The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Matt Westwood · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

GFK:
Severity One:
@Deprecated:
Child of the '20s:
Doesn't "XXX" stand for "whiskey?"
It stands for Amsterdam.
Some people might argue that there's not much of a difference between Amsterdam and what you'd associate with 'XXX'. Ever been to amsterdam.com? (Not safe for work last time I checked.)
It's a seriously beautiful and cool place to live, though.

Some people might argue that there's not much of a difference between Amsterdam and any other city in the world on this matter, apart from the presentation.

Well thst's as maybe, but in Amsterdam you can walk into a coffee-shop or pub and buy cannabis, stroll into a bookshop and buy one-handed reading material to whatever taste you desire, and on the way back to the hotel you can legally partake of any of a number of highly proficient whores. There are not too many cities in the world which offer a person that degree of freedom.

Oh, and in the winter you can often skate on the canals, and at other times of year you can ride on the canal boats, and any time you can visit some breathtaking museums and experience some fascinating campanology.

Severity One · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

GFK:
Severity One:
Some people might argue that there's not much of a difference between Amsterdam and what you'd associate with 'XXX'. Ever been to amsterdam.com? (Not safe for work last time I checked.)
It's a seriously beautiful and cool place to live, though.
Some people might argue that there's not much of a difference between Amsterdam and any other city in the world on this matter, apart from the presentation.

So what are we talking about here? The smut, or that Amsterdam is an incredibly cool place?

In my experience, (capital) cities are pretty much the same the world (or at least, Europe) over: you get some broad boulevards, some statues, some big monuments. One might have an Eiffel Tower and another might have a Colosseum, but it's more or less the same. Even Valletta (capital of Malta), which has barely 8000 inhabitants, has an astonishing number of churches and palaces, given its small size and the extensive damage during WW2.

Amsterdam, however, doesn't have an awful lot of palaces, let alone statues of famous people. What it does have, though, is a practically intact 17th century centre, and whilst there are extravagant modern buildings, they're all outside the historic centre and the early 20th century area (architecturally important, but often overlooked).

The centre is a collection of not-so-very-big, highly individualistic houses bordering canals, that give it more a look of a large village than a capital city. If you'd have to compare to something, that would probably be Florence, although the centre of Florence is about a century older. Venice has even more canals than Amsterdam, but it also looks rather poorly maintained, and it's excessively expensive.

DaveK · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

Medezark:
PG4:
Oh, I forgot, Exchange, you can't put 3 lines in your sendmail.cf that will check a dynamic black hole list.

Umm, no you can't do it in sendmail.cf, but you can do it in message delivery options. In fact you can set up blacklists, whitelists, set up different return codes and rejections criteria, exceptions . . . .

Also, you don't have to dedicate years of your life to the study of the million tons of insane m4 gibberish that constitutes sendmail.cf files. Life is too short and precious to waste on that shit.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

hoodaticus:
Ken B.:
hoodaticus:
If you want something done right, lock your boss in the tape safe before you do it yourself.
What? And have his magnetic "health bracelet" wipe out your backups?
True... all the more reason to lose the safe keys, bust a water pipe on that floor, and let time and gravity do the rest.

Before or after you've locked the boss in there?

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

What sort of virus scanner quarantine files but doesn't change the extension? Even crappy McAfee does that.

Calling BS. Just push the reset button and start things up.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

nomdeplume:
PG4:
The real WTF is even scanning for stuff in email messages.
What the user doesn't have a virus scanning program on is system?
So you like to actually receive and have to manually delete emails with viruses attached? And you like having to allocate space on the email server and in your backups to store all these useless emails that nobody will actually ever read?

We scan for viruses in emails for the same reason we scan for spam: it's a waste of time to receive them. And, viruses are pretty low-hanging fruit in this regard as the majority can be efficiently detected with very low overheads and almost no chance of a false positive. The "cost" of doing this is tiny compared to the time it saves.

Additionally, it's quite possible to use a different virus scanner for your email than you install on desktops, which does provide some measure of "defense in depth". If one vendor misses the virus, another might not.

Read the rest of what I said. The email never gets in, the connection gets dropped as soon as sendmail checks that the IP address they are connecting from is on the dynamic block list. No disk space used, no backups, no processing time.

I've seen the two different scanners config used. I've also seen a virus get past both of them when a simple, "Hey the IP address doesn't reverse resolve" check in sendmail would have dropped it.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

tharpa:
1) What is the plural of virus?

According to mainstream news media, "hacker."

2) Explain.

Well, you see, Transformers has had inconsistent characterization right from the start, even looking solely at the original 80s cartoons and comic books. Shockwave is Megatron's loyal right-hand bot or his major rival for leadership. Sometimes Optimus Prime will effectively execute Silverbolt for failing a mission, other times he'll commit suicide over having harmed NPCs in a video game. Either Fortress Maximus is a guy with a remote-controlled drone named Cerebros, or Cerebros is a guy with a giant mech named Fortress Maximus. Portrayals have only grown even more divergent in the years since--one version of Starscream was a genuinely nice guy who joined up with the Autobots for a while and hung out with some human kids, and at one point Inferno was a psychopath who turned into an ant. So claiming that the Michael Bay movies get the characters wrong is more of a personal opinion than an objective complaint.

