• (cs)

    The movie one's probably not a WTF; there have been multiple movies named "The Last of the Mohicans" you know.

  • Joe Example (unregistered)

    I don't get what's wrong with the last one from SigAlert.com. Somebody plz explain?

  • (cs) in reply to Joe Example
    Joe Example:
    I don't get what's wrong with the last one from SigAlert.com. Somebody plz explain?

    The juxtaposition of the 21st.com ad and the traffic accident notice suggests that a traffic collision was caused by "Drivers just like you".

  • (cs)

    Looks like someone hacked the images in Solitaire and was playing it on Barkin's machine while he was at lunch.

  • (cs) in reply to snowman
    snowman:
    Anyway to make this more fun, try to find the REAL dialog box in the midst of all those shadow ones. Hint: it's the one with a yellow triangle!

    That's easy, it's the one on top of a very tightly-overlapping stack just left of center-- I mean center of left screen. Whoever it was moved the mouse real fast a lot and slowed down just before walking away, and you get one clone per (mouse track or screen update, not sure which or both or wtf).

    TRWTF is that either a) you didn't lock your screen when you went to lunch or b) you locked your screen but something managed to plant a dialog on top of the screensaver or blank. That could have been a very embarrassing message...

  • Tel Janin (unregistered) 
        "I am the bone of my PC.
    Silicon is my body, and electrons are my blood.
    I have created over a thousand text documents.
    Unknown to BSOD.
    Nor known to logins.
    Have withstood pain to create many programs.
    Yet, those hands will never code anything.
    So as I pray, "Unlimited Error Works."
  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    These "secret questions" are a pet peeve of mine. Basically, it's a second password with far, far less security (in the all to common worst case it's both vulnerable to a dictionary attack and can be easily found out through some research) that everyone can use to circumvent the real password.

    So, in a way, the case shown in the screenshot ("What is your password?") may seem stupid, but is at least secure.

    Yeah, I got to thinking about that. It's not hard to make up a reasonably secure password. But if anyone really wanted to break into my bank account -- like they think I have any money, ha! ha! -- some of the common "security questions" like my mother's maiden name and the city where I was born are public record. If they went to a little work they could find that out. Indeed, someone trolling could guess that many people might still live in the city where they were born, and so try the city from the person's current address for the city of birth. Things like "name of first pet" would be even easier: surely one could easily put together a list of a hundred or so common pet names. "Favorite color" would be easiest of all: basic colors like "blue", "red", "green", etc, maybe twenty possibilities, would probably cover an awful lot of people. (Personally, I always give an HTML color code, like #f9c742, in answer to such questions.)

    Of course, here in the U.S. we use our Social Security Number in two very interesting ways: One, it's your universal personal identification number, to be used on every sort of registration or application and generally given out to anyone who wants to include you on any sort of list. And Two, it's your secret password, to be used to prove your identity when accessing the most private and confidential of information.

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Why not let us make up our own questions?
    This trope occurs all too often on TDWTF; so, for the benefit of readers, herewith the only logical solution. In Hegelian dialectic, obviously.

    Question: Why not let us make up our own questions? Answer: Because the question is irrelevant. Why would you care? The computer doesn't. Question: What's the answer, then? Answer: Well, obviously, it's forty two. Question: What? To everything? Answer: Also to life and the universe. But, yes, to everything. Question: But that's hardly very secure, is it? Answer: Nobody said that reality had to be secure. But it is easy to remember. Question: Are you saying that reality is easy to remember? Answer: No, that's a deficiency either of (a) the English language or (b) your recent beer consumption. All I was saying is that the Answer is easy to remember. Question: But that makes the security question easy to crack, surely? Answer: You are a pitiful n42b. The ISO/OSI layered "Life, The Universe, and Everything" protocol merely mandates the answer at the link layer. You can add any amount of cryptography you like, provided it occurs at one or more of the five higher layers. I'd recommend the Application layer (7a, 7b or 7c). Nobody sane has ever found a use for those. Question: You've lost me there. How do I encrypt the Answer? Answer: Any way you like. Myself, I prefer Morse Code, but that can fall foul of regexps. Simple-minded people go for Pig Latin, as in "Ortyay otway," but I suspect that evil hax42rs can google for that. Klingon is a possibility, especially if spoken by an innumerate tlhlngan with a speech impediment. Question: I'm sorry. What was the answer again? 42: Fuck it, just email me with your bank account details. I'll be in touch.

