• (cs)

    Re: extreme ZIP compression.

    At the end of the 1990s there was a brief fashion in the anti-anti-virus crowd for crafting ZIP files for email attachments that would be only a few K long, but expand to many GB of zeros, the idea being to attack the AV scanner that was looking at emails by exhausting its disk space.

    More sophisticated scanners simply implemented transparent on-the-fly expansion of the interesting parts, which for 16GB of zeros is effectively almost none of it. (You need to read enough to know that what remains isn't interesting: does it begin MZ? it's an executable - does it begin 0xD0, 0xCF? it's an Office D0Cument File - etc.)

  • MP79 (unregistered)

    seconded on the zip file. It's entirely possible to craft zips such that the algorithm will in theory extract things that can't exist. There's a 16Kb or so one knocking about that contains a txt file with a googolplex written in it. note that a googolplex has more zeroes in it than there are atoms in the universe. however I'm sure that apple will claim the next ipad will be able to display it due to it's new patented iFinity display.

  • Mole125 (unregistered)

    The last one appears to be an epson printer. It is badly written but it is telling you that you need to replace the Black ink cartridge with either a model 127 or 126. Or in other words replace it with a BK127 or a BK128. if the Cyan ink cartridge goes it displays [CY]127/126 (with a cyan coloured background for the CY.

  • (cs)

    scanned images are being sent to the special one?

  • Stephen Roughley (unregistered)

    TRWTF is mixing Java and PHP!

  • (cs)

    Awwww! I've seen those SOAP errors so many times that now that I don't get to see them I remember the old days from a month ago.

    Anyway! How does an exception thrown at the lowest level of a system reaches the end user is exceptional. Three WTFs in that single screen:

    1- No exception handling in the SOAP controllers or in the SOAP actions or in their DA implementation. 2- No exception handling in the PHP SOAP Client (that just feels soooooo dirty) 3- Bad SQL reaching a live system.

    Then they say unchecked exceptions are the greatest invention ever.

  • Someone (unregistered) in reply to Mole125
    Mole125:
    The last one appears to be an epson printer. It is badly written but it is telling you that you need to replace the Black ink cartridge with either a model 127 or 126. Or in other words replace it with a BK127 or a BK128. if the Cyan ink cartridge goes it displays [CY]127/126 (with a cyan coloured background for the CY.

    Hence, helpful.

  • Gawaine (unregistered)

    So Blue Cross will accept Middle English speaking doctors, as long as they aren't Hermaphrodites?

  • (cs)

    SOAP client? Must be for watching soap operas.

  • pure (unregistered)

    "Jon Wilson is a little bit suspicious about the price per liter."

    I think you'll find that as that is a british price tag, the price would be per litre.

  • Medi-Man (unregistered)

    Not suprising... the NPI (National Provider Index) is the federal government list of doctors offices, Emergency Rooms, Pharmacies, etc. Having worked with munging that DB I can attest that there's several portions that are either duplicates or empty space which compresses quite well.

    nulla - When an unexpected exception hits italian code that's a nulla.

  • Eric (unregistered)

    1,500 years? The Elamite language hasn't been spoken (or written) in over 2500 years.

  • The Fixer (unregistered) in reply to Stephen Roughley

    I actually use PHP and Java for SOAP web services in my work space.

    We work with a iSeries at work and have both a web page front end and a web service that can bypass the front end. Because of the janky EBCDIC encoding in the database (and core systems) we have to ship our hash calculations over to Java to verify that the hash is correct. This split architecture was not really my idea but because we needed the web services pronto, we got saddled with this abomination.

  • Bruce W (unregistered)

    Glad they have Esperanto covered!

  • Some Jerk (unregistered)

    What's with all of this bitching about SOAP when there is a screenshot from a JAVA APPLET!

  • (cs)

    According to Google Maps, Morena is a neighborhood in San Diego...

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to ekolis

    Morena is - in Spanish - brunette, dark skinned woman or any of the Muraenidae family species - Moray eels.

    So you may be sending it to either a Lady or a fish.

  • (cs)

    [Doctor]: What seems to the trouble Mr. Chaucer?

    [Patient]: Bifil that in that seson on a day, in southwerk at the tabard as I lay...

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to Eric
    Eric:
    1,500 years? The Elamite language hasn't been spoken (or written) in over 2500 years.
    Not sure if Egyptian (Ancient) would have that beat or not. Then again, their medical practices involved scooping dead people's brains out through their nose. Extremely well embalmed, though.
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to pure
    pure:
    "Jon Wilson is a little bit suspicious about the price per liter."

