• Ned (unregistered) in reply to wingcommander

    Bulletball

  • ELB (unregistered) in reply to Jon
  • (cs)
    It synergizes backward overflow while optimizing cardinal grammeters in addition to allowing customers to parabolize slithy toves at the least embiggoned cost possible.
    When the managers get all Humpty and start using words like that, you know there's a fall coming.
  • Jonathan (unregistered) in reply to FlySwat

    I used to work for the weather office in New Zealand, and we had an automated fax system that used to run overnight. Occasional typos would slip into the recipient fax list, resulting in random people receiving phone calls at 2am for weeks on end.

    shrug

  • dg (unregistered) in reply to Edward Pearson

    Pah. That's nothing. Do you know the poem in Latin?

    Est brilgum: tovi slimici In vabo tererotitant Brogovi sunt macresculi Momi rasti strugitant.

    "Fuge Gabrobocchia, fili mi, Qui fero lacerat morsu: Diffide Iubiubae avi Es procul ab Unguimanu." ...

    (Actually, neither do I, but that's what teh interweb is for.)

  • Mr. Bean (unregistered) in reply to Jon

    I got in trouble for using example.com once.

    Apparently it returns bounces rather than swallowing the emails you send it, and the bounces were causing much the same problem as simply sending the emails in the first place.

    Thereafter, I was told to use something like "fakename@[email protected]" instead, and that address was then routed to dev/null

  • CS Student (unregistered) in reply to FlySwat

    We had a similar incident at the college I go to. We had just started learning Ruby and how to send notification emails to new users with their password. One of my peers would put in our professors email, so he could check if it was sent right (part of the assignment). My friend is pretty curious about things, so he wondered what would happen if you were to run the email loop for 1000 times. He would send it to his own personal address though.

    Two errors occured:

    1. He had put in his own email, but forgot to comment out the professor's own address.
    2. Ruby being a slightly different language than what we were used to, he messed up the while loop. Yes, he hit a infinite loop.

    He didn't know what happened until 3 minutes later the professor comes storming in DEMANDING to know why his inbox had a thousand and counting emails. They immediately terminated the process, but the damage was already done. The professor and him ended up getting close to half a million emails. They both had to run scripts to delete the email, but while the professor was on the college network and got all the email at once, the student had Yahoo. It would trickle in 30 at a time every few minutes. I'm not sure when the emails finally stopped arriving, but this happened a few months ago and could still be going on!

  • Russ (unregistered) in reply to CS Student
    CS Student:
    We had a similar incident at the college I go to. We had just started learning Ruby and how to send notification emails to new users with their password. One of my peers would put in our professors email, so he could check if it was sent right (part of the assignment). My friend is pretty curious about things, so he wondered what would happen if you were to run the email loop for 1000 times. He would send it to his own personal address though.

    Two errors occured:

    1. He had put in his own email, but forgot to comment out the professor's own address.
    2. Ruby being a slightly different language than what we were used to, he messed up the while loop. Yes, he hit a infinite loop.

    He didn't know what happened until 3 minutes later the professor comes storming in DEMANDING to know why his inbox had a thousand and counting emails. They immediately terminated the process, but the damage was already done. The professor and him ended up getting close to half a million emails. They both had to run scripts to delete the email, but while the professor was on the college network and got all the email at once, the student had Yahoo. It would trickle in 30 at a time every few minutes. I'm not sure when the emails finally stopped arriving, but this happened a few months ago and could still be going on!

    This is really retarded. They should've just gotten in touch with the server administrator and deleted those emails from the queue.

  • Rhialto (unregistered)

    "Spamming" is sending unsolicited commercial (i.e. advertising) bulk email.

    Now what happened here was unsolicited, bulk, and email. But it doesn't look like it was commercial/advertising. So it was not spamming!

    Please be precise in your use of language.