  • (cs) in reply to DazP
    DazP:
    As for the dentist - I dare not say what he is going to do you out loud. It is the procedure that must not be named.
    It's obviously related to the location of the beer menu one, if you know what I mean.
  • Slater (unregistered) in reply to alegr
    alegr:
    snowman:
    Thanks to the abomination known as modal dialogs*, some error boxes lock up the parent window until you answer their demands. If you move the error box, the parent window won't repaint because it is locked up. Now you have two boxes, the real one and the "shadow" of where it used to be. Move it enough and you can fill the screen with shadow dialogs plus the one real one still demanding your sage decision.

    So the only WTF here is GUI designers who think all users will do what they're told like sheep and never tinker with anything. And, of course, since most GUI users ARE sheep, they're usually right.

    Anyway to make this more fun, try to find the REAL dialog box in the midst of all those shadow ones. Hint: it's the one with a yellow triangle!

    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_dialog

    Unless you're using some homebrewn modal dialog substitute, WM_PAINT is perfectly handled in the parent windows while the modal dialog is shown. When a parent window is disabled, it only doesn't get mouse clicks and keyboard focus; that's it.

    Modal dialogs from COM components are a common problem. Good thing COM is as dead as XP's obsolete unbuffered bitmap-graphics engine.

  • MadJo@Work (unregistered)

    Somehow I suspect that the dentist appointment has very little to do with Mambo#5.

  • Jesse (unregistered) in reply to Jason
    Jason:
    They attached an iCalendar appointment to my last appointment reminder -- in UTC. 8:10 AM appointments are bad enough, but I'm not going to my dentist at 1 in the morning!
    TRWTF is that your iCalendar client doesn't understand how to deal with times in UTC.
  • frustrati (unregistered) in reply to Chris
    Chris:
    Word has a nasty habit of updating fields when you print your document, even though the fields show their old values in Word. I have encountered this in the past, printing something and seeing 'Error!' in the printed version where everything was fine when looking at the Word document.
    Interesting, as that is one thing that I have not found (or rather bothered to find) out how to accomplish.

    Of course, the whole idea that updating an error field to a (localised) error message is just wrong on so many levels. Whenever I need to print a Word document I have to:

    1. Change to "Normal" view (otherwise fields in headers and footers will not be updated)
    2. Select all text (Ctrl-A)
    3. Update fields (F9)
    4. Search for the text "Error!" to verify if errors were found. A truly well-designed feature!
  • (cs) in reply to SNF
    SNF:
    « Open wiiiiiide! No no, I don't mean your mouth... »
    You made me think of goatse. :^(

    (to be sung to the tune of, 'you make me feel like dansing')

  • (cs) in reply to Jesse
    Jesse:
    Jason:
    They attached an iCalendar appointment to my last appointment reminder -- in UTC. 8:10 AM appointments are bad enough, but I'm not going to my dentist at 1 in the morning!
    TRWTF is that your iCalendar client doesn't understand how to deal with times in UTC.

    Unless they sent it marked UTC but the number was local and the iCalendar client did correctly handle UTC, dutifully translating it to 1 AM.

  • Smurf (unregistered)

    Yeah. Now go back and save those error message windows in ANY format that is NOT freakin' lossy JPEG, so that i can actually use it as background without getting SEVERE EYE CANCER, dammit.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to DazP
    DazP:
    Anon:
    I saw this site the other day:

    http://www.blue-moon-authentication.com/

    It's authentication based on preferences, which are usually pretty stable. You select 16 things (8 liked, 8 disliked) from a pool of 60 things. Then when you need to authenticate, it just shows you the 16 things and you have to select whether you like them or not. Unless you suddenly go from hating watching golf to loving it, you shouldn't need to remember what you put in the first time.

    Again - it's just a matter of talking to you for long enough. If it's your bank account I'm after, that isn't enough because that would motivate someone long enough to ask 60 questions.

    Shit, they could approach you on the street with a questionnaire and offer you $10 for completing it - most people would.

    But they don't know which questions to ask. And you can choose things that you only have relatively weak preferences for that maybe only you really know about. For example, if you are a huge golf fan, you probably wouldn't pick that as one of your options because everybody knows it. But if you kind of like Opera, but have never been to the Opera and don't own any Opera CDs, but you just kind of think it makes a pleasant sound, you could pick that and nobody would guess you even had any interest in it (because, really, you don't).