    I think you'll find that as that is a british price tag, the price would be per litre.

    Or, in this case, per litter.

  • (cs)

    I was nice of Erik to help his brother catch the soaps, no?

  • (cs)

    TRWTF is still using checks. I haven't seen one in at least 10 years.

  • Rodnas (unregistered)

    Hmmmm, I don't speak Middle Dutch and Flemish. Just regular Dutch. So basically, i am screwed.

  • (cs) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    Re: extreme ZIP compression.

    At the end of the 1990s there was a brief fashion in the anti-anti-virus crowd for crafting ZIP files for email attachments that would be only a few K long, but expand to many GB of zeros, the idea being to attack the AV scanner that was looking at emails by exhausting its disk space.

    More sophisticated scanners simply implemented transparent on-the-fly expansion of the interesting parts, which for 16GB of zeros is effectively almost none of it. (You need to read enough to know that what remains isn't interesting: does it begin MZ? it's an executable - does it begin 0xD0, 0xCF? it's an Office D0Cument File - etc.)

    Also used to be in fashion to put a file like that in a "hidden" area of your web or FTP site. Call it something like mailing_list.zip if you want to play with spammers, hot_pix.zip for everyone else.

    Don't know if it ever really fooled anyone.

  • (cs)

    Anyone know where I can purchase some Ziggo Soap? Sounds like exceptionally good stuff*

    *: Apologies for lame joke

  • (cs)
    1. Wonder if the hard drive is so hot BECAUSE it has soap on it?
    2. What loozer doesn't have enough drive space for a 6PB file anyway? err... ummm... other than me anyway.
    3. I wonder if the compression is designed to torn each byte into a soap structure?

    way too much blood in my alcohol system... so you all won't see much of me today.

  • Glenn Lasher (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic

    There was a talk at the HOPE conference a couple of months ago about crafting "exploding" archives, which get the unzipper caught in a loop of some sort. I didn't listen to the whole talk, but it could presumably result in a really big disc space calculation.

  • Hewlett Packard (unregistered)

    at $10027.78 per kg, that chocolate topping is almost expensive as injet ink. Almost.

  • (cs)

    I was totally disappointed with the interactive TV thing. I see SOAP, XML, and PHP; and even a hint of a possible SQL injection opportunity.

    But where's the AJAX, .NET, ASP and all those other goodies?

  • cscastle (unregistered)

    Has anyone else noticed that we've had a new article every weekday, posted early in the day, for the past three weeks? Sure has been nice. Thanks, Alex!

  • (cs) in reply to cscastle

    +1

  • (cs)

    So this is why you never drop the soap... to avoid an Uncaught Soap Exception.

  • studog (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    Re: extreme ZIP compression.

    At the end of the 1990s there was a brief fashion in the anti-anti-virus crowd for crafting ZIP files for email attachments that would be only a few K long, but expand to many GB of zeros, the idea being to attack the AV scanner that was looking at emails by exhausting its disk space.

    And at the beginning of the 1990s there was the fractal compression hoax. The program would "compress" your file to well less than 1% of it's original size. All it actually did was store the path to your original file; no compression of any kind occurred.

    When you "uncompress" it merely copies the file. So if you had a file bigger than your remaining free space, it would fail to uncompress. So you'd delete the original...

  • Zunerino (unregistered) in reply to Maurits
    Maurits:
    So this is why you never drop the soap... to avoid an Uncaught Soap Exception.
    That's not all you'll catch! Hiyo!
  • Crashed Internet (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    At the end of the 1990s there was a brief fashion in the anti-anti-virus crowd for crafting ZIP files for email attachments that would be only a few K long, but expand to many GB of zeros, the idea being to attack the AV scanner that was looking at emails by exhausting its disk space.

    More sophisticated scanners simply implemented transparent on-the-fly expansion of the interesting parts, which for 16GB of zeros is effectively almost none of it. (You need to read enough to know that what remains isn't interesting: does it begin MZ? it's an executable - does it begin 0xD0, 0xCF? it's an Office D0Cument File - etc.)

    Ah, I was bitten by something like that. In dial-up era, there was a certain zip file, and it was normal. The virus scanner looked it at, and stalled the computer for 10 seconds each time the download manager tried writing ~5KB. Sinc the computer used a software win-modem, it disconnected during that time.