  • Rhialto (unregistered) in reply to Greg
    Greg:
    "got a 404 and assumed that meant the domain was unregistered"... ummm... yeah... It kind of only means the exact opposite - that there is a web server at that address.
    They must have used Internet Exploder - it uses the same error message for any and all errors so you never know what's going on.
  • Otis P Criblecoblis (unregistered) in reply to Rhialto
    Rhialto:
    Greg:
    "got a 404 and assumed that meant the domain was unregistered"... ummm... yeah... It kind of only means the exact opposite - that there is a web server at that address.
    They must have used Internet Exploder - it uses the same error message for any and all errors so you never know what's going on.

    You really should drink some coffee before posting early in the morning. That way you won't expose your fundamental ignorance of the workings of web browsers. (Hint: is a 404 message generated by the client?)

  • KäseMeister (unregistered) in reply to Nerf Herder

    I do this an' all:

    Nerf Herder:
    I'm sure the folks over at test.com are sick of getting my emails. I always use [email protected] when I dont feel like giving my read address.

    I'd buy that for a dollar.

  • p-daddy (unregistered)

    captcha=mara

  • (cs) in reply to Aaron
    Aaron:
    Can we please stop this WTF meme? It wasn't even funny the first time I heard it on the Simpsons a decade ago, and quoting TV shows isn't funny in general (and especially when they're that old).

    Can we please find Aaron a sense of humor? If that can't be done, see if you can find some tolerance for other people he can use. I mean, apparently he's incapable of understanding that, just because he doesn't find something funny that someone else might. (I don't either, but that's OK with me.)

    If you can't do either of the above, can someone at least find a gag, so he'll at least STFU?

    Thanks.

  • (cs) in reply to Andy L.
    Andy L.:
    Andy L.:
    Polly: According to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, any and all electronic mail messages-
    YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF FUTURE LAW!

    THE PENALTY FOR VIOLATING FUTURE LAW IS FOUR YEARS IN SUSPENDED ANIMATION!

    Actually, this is pretty smart. I mean, if there are significant fines involved for violations, and you enforce the law retroactively for four years, think of the revenue you could generate!

  • Bear (unregistered) in reply to FlySwat

    Reminds me of what happened at my job a few years back.

    There was a new developer. A very tall (over 7ft) kid who referred to himself in the third person, and insisted that we all call him as Troll Boy.

    He was given the assignment of writing a rather simple data conversion script. Take a row of data from one table, look a few things up, mash it together, and stick it into a new table. Sounds easy.

    I was told to look over his script before he actually ran it. It was a small script; the logic was okay, but Troll Boy's SQL wasn't up to par. I told him that the SQL he had written was invalid, and that he needed to fix it; also, he needed to write some error handling that would kill the script if a database error occured.

    Two very simple requests; two very simple things to do.

    "Don't worry, Troll Boy will fix it." "Good," I responded, "Let me take another look before you run it against all that data."

    Our database object was configured to send an email to [email protected] whenever a database error occured. We were a small tech department with a half dozen developers, and for the most part, everyone knew the system well enough to be able to respond to a database error email and at least start looking into the problem.

    Except, of course, Troll Boy. This bright creature ran the script and a moment later, he told me, with a huge grin, "Troll Boy is done." I thought he meant "done" as in "Troll Boy, Master of Talking in the Third Person, Slayer of Heroes and Pizza in my Mother's Basement, is done making your requested modifications. Would you like to take a look?"

    I was about to say, "Good job, but you have to let me look over thing before you actually run them..." but as I started to do that, my inbox started to flood with error emails.

    Not just a few hundred. Or a few thousand. What came out of my mouth instead was, "Oh shit." These words were repeated a moment later by the systems admin. "Oh shit! The mail server crashed, wtf?"

    Troll Boy, in his infinite wisdom, didn't fix his SQL, he didn't add error handling, and he didn't let me look over the script again before he ran it.

    In less than a minute, he had sent out well over 50,000 emails to every developer in the company. The email server, an Exchange server with a few weird custom hacks built into it (the details of which I still do not know), could not keep up and it died.

    The data was corrupted so badly that we had to phone in an emergency call to Microsoft to send someone out to fix the server and recover as much data as possible. From what I heard, that call cost us $20,000.