  • pa (unregistered) in reply to gaboo_bl
    gaboo_bl:
    pa:
    - fishing beer <- You're wrong there, it's peach flavored beer

    I think I can help here as a native french speaker who live near belgium, I completed the words you were missing for the knowledge of you all.

    Shame on me. I live near Belgium too (20km) and I was thinking, wtf is fishing beer and why did they use the wrong accent?

  • Dinges (unregistered)

    I love my new desktop! Thank you so much!

  • Marc B (unregistered) in reply to SNF

    From the picture, I thought it was a visit to the proctologist.

  • James (unregistered)

    I'm really surprised at how many non-WTFs made it through this time.

    The last-name email one could be from a system asking you to pick an email address, and the company wants you to set it up as "[email protected]" without any numbers or whatever. Granted, it would be easier to just ask for first and last names in separate boxes and form the address in JS, but it's at least a possibility.

    The Verizon one is almost certainly an issue of rounding, no biggie there (though they should have said "less than 30 seconds" to make it clear that 30 seconds is too long).

    "Cannot Save File" "Cannot Open File" makes sense, because you have to open a file handle to write to it. Maybe the error was written by an Engineer with little people skills, but it's technically correct.

  • (cs)

    Those "secret questions" are horrible. I had one that wanted the name of your "best childhood friend". I didn't have one particular best childhood friend.

    Sometimes half of the chooseable secret questions assume that you have a spouse or children (anniversary date, spouse's middle name, child's birth date, something like that).

    Another one (where I had no choice on the question) wanted the first name of my paternal grandfather, and then had a LENGTH requirement for the answer. Gah! Length requirements are fine for made-up passwords, but you can't apply a length requirement to a "fact". (One of my college classmates had a first name of U.)

    I called the bank on this one, and they suggested adding 111 or 123 after my paternal grandfather's first name. Great, now I have to remember whether I added 111 or 123 after the name. Web page designers, just like all programmers, need to think about what they are implementing.

  • Wizou (unregistered) in reply to seditious
    seditious:
    TRWTF is that either a) you didn't lock your screen when you went to lunch or b) you locked your screen but something managed to plant a dialog on top of the screensaver or blank. That could have been a very embarrassing message...

    I think he did lock the screen, but the screensaver crashed, showing a dialog box. Screensaver crashing explains why the whole screen surface doesn't get updated anymore.

  • Calli Arcale (unregistered) in reply to DWalker59
    DWalker59:
    Those "secret questions" are horrible.

    Y'know, there is a simple solution to those. Does the bank reject your loan application if you give something other than your mother's maiden name when they ask you for your mother's maiden name? Do you have to spell your pet's name "Pooky" instead of "$df12Ab@"?

    It doesn't really solve the fundamental lunacy of this sort of not-really-two-factor authentication to just add another password, and it may break down the point of the secret question (to retrieve your password when you forget it). But it does address the security problem.

  • (cs) in reply to Calli Arcale
    Calli Arcale:
    DWalker59:
    Those "secret questions" are horrible.

    Y'know, there is a simple solution to those. Does the bank reject your loan application if you give something other than your mother's maiden name when they ask you for your mother's maiden name? Do you have to spell your pet's name "Pooky" instead of "$df12Ab@"?

    It doesn't really solve the fundamental lunacy of this sort of not-really-two-factor authentication to just add another password, and it may break down the point of the secret question (to retrieve your password when you forget it). But it does address the security problem.

    Now I just feel foolish. Wish I'd thought of that first.

  • ChiefCrazyTalk (unregistered) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    brazzy:
    These "secret questions" are a pet peeve of mine. Basically, it's a second password with far, far less security (in the all to common worst case it's both vulnerable to a dictionary attack and can be easily found out through some research) that everyone can use to circumvent the real password.

    So, in a way, the case shown in the screenshot ("What is your password?") may seem stupid, but is at least secure.

    I agree. And when you have to choose one of the preset questions it's usually worse.

    They usually go like this:

    1. What is your favourite colour?
    2. What is your pet's name?
    3. What is your favourite vacation spot?

    I've never given any thought to my favourite colour, I don't have a pet, and I can't say I have a distinct favourite vacation spot. Ergo, either I make something up and forget it for one the questions--defeating the purpose of the question--or I make something up and write it down--making it way less secure.

    At least it's somewhat more acceptable when they give an option that might not change depending on the day of the week, like "What is your birth mother's maiden name?"