  • the beholder (unregistered) in reply to @Deprecated
    @Deprecated:
    Anyone know where I can purchase some Ziggo Soap? Sounds like exceptionally good stuff*

    *: Apologies for lame joke

    I don't know where you can buy it. I just grab some from the SOAP server dispenser.

  • Unicorn #8157 (unregistered) in reply to cscastle
    cscastle:
    Has anyone else noticed that we've had a new article every weekday, posted early in the day, for the past three weeks? Sure has been nice. Thanks, Alex!
    We regret to inform you that Alex hasn't been feeling well for the last week so the legion of unicorns has been filling in. Early this morning he passed away in his sleep though we have just now been informed of this. We will be convening over the weekend to decide whether to continue with TDWTF or to just wrap it up.

    Please pray for Alex and his family in these trying times.

  • (cs) in reply to Unicorn #8157

    It would take too long for your hard disk to cook my beef roast. An oven may be more economically efficient.

  • Ozz (unregistered)

    Gotta love SpinRite. Older Dell laptops were notorious for givving the overheat error, though not usually quite that hot.

  • (cs)

    That hard drive probably just needs a can of raid...

  • just me (unregistered) in reply to Crashed Internet
    Crashed Internet:
    Steve The Cynic:
    At the end of the 1990s there was a brief fashion in the anti-anti-virus crowd for crafting ZIP files for email attachments that would be only a few K long, but expand to many GB of zeros, the idea being to attack the AV scanner that was looking at emails by exhausting its disk space.

    More sophisticated scanners simply implemented transparent on-the-fly expansion of the interesting parts, which for 16GB of zeros is effectively almost none of it. (You need to read enough to know that what remains isn't interesting: does it begin MZ? it's an executable - does it begin 0xD0, 0xCF? it's an Office D0Cument File - etc.)

    Ah, I was bitten by something like that. In dial-up era, there was a certain zip file, and it was normal. The virus scanner looked it at, and stalled the computer for 10 seconds each time the download manager tried writing ~5KB. Sinc the computer used a software win-modem, it disconnected during that time.

    A nice example of this is the zip file quine, which contains itself... perfect to put your virus scanner into an infinite loop!

    BTW, I can understand that TV; catching soap is quite difficult, especially when it's wet.

  • Techpaul (unregistered) in reply to Gawaine
    Gawaine:
    So Blue Cross will accept Middle English speaking doctors, as long as they aren't Hermaphrodites?

    let alone I want to see a doctor who was a man but is now a woman...

    I also notice We have Dutch middle and Dutch-Flemish, they must have missed levels of Dutch out there...

  • Spewin Coffee (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that Chris Reid is really a woman named Elizabeth Smith.

  • Cary (unregistered)

    Havinge been a customer of United, myself did finde them less than well, for bleed me they would not, though had I the brain-fever withall and a clear imbalance of humours.

    Bonus: the goblin called Captcha did ask me to scribe the word "augue".

  • Dr. Mugu (unregistered)
    "Every time I deposit a check via the web to my bank, the java applet says it is sending the scan to Morena," reports Chris Reid, "I hope she works for the bank."
    Keep thinking that.
  • Dan Tastik (unregistered)

    I am not sure here - is it a WTF because they use Hibernate in the telly, or because Hibernate exists?

  • (cs)

    Sorry, but the WTF in that last one is in the submitter. And Mark Bowytz for publishing it. It says you need to replace one or more ink cartridges. Then it gives you a list with a header of Ink Cartridges with the black ink cartridge being listed. It even gives you the model number of the ink cartridge.

  • Ryan (unregistered)

    "Jon Wilson is a little bit suspicious about the price per liter."

    Maybe they meant price per litter?

  • (cs) in reply to campkev
    campkev:
    Sorry, but the WTF in that last one is in the submitter. And Mark Bowytz for publishing it. It says you need to replace one or more ink cartridges. Then it gives you a list with a header of Ink Cartridges with the black ink cartridge being listed. It even gives you the model number of the ink cartridge.

    The way I interpreted it is that the ink cartridge could not be detected properly. Also, I don't know what you're calling a model number. Looks like a fraction 127/126. It could mean a few things, there are either two cartridges, but it could also mean ink level, in which we have over 100%

  • Meneth (unregistered)

    I know about this one guy who speaks Ancient Egyptian...

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