    Not a great was to start your first week at a company.

    Of course, there are several other WTFs in here. For example; why wasn't outbound mail throttled? Why did the Exchange server crash? Why does Troll Boy talk to himself in the third person?

    I'll never know. He didn't last more than a few more months at the company. Troll Boy jumped ship and went to work for one of those sweat shops down in Las Vegas.

    Troll Boy was full of (CAPTCHA): ingenium

  • Rhialto (unregistered) in reply to Otis P Criblecoblis
    Otis P Criblecoblis:
    Rhialto:
    Greg:
    "got a 404 and assumed that meant the domain was unregistered"... ummm... yeah... It kind of only means the exact opposite - that there is a web server at that address.
    They must have used Internet Exploder - it uses the same error message for any and all errors so you never know what's going on.

    You really should drink some coffee before posting early in the morning. That way you won't expose your fundamental ignorance of the workings of web browsers. (Hint: is a 404 message generated by the client?)

    In Internet Exploder you often can't see the difference. I don't allow the crap in my house, otherwise I'd try it out right now.

    And I expect that, much like the misuse of the word "spam", many people just say "404" for any generic error message seen in their web browser, whether the number 404 is present in it or not.

  • (cs) in reply to Morasique
    Morasique:
    The real WTF is sdfjgi.com really isn't registered, was the keyboard mashing changed to protect the innocent?

    Well, you fail reading comprehension. From the OP (emphasis mine):

    mashed his keyboard to get a random domain name — sdfjgi.com (changed to protect the innocent).
  • JH (unregistered) in reply to FlySwat

    Just wanted to point this out about your story. You were working on a VCI "VALUE CHAIN INTEGRATION". I have never heard of this.

    So then when you said you'd put this in "Laymans terms" I felt this would help me. These Laymans terms were: " synergizes backward overflow while optimizing cardinal grammeters in addition to allowing customers to parabolize slithy toves at the least embiggoned cost possible."

    Again, are you sure you got these in the right order?

    Hope documentation is not in your job description.

  • (cs) in reply to nazi
    nazi:
    wingcommander:
    Everyone knows that VC capital should be used to buy Aeron chairs and foosball machines.
    VC capital?

    Do you retrieve that from the ATM machine with your PIN number?

    If you bothered to read some of the other replies before you posted, you would have seen that this was said almost immediately after the start of comments (and a dozen times after that before your post).

    Try to see what's here first before posting, please. You'll produce less clutter that way.

    Oh, and nice choice of poster name. Shouldn't you prefer "moron" instead? It's actually got a nicer connotation to most people than the name you chose.

  • grayback (unregistered) in reply to FlySwat
    FlySwat:
    It sent over 7,000 e-mails before my outbound SMTP server died.

    I'm a much better developer now :)

    So, does it support sending over 7 billion emails now?

  • (cs) in reply to Rhialto
    Rhialto:
    In Internet Exploder you often can't see the difference. I don't allow the crap in my house, otherwise I'd try it out right now.

    And I expect that, much like the misuse of the word "spam", many people just say "404" for any generic error message seen in their web browser, whether the number 404 is present in it or not.

    You've already indicated you don't know what you're talking about; must you further enhance that for us by using the script kiddie anti-MS bashing where it's not appropriate as well?

    You can tell someone's intelligence level (or lack thereof) by the way they feel the need to blame everything on a large company or platform even when it's not that company or platform's fault. You know, with comments that say things like "Internet Exploder", or "M$", or "Windoze", or "Linux sux!", or "Apple blows" for absolutely no reason whatsoever in their posts.

    Thanks for confirming your IQ level for us; I've never spoken to someone with a sub-20 before. It's been enlightening.

  • (cs) in reply to JH
    JH:
    Just wanted to point this out about your story. You were working on a VCI "VALUE CHAIN INTEGRATION". I have never heard of this.

    So then when you said you'd put this in "Laymans terms" I felt this would help me. These Laymans terms were: " synergizes backward overflow while optimizing cardinal grammeters in addition to allowing customers to parabolize slithy toves at the least embiggoned cost possible."