Oh, wait, you meant explain the "plural of virus" thing.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

tharpa:
1) What is the plural of virus? 2) Explain.

In Latin? Virus. In English? Virus or viruses.

Virus is only ever declined in the singular in Latin. In English it's an adopted word, so you can apply English rules or continue using the Latin ones, it's up to you. Just get it right, whichever one you choose.

You can have an argument over whether this means you can use the -en pluralization suffix instead, if you want. I would suggest no, because modern English doesn't decline words that way.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

drusi:
Well, you see, Transformers has had inconsistent characterization right from the start, even looking solely at the original 80s cartoons and comic books. Shockwave is Megatron's loyal right-hand bot or his major rival for leadership. Sometimes Optimus Prime will effectively execute Silverbolt for failing a mission, other times he'll commit suicide over having harmed NPCs in a video game. Either Fortress Maximus is a guy with a remote-controlled drone named Cerebros, or Cerebros is a guy with a giant mech named Fortress Maximus. Portrayals have only grown even more divergent in the years since--one version of Starscream was a genuinely nice guy who joined up with the Autobots for a while and hung out with some human kids, and at one point Inferno was a psychopath who turned into an ant. So claiming that the Michael Bay movies get the characters wrong is more of a personal opinion than an objective complaint.

TRWTF will always be Bayformers

operagost · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

snoofle:
So he accidentally attempted to launch 10,000 programs/viruses/whatever.
Don't recent versions of windows figure out that you probably didn't do it on purpose and ask if that's what you really want to do before blindly doing it?

I know it does for document types, but to be honest I never tried it for programs.

operagost · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

tharpa:
1) What is the plural of virus? 2) Explain.

1. Viren. 2. I'm pretty sure it's German.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

Let me lay some statistics down on ye:

The amount and degree of trolling has a direct correlation with the tardiness which articles are posted in.

C'mon Alex, get with the program.

ContraCorners · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

Meet your Math:
Let me lay some statistics down on ye:
The amount and degree of trolling has a direct correlation with the tardiness which articles are posted in.

C'mon Alex, get with the program.

Don't statistics usually involve numbers?

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

boog:
Melvis:
The Enterpriser:
What a moran.
What's a moran?
According to Wiktionary, it's an unmarried Maasai or Samburu warrior, apparently.

FAIL. Know your meme.

No, akismet, this is not spam.

C-Octothorpe · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

ContraCorners:
Meet your Math:
Let me lay some statistics down on ye:
The amount and degree of trolling has a direct correlation with the tardiness which articles are posted in.

C'mon Alex, get with the program.
Don't statistics usually involve numbers?

Did you know that 90% of statistics are 80% accurate 62% of the time (taking into account the pulling numbers out of arse error variance of course)? Well, now you know...

C-Octothorpe · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

mike:
boog:
Melvis:
The Enterpriser:
What a moran.
What's a moran?
According to Wiktionary, it's an unmarried Maasai or Samburu warrior, apparently.
FAIL. Know your meme.
No, akismet, this is not spam.

Yes, yes it is spam...

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

ContraCorners:
Meet your Math:
Let me lay some statistics down on ye:
The amount and degree of trolling has a direct correlation with the tardiness which articles are posted in.

C'mon Alex, get with the program.
Don't statistics usually involve numbers?

No, just lines and graphs.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

I once worked with someone who insisted that the plural of status was statii. I winced every time she said it.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

Economics Major:
ContraCorners:
Meet your Math:
Let me lay some statistics down on ye:
The amount and degree of trolling has a direct correlation with the tardiness which articles are posted in.

C'mon Alex, get with the program.
Don't statistics usually involve numbers?
No, just lines and graphs.

I wish all you ivory tower math-wannabes would get off your high horses. Lines and graphs ARE numbers! Do you even know what graphs mean? It means to illustrate a number. Statistics use numbers. Now STFU.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

J.:
He didn't open the messages, he opened the quarantined attachments.

And he didn't immediately pull the plug, he tried to com-fu all the executing processes out of the system, taking up an entire day.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

drusi:
tharpa:
1) What is the plural of virus?

According to mainstream news media, "hacker."

2) Explain.

Well, you see, Transformers has had inconsistent characterization right from the start, even looking solely at the original 80s cartoons and comic books. Shockwave is Megatron's loyal right-hand bot or his major rival for leadership. Sometimes Optimus Prime will effectively execute Silverbolt for failing a mission, other times he'll commit suicide over having harmed NPCs in a video game. Either Fortress Maximus is a guy with a remote-controlled drone named Cerebros, or Cerebros is a guy with a giant mech named Fortress Maximus. Portrayals have only grown even more divergent in the years since--one version of Starscream was a genuinely nice guy who joined up with the Autobots for a while and hung out with some human kids, and at one point Inferno was a psychopath who turned into an ant. So claiming that the Michael Bay movies get the characters wrong is more of a personal opinion than an objective complaint.

