gets lost. Another project I was on unfortunately did this in order to ensure the user was logged out when they closed their browser. The only other real option to be really really sure is to open a popunder window which closes itself, which is no less of a WTF.

More of a WTF is that pausecomp seems to be used in totally random situations that have nothing to do with what I just described.

no laughing matter · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
There's an XKCD on the topic of cobbled-together solutions, something about video files, which fits nicely in with the article you pointed us at.

Well, probably not the one you remembered, but this xkcd seems somehow related!

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

faoileag:
anonymous:
Trying to make anything work properly asynchronously in Javascript is a huge pain in the ass. Mostly because there doesn't EXIST a real "sleep" function... blocking until it returns, but not GUI-locking thread-blocking spin-waiting. setTimeout completely trashes your scope, so it forces you to either use a bunch of static/global variables or try to pass them all to the setTimeout callback.
setTimeout is real asyncronicity and if you need a sleep in an asynchroneous function you are doing it wrong.
var foo = 'hello world!';
setTimeout(function() { alert(foo); }, 1000);
Does what is expected, shows an alert with "hello world!" in it after one second. foo is locally scoped, so what's your problem?
Actually, asynchroneous programming with Javascript is really simple as plenty of AJAX-driven webpages prove.

Awesome, that works because foo is global and the anonymous function is in the same scope. This doesn't work:

function test() {
var foo = "hello world";
setTimeout(callback, 1000);
}
function callback() {
alert(foo);
}
test();

Oh, you wanted recursion? Yeah, you're stuck with a bunch of globals, or passing everything you need from an anonymous function. Exactly like I said before.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

anonymous:
Trying to make anything work properly asynchronously in Javascript is a huge pain in the ass. Mostly because there doesn't EXIST a real "sleep" function... blocking until it returns, but not GUI-locking thread-blocking spin-waiting.

That's easy, just write a program to transform your code into continuation-passing style, and then setTimeout works just fine. (And yes, I have actually done this....)

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

anonymous:
faoileag:
anonymous:
Trying to make anything work properly asynchronously in Javascript is a huge pain in the ass. Mostly because there doesn't EXIST a real "sleep" function... blocking until it returns, but not GUI-locking thread-blocking spin-waiting. setTimeout completely trashes your scope, so it forces you to either use a bunch of static/global variables or try to pass them all to the setTimeout callback.
setTimeout is real asyncronicity and if you need a sleep in an asynchroneous function you are doing it wrong.
var foo = 'hello world!';
setTimeout(function() { alert(foo); }, 1000);
Does what is expected, shows an alert with "hello world!" in it after one second. foo is locally scoped, so what's your problem?
Awesome, that works because foo is global and the anonymous function is in the same scope.

No, foo isn't global, foo is just in the same scope as the anonymous function. This is the reason the idiom "var instance = this;" comes in handy when you use anonymous functions in an oo context.

anonymous:

This doesn't work:

function test() {
    var foo = "hello world";
    setTimeout(callback, 1000);
}
function callback() {
alert(foo);
}
test();

Indeed, it doesn't. Without delving too deep into the stuff, functions are a closed scope and the only way of getting data into that scope from the outside is either by passing arguments or by using global variables or via member variables (in an oo context). This is the same in all languages I know but doesn't really make asynchroneous programming too difficult - either you pass the data around via arguments or you create some global shared data object. The first is probably preferable.

anonymous:
Oh, you wanted recursion?

What's got recursion to do with it?

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

anonymous:
faoileag:
anonymous:
Trying to make anything work properly asynchronously in Javascript is a huge pain in the ass. Mostly because there doesn't EXIST a real "sleep" function... blocking until it returns, but not GUI-locking thread-blocking spin-waiting. setTimeout completely trashes your scope, so it forces you to either use a bunch of static/global variables or try to pass them all to the setTimeout callback.
setTimeout is real asyncronicity and if you need a sleep in an asynchroneous function you are doing it wrong.
var foo = 'hello world!';
setTimeout(function() { alert(foo); }, 1000);
Does what is expected, shows an alert with "hello world!" in it after one second. foo is locally scoped, so what's your problem?
Actually, asynchroneous programming with Javascript is really simple as plenty of AJAX-driven webpages prove.
Awesome, that works because foo is global and the anonymous function is in the same scope. This doesn't work:
function test() {
var foo = "hello world";
setTimeout(callback, 1000);
}
function callback() {
alert(foo);
}
test();
Oh, you wanted recursion? Yeah, you're stuck with a bunch of globals, or passing everything you need from an anonymous function. Exactly like I said before.