    Again, are you sure you got these in the right order?

    Hope documentation is not in your job description.

    Actually, what was posted is a very concise description of a VCI. Perhaps English is not your first language?

    (Hint: Both the "VCI" phrase and the definition thereof were, and were intended to be, nonsensical humor, and therefore were not to be taken seriously.)

  • the thing is (unregistered)

    even if you picked a domain that was unregistered, even one so outlandish that no one in their right mind would register, say dgege5sea4fstegs4deeznuts444444.com, due to the dns traffic you generate someone may find out that the domain is being used for "something" and then register it

    I know because I have done it before.

  • JohnInMableton (unregistered)

    The IT dept of the bank I used to work for had test accounts in celebrity names for fun. I asked them to please stop it in case they got mailed out, many times.

    Naturally, they got mailed out and at the front desk, Dolly Partons manager among others called to find out about these accounts. While the addrresses are bogus, when you send something to Dolly Parton at Big Bossom Ave anywhere in TN, you can not count on it not arriving, especially if it is a bank statement.

    After a year and half of bogus statements to insulting wrong addresses, they started suing. Undisclosed settlements later, the IT finally dropped the address fields from the statements but kept mailing them anyway.

    The post office is so friendly, if you are VIP and they have a bank statement for you, they will see it delivered. New suits. IT Dept canned.

  • Rhialto (unregistered) in reply to KenW
    KenW:
    You've already indicated you don't know what you're talking about; must you further enhance that for us by using the script kiddie anti-MS bashing where it's not appropriate as well?
    I think you have never seen IE error messages. They are exceedingly useless, dumbed down to saying nothing more than "something went wrong", and giving a generic list of things to try which is not adapted to the specific error at all (so it includes lots of possible errors that don't and can't apply). Does that sound useful to you?
    KenW:
    You can tell someone's intelligence level (or lack thereof) by the way they feel the need to blame everything on a large company or platform even when it's not that company or platform's fault. You know, with comments that say things like "Internet Exploder", or "M$", or "Windoze", or "Linux sux!", or "Apple blows" for absolutely no reason whatsoever in their posts.

    Thanks for confirming your IQ level for us; I've never spoken to someone with a sub-20 before. It's been enlightening.

    Usually this kind of language says more about the author than about the accused. I'll leave it at that.

  • (cs) in reply to Rhialto
    Rhialto:
    I think you have never seen IE error messages. They are exceedingly useless, dumbed down to saying nothing more than "something went wrong", and giving a generic list of things to try which is not adapted to the specific error at all (so it includes lots of possible errors that don't and can't apply).
    You mean generic advice like this?
    Server not found Can't find the server at www.gosdfogle.com. * Check the address for typing errors such as ww.example.com instead of www.example.com * If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection. * If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure the browser is permitted to access the Web.
    Oh wait, that's what Firefox says when you try to access a nonexistent server.

    Are you quite finished being stupid now?

  • Shill (unregistered) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    Rhialto:
    I think you have never seen IE error messages. They are exceedingly useless, dumbed down to saying nothing more than "something went wrong", and giving a generic list of things to try which is not adapted to the specific error at all (so it includes lots of possible errors that don't and can't apply).
    You mean generic advice like this?
    Server not found Can't find the server at www.gosdfogle.com. * Check the address for typing errors such as ww.example.com instead of www.example.com * If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection. * If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure the browser is permitted to access the Web.
    Oh wait, that's what Firefox says when you try to access a nonexistent server.

    Are you quite finished being stupid now?

    Care to explain what the "Show friendly HTTP error messages" option in IE6 does? BTW, it is checked by default.

  • Bob (unregistered)

    A similar situation happened for me too.. In one of the projects I'm managing, the client kept on getting emails from a test environment. We have made sure that we turn off all email mechanisms from the test environment, but he still kept complaining.

    After 3 weeks of fighting this, we couldn't find the machine from where the emails are generated. It was all silent for a week, no emails were sent, we thought we had figured out the issue.