    Even worse for many geeks:

    "What was the name of your first girlfriend?"

  • (cs) in reply to ChiefCrazyTalk
    ChiefCrazyTalk:
    Even worse for many geeks:

    "What was the name of your first girlfriend?"

    Yeah, that would be vulnerable to a dictionary attack of image (or video) file extensions. Most likely answer being Dot Jpeg.

  • 4thgradeenglsh (unregistered)

    That dialog thing means you won at Windows! Congratulations! It's the same code that fires when you win at Solitaire.

  • omg (unregistered)

    14 euros.. for beer? Granted, it's probably some of the best beer one can get, being Belgian, but... aie, I'm quaking in my boots, as I'll be in Vienna for 5 days in a little while. I guess I can persist on gruel or kebabs or something. And I can deal with 8 Eur. coffee because I'm a junkie who will pay anything for caffeine.

  • Me (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that he used JPEG to store a screenie...

  • Eris Discordia (unregistered) in reply to NSCoder

    In both cases it's still a "Europeanism" -- the first time I heard an equivalent of this phrase was in a continental European language.

    But yeah, "fruits of the forest" makes it more immediately clear what is meant (which is "berries").

  • Eris Discordia (unregistered)

    Erm, that was in reply to the person talking about the beer name "wood fruits," see?

  • Avalanche (unregistered) in reply to omg
    omg:
    14 euros.. for beer? Granted, it's probably some of the best beer one can get, being Belgian, but... aie, I'm quaking in my boots, as I'll be in Vienna for 5 days in a little while. I guess I can persist on gruel or kebabs or something. And I can deal with 8 Eur. coffee because I'm a junkie who will pay anything for caffeine.

    It is not the pricelist, it is the index into the pricelist (so page 2 for draftbeers (nos bieres a la pression), page 3 for gueuzes etc). So that is not 14 Euros, but page 14 where you can look up the exact beer you want and what it costs.

  • (cs) in reply to Calli Arcale
    Calli Arcale:
    DWalker59:
    Those "secret questions" are horrible.

    Y'know, there is a simple solution to those. Does the bank reject your loan application if you give something other than your mother's maiden name when they ask you for your mother's maiden name? Do you have to spell your pet's name "Pooky" instead of "$df12Ab@"?

    It doesn't really solve the fundamental lunacy of this sort of not-really-two-factor authentication to just add another password, and it may break down the point of the secret question (to retrieve your password when you forget it). But it does address the security problem.

    And how the H$LL am I supposed to remember that my mother's maiden name is "spot" and my high school is located in city %rte$6Y?

  • JIm Jones (unregistered)

    Dang dude, looks like you got some major bugs!

    RD www.Privacy-Center.net

  • Shinobu (unregistered) in reply to alegr
    alegr:
    Unless you're using some homebrewn modal dialog substitute, WM_PAINT is perfectly handled in the parent windows while the modal dialog is shown. When a parent window is disabled, it only doesn't get mouse clicks and keyboard focus; that's it.
    Even if WM_PAINT is sent, that doesn't mean that the message is actually acted upon. If this application (or screensaver or whatever it was) errored out, it might be left in a state which causes the repaint of the window to fail in some way. Perhaps the handle of the bitmap it is supposed to display is NULL? Or perhaps the application didn't expect to have to handle WM_PAINT, doing all the drawing in an animation loop? Both could apply in the case of a screensaver. And applications not correctly handling WM_PAINT when a modal dialog is shown is more common than you think. In Visual Basic for example, modal dialogs created using MyForm.Show 1 work okay, but those created using MsgBox don't. I'm not sure why this is, it is evident that WM_PAINT does get sent, since everything that doesn't depend on Visual Basic code to be redrawn gets redrawn normally (buttons, AutoRedraw forms, checkboxes, form's BackColor, etc.) but the Form_Paint event doesn't appear to fire. I don't like modal dialogs and I prefer to avoid them if possible, but they have their uses. Presenting the user with a blank error message isn't one of them though.
  • Joep (unregistered) in reply to DazP

    The "Error Bookmark not defined" manifests after saving and , closing, and then re-opening a word file on Word 2007. OR when you print it. Basically this means you don't see the error until after you've printed it. Microsoft sucks :(

  • Nobody (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that nobody recognized the CDW security question as an obvious phishing attempt.

    Captcha: quis - I am gonna quis necro-ing now.

  • Friday (unregistered)

    Error, error, everywhere, and not a drop to Drink.

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