the that foo is global is not needed in the example. Even if callback is outside test, you can do this:

function callback(foo){...};
function test(){
  var foo = "Hello World!";
  setTimeout(function(){
    callback(foo)
  })
}

or even, in ES5,

function callback(foo){...};
function test(){
  var foo = "Hello World";
  setTimeout(callback.bind(null, foo));
}

If you want recursion, you can use nested functions, even immediately invoked functions

function deepSum(tree){
  var sum = 0;
  (function doDeepSum(node){
    if(typeof node == "number") sum += node;
    else node.forEach(doDeepSum)
  }(tree))
  return sum
}

function getPageCount(url){
  var count = 1;
  (function fetchPage(url, callback){
    $.getHTML(url, function(result){
      $nextA = $("a.nextPage", result)
      if($nextA.length){
        count++;
        fetchPage($nextA.attr("href"));
      } else callback(count);
    });
  }(url));
}

Closures are an amazing stuff.

Java doesn't let you close over non-final variables, but you can still close over instance fields or do

 Stuff[] stuff = {stuff};

In C, you'd probably pass a pointer to a structure where you can keep your data. When the library finishes doing the asynchronous stuff, it then passes the sole pointer as an argument to the callback.


void notify(void (callback)(T))

DCRoss · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

JimM:
OMFG, just realised - this is a pattern! A few lines earlier there's an "if ( 1==1 && ....) too! So presumably they're checking that the basic foundation of maths hasn't changed before committing their scraped data back to the homeworld?!?!

It's just good thinking. You never know what kind of Universe your clients are going to be contacting you from so it's important to check those things. If you don't you run the risk of dividing a prime number by three and creating a singularity which could destroy everything.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

faoileag:
Rick:
I found it amusing that while they check for a single field named 'Organization' and 'organization', 'Organisation' isn't in there.
Might be because the code has been developed in the USA and not every coder makes a distinction between American English and Other English, as Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/organisation) does.

The real WTF is American English. One would think, with the amount of cash the Federal Reserve are printing right now, you 'merkins could afford to import some spare "U"s and exchange a few "Z"s for "S"s.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Oh thanks. I almost forgot there's a way to get a revenge for all those lame stories:

thedailywtf.com:

NoScript -> Forbid google-analytics.com
Adblock -> Enable on this site

JimM · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

belzebub:
Oh thanks. I almost forgot there's a way to get a revenge for all those lame stories:
thedailywtf.com:

NoScript -> Forbid google-analytics.com

Adblock -> Enable on this site

Why go to that effort, when you could just choose to, you know, not visit the site if it's so lame?

I'd've thought that anyone who visits the site regularly wouldn't mind supporting its continued existence by ignoring a couple of unobtrusive banner ads as they slag off Hanzo stories in the comments threads... ;)

Steve The Cynic · 2013-11-27 Reply Admin

JimM:
Steve The Cynic:
... There's an XKCD on the topic ...

"If they say they've solved their problem, NEVER ask how".

Yup, that's the one.

Now that my office firewall is after-hours, I found it at http://xkcd.com/763/

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

Wow. Just wow. I think the thing that offends me the most is those enormous if || chains. Holy fuck, lrn2loop. Something like:

if (match(llelementfirstname, firstnametable))

where firstnametable is a big JSON array with values to search for and an optional second field for matching llfrmid for the really specific matches. Then all the matching is done in a loop, and all you see in the main code is just essence of what you're trying to match.

After being being subjected to horribly ugly "example code" related to bringing up a new chip (I do embedded systems programming), I've started to use the term "weeds" to refer to all the garbage that makes code hard to read, including things like "} /* FunctionName */" at the end of functions and short if blocks. If your code wasn't so full of weeds to begin with, you wouldn't need to add those other weeds to make it more "readable"!