    Then suddenly it started all over again. But this time I think we knew what was happening. We had one of our developers go on vacation for a week - and thats when it was silent. When he started his server, mails have started again.

    I sat with him and looked at the code, the portion of the code, which was supposed to be commented out for test environment wasn't commented, inspite of an clear email to do the same.

    God bless developers.

  • Lari (unregistered)

    "Hi, this is Firstname Lastname from Test Corporation. Could you please stop spamming us right now!"

  • Russell (unregistered)

    I found a bug in kmail once. Apparently before the patch, if you changed the permissions on sent-mail, it would just continue to resend trying to write to the file. Froze my server with hundreds of mails per second running through sendmail, and the victim was a mailing list that I was trying to send a mail to. Caused quite a bit of havoc.

    I patched the bug and got them to put it in a release.

  • (cs) in reply to Aaron
    Aaron:
    akatherder:
    And you lose points for not using "cromulent".
    Can we please stop this WTF meme? It wasn't even funny the first time I heard it on the Simpsons a decade ago, and quoting TV shows isn't funny in general (and especially when they're that old).
    I don't see why we should stop, it's a perfectly cromulent meme.
  • pong (unregistered) in reply to Rhialto
    I think you have never seen IE error messages. They are exceedingly useless, dumbed down to saying nothing more than "something went wrong", and giving a generic list of things to try which is not adapted to the specific error at all (so it includes lots of possible errors that don't and can't apply). Does that sound useful to you?

    Usually this kind of language says more about the author than about the accused. I'll leave it at that.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Shill
    Shill:
    Care to explain what the "Show friendly HTTP error messages" option in IE6 does? BTW, it is checked by default.
    Yeah, but what competent developer leaves it checked? Oh, never mind.
  • I know more than you do (unregistered)

    So, while I was taking pilot lessons, I was talking with my flight instructor and the administrator at the FBO. (think: airport for private planes) The administrator was complaining about her ex-boyfriend harassing her by cell phone.

    Without thinking, I offered to open my laptop, make a quickie loop in a mail script, and send him a few thousand text messages of "leave me the f*ck alone".

    There was a very pregnant pause, and my flight instructor started adding up... At $0.25 per text message, times 5,000... he about shit his pants.

    I guess software engineers end up thinking on different scales then "normal folk". I routinely think with values of 100 million or more, a few thousands is a quickie hack in bash slapped together in a few minutes...

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to JH
    JH:
    Just wanted to point this out about your story. You were working on a VCI "VALUE CHAIN INTEGRATION". I have never heard of this.

    So then when you said you'd put this in "Laymans terms" I felt this would help me. These Laymans terms were: " synergizes backward overflow while optimizing cardinal grammeters in addition to allowing customers to parabolize slithy toves at the least embiggoned cost possible."

    Again, are you sure you got these in the right order?

    Hope documentation is not in your job description.

    I hope you're sarcastic, because if you don't get it you're hopeless yourself.

    The story merely pointed out that the business they were supposedly in was a load of bullcrap, in layman's terms as well. You didn't get that?! Think .coms

  • Overstressed Admin (unregistered) in reply to n9ds

    Thanks for making me laugh, that was awesome. Going to check my queue now...

  • Edward Royce (unregistered) in reply to James R. Twine
    James R. Twine:
    > in layman's terms it synergizes backward overflow while > optimizing cardinal grammeters in addition to allowing > customers to parabolize slithy toves at the least > embiggoned cost possible.

    Right -- gotcha!

    Gentlemen! We've got to protect our phoney-baloney jobs!

    Harrumph!

  • (cs) in reply to Jon
    Jon:
    The Real WTF: example.org is reserved for testing, so there's no situation where you should be randomly picking domains.

    Yup, and since they don't have any MX you could just use [email protected] as the sending address in order not to be bothered by the backscatter...

  • Pete (unregistered) in reply to Doc Monster
    Doc Monster:
    "What? My code/config/test-procedure spammed the mail server and caused service interruption? Why, that's not abusing the server, that's a lousy server!!1" <-- TRWTF
    I'm afraid the sysadmin is really is likely to be to blame in this instance.