Oh, wait, you meant explain the "plural of virus" thing.

If I could digg this, I would.

2011-07-29 Reply Admin

At least it wasn't actually pornography. That might have been worse.

C-Octothorpe · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

Tripp:
At least it wasn't actually pornography. That might have been worse.

Please explain...

PedanticCurmudgeon · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

Meet your Math:
Let me lay some statistics down on ye:
The amount and degree of trolling has a direct correlation with the tardiness which articles are posted in.

C'mon Alex, get with the program.

I disagree. The trolling usually starts after the mandatory frist post. So new articles just shift the trolling from one thread to another.

boog · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

mike:
boog:
Melvis:
The Enterpriser:
What a moran.
What's a moran?
According to Wiktionary, it's an unmarried Maasai or Samburu warrior, apparently.
FAIL. Know your meme.

Clearly it didn't occur to you that my disregard for the meme might be deliberate. Without knowing my intentions, how can you conclusively know if I failed?

DaveK · 2011-07-29 Reply Admin

operagost:
snoofle:
So he accidentally attempted to launch 10,000 programs/viruses/whatever.
Don't recent versions of windows figure out that you probably didn't do it on purpose and ask if that's what you really want to do before blindly doing it?
I know it does for document types, but to be honest I never tried it for programs.

So, just to cut through all the bullshit and blind assertions and random guesses, I actually *tried* it.

admin@ubik /tmp/tdwtf $ cat test.c int main (int argc, const char **argv) { return 0; }
admin@ubik /tmp/tdwtf $ gcc -o test.exe test.c

admin@ubik /tmp/tdwtf $ for (( x = 0; x < 10000; x++ )) ; do echo $x ; cp test.exe test$x.exe ; done

0 1 2 [ . . . ] 9998 9999

admin@ubik /tmp/tdwtf $ rm test.c

admin@ubik /tmp/tdwtf $ cmd /c start .

Followed by pressing Ctrl+A then enter. It turns out that Win2k doesn't warn but XpSp2 does.

BTW, the best way to stop it once it gets started is to kill explorer.exe in task manager.

2011-07-30 Reply Admin

Made-up story imo. Windows asks you if you want to perform operations on large numbers of files, did the poor lad twit twice and hit enter twice?

oheso · 2011-07-30 Reply Admin

PG4:
The real WTF is even scanning for stuff in email messages.

Go on, then. Set up a mail server with a few hundred users and don't scan the mail. In either direction.

See how long it takes before you get your server/domain added to a real-time blacklist.

Arancaytar · 2011-07-30 Reply Admin

bottle-tanned

The return of Rod?!

2011-07-30 Reply Admin

The Enterpriser:
I guess he was running a special version of windows which didn't say "are you sure you want to run all 10,000 of these files at the same time".
Also, about that time where he was working for 6 companies at once.. at the same time.. sounds like someone might not have been filling in their time sheet correctly.

What a moran.

Wanna know how I know you're a noob at Windows?

(Hint: That question didn't appear until Vista and Server 2008.)

Also, you have no idea how legal and contract billing works if you think you can't work for several companies at the same time (one on-site, one calling with an emergency, and filling out paperwork for another one), and still get paid. As long as you don't abuse it too badly.

As for everyone else, the disk-thrashing and memory overflow of doing this far outweighs any possible embarrassment at the contents of the picture/executable. Done it more than once on my home and work PCs, when they were XP. Usually you can either walk away from an hour, or just pull the plug and start all over.

2011-07-30 Reply Admin

PG4:
Read the rest of what I said. The email never gets in, the connection gets dropped as soon as sendmail checks that the IP address they are connecting from is on the dynamic block list. No disk space used, no backups, no processing time.
I've seen the two different scanners config used. I've also seen a virus get past both of them when a simple, "Hey the IP address doesn't reverse resolve" check in sendmail would have dropped it.

Good job ignoring the other replies to your screed, buddy, but you're about 8 years out of date. Exchange has supported RBLs since 2003. I can truthfully say that in ten years I've yet to find one mail server across any platform that makes simple tasks simple without making complicated tasks painful, so I'm no Windows bigot.

Matt Westwood:
Well thst's as maybe, but in Amsterdam you can walk into a coffee-shop or pub and buy cannabis, stroll into a bookshop and buy one-handed reading material to whatever taste you desire, and on the way back to the hotel you can legally partake of any of a number of highly proficient whores. There are not too many cities in the world which offer a person that degree of freedom.
Oh, and in the winter you can often skate on the canals, and at other times of year you can ride on the canal boats, and any time you can visit some breathtaking museums and experience some fascinating campanology.

That's on its way out, sadly. Since 2008 they've been shutting down brothels and cannabis cafes, and in May announced that by the end of the year, tourists will be banned from the remaining ones. Residents will have to show proof of citizenship to get in.

2011-07-31 Reply Admin

Anonymous Coward:
So I'm confused here. He selected all the emails in the quarantine folder, which had