One of my favorite WTFs was code that I had to maintain that was compiled with a specially hacked up GCC 2.95 for ARM (and we didn't even know how it was hacked up help us get away from it). One function had about 50 array elements initialized like "a[1]=0x123; a[2]=0x456; a[3]=0x789; ..." At some point the code generator would get confused and the register allocator would run out of registers trying to compile it. Once I got to be in charge of that code, lots of things went to loops using constant arrays. That bastard version of GCC was a lot happier.

I take particular pride in things like making initialized array tables where each element fits in one 80-column line of code, with only very simple macro usage (for shrinking commonly repeated stuff like "(void*)" or "|FLAG" in individual elements). Code is so much easier to maintain when it contains as little repeated fluff as possible, by applying the DRY principle to the maximum.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

faoileag:
No, foo isn't global, foo is just in the same scope as the anonymous function. This is the reason the idiom "var instance = this;" comes in handy when you use anonymous functions in an oo context.

Honnza:
the that foo is global is not needed in the example. Even if `callback` is outside `test`, you can do this

What I should have said is "works IF foo is global OR the anonymous function is in the same scope". The code wasn't a function, so foo WAS global (and it'll always work if foo is global); it also used an anonymous function that was in the same scope as the variable definition, which also works even if the code is inside a function.

faoileag:
What's got recursion to do with it?

Honnza:
If you want recursion, you can use nested functions, even immediately invoked functions

I don't necessarily WANT recursion, but I'm forced to use recursion to avoid freezing the GUI (and simple recursion won't avoid this; you have to use setTimeout to give the browser a chance to update). When you have a lot of data to process or a complex problem to solve, and you can either use a recursive or sequential algorithm to do so, the sequential algorithm is often easier to write and it'd be DAMN NICE if you could just stick a sleep() in there so it wouldn't freeze the entire browser while it chugs away at your function.

Sure, you could also figure out how to write the whole thing as a web worker, but that's as much work as just making a bunch of variables global or passing them as arguments and then making it recursive.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

faoileag:
Original code:
<%set ON = 1%>
<%set Debugging = 1%>
if (<%Debugging%> == <%ON%>) {...
Delivered code:
if (1 == 1) {...
This is quote common in fact.

common:
In fact.

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
After being being subjected to horribly ugly "example code" related to bringing up a new chip (I do embedded systems programming), I've started to use the term "weeds" to refer to all the garbage that makes code hard to read, including things like "} /* FunctionName */" at the end of functions and short if blocks. If your code wasn't so full of weeds to begin with, you wouldn't need to add those other weeds to make it more "readable"!

But ... but ... but!

You know, there may be a 1000 line function somewhere in our codebase, and if we don't, you know, put an ending comment at its end, the programmer needs to, well, SCOLL UP to see the function name (unless the IDE has better support, but anyway). So you see that's why it's so urgently needed. And if we do it once, we need to do it everywhere because, you know, CONSISTENCY! CONSISTENCY! That's important! CONSISTENCY!

How dare you ... <headasplode> /* end of comment */

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

TDWTF:
We here at TDWTF use Google Analytics to see who visits our site

Ghostery detects the following Reddit tracker widgets when viewing the text of an article:

Ghostery:
Detected tracker source URLs: http://www.reddit.com/static/spreddit2.gif http://www.reddit.com/static/spreddit2.gif

Note that these widgets are part of the page and perform their tracking function even when JavaScript is disabled by something like NoScript.

After you enable JavaScript on thedailywtf.com, then Ghostery also notes the Google Analytics tracking:

Ghostery:
Detected tracker source URLs: http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js

2013-11-27 Reply Admin

nonpartisan:
You should've seen the original code. It took 60 seconds to analyze a page. That was unacceptable, so Adam tried Google Analytics and it completed the task in only a few milliseconds. Nigel insisted that he could rewrite the code and not be beholden to Google. Now it only takes 20 seconds to analyze a page.

But it only scans 3000 DOM elements by name. :(

A Privacy Monstrosity on Top of a Coding Monstrosity

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