    At some point, certainly in the first few days, s/he ought to have been asked to check the logs to see if the email traffic was making it into the mail queue correctly (and if not, what the error was, if mail had made it to any part of the system).

    Doc Monster:
    Four years ago most MTAs (Mail Transport Agents) didn't [...] default to keeping a database of sites that were down in order to skip those messages in the queue and quickly find the deliverable ones.
    They certainly had commands to list undelivered messages in the mail queue and to list their last delivery failure reason. That's been the case even back to ancient Sendmail and MMDF in the early 1990s and probably quite a bit earlier.
  • (cs)
    When he opened it in a web browser and got a 404, he assumed that meant the domain was unregistered,

    AAAAAAAAARRRRRGHHH!

  • Frank (unregistered) in reply to Jon

    [snip] example.org is reserved for testing [snip] Thats not correct. See what there is written on www.example.com . For testing there is the top level domain .test

  • (cs)

    I worked on a system that allowed users to set up email reminders to themselves. The user could enter a start date, end date, time period, and rate at which the emails should be sent out. For instance, every 2 days, or every 1 week, between the start and end dates.

    Unfortunately, there was no validation of the rate, and eventually a user set a reminder to be sent EVERY 0 DAYS.

    The emails were sent by a nightly process that was designed, per the spec, to send any missed emails. So, if it hadn't run for a week for some reason (e.g., if the server had been down) and you had a reminder set for every 2 days, you'd get several messages in your inbox the next morning.

    This was implemented by sending an email, adding the time increment (e.g., 2 days), and then comparing to see if it was greater than today's date. If not, loop and send another message.

    Which worked great, except for the message set to be sent EVERY 0 DAYS.

    It sent an email, added 0 days to the date, compared that to today's date, sent another email, added 0 again, ....

    We got a call from the woman the next day, saying that she had half a million messages in her inbox.

    When I went to check the logs, and the state of her reminder in the database, to see what had happened, I could see where the process had started, and that the record was marked as being processed, but no evidence of it having stopped....

    We had to restart the production server in the middle of the day to get it to stop spamming the poor woman.

    Naturally, the next version contained much more validation, and a number of checks to prevent the problem from recurring.

  • whois (unregistered)

    He used a browser to check if a web server exists at the domain instead of using whois to check if the domain exists?

  • montana (unregistered) in reply to Edward Pearson

    lol me too, that's a great one. memorized the morning it was due to be recited to the class - 4th grade.

  • anothersysadmin (unregistered) in reply to Edward Pearson
    Edward Pearson:
    'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

    "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!"......

    I'm glad you put that - I was starting to wonder how it went - I couldn't remember! :)

  • digitalblur (unregistered)

    I came across something similar on a previous project for a major telco. Our test team was using what they thought was a false mobile number when testing SMS alerts. The test team was quite large and was both on and off-shore which resulted in some poor guy getting mobile phone spam at all hours of the day/night.

    Of course, we didn't know anything about it until we got a very angry call from our client. Turns out the guy getting spammed was a high profile customer of the only other major Telco in the country. This other telco were even threatening legal action since they thought it was a campaign to drive away their big customers!

  • Anonymous Cow-Herd (unregistered)

    TRWTF was that someone registered a domain that looked like cat typing.

  • Russell (unregistered)

    When I worked for the State Board of Education (is that ok as long as I don't mention what State?) we set up some devices to reach out to cisco.com to see if we had an internet connection, figuring that of all places, cisco.com ought to be up fairly regularly (this was 1998-9, don't know if example.org was around then). At any rate, the verification was happening so often that Cisco noticed, and within a few days called the network admin at his desk. Directly. That was a bit scary, so he changed the verification to happen much less often. It's sometimes fun to accidently break someone elses stuff for a change.

  • Valued Service (unregistered) in reply to oncogenesis
    oncogenesis:
    I guess it's too much to ask developers to read or even be aware of pertinent RFCs...

    Reserved Top Level DNS Names

    Then someone pays out the <your fav. word here> for example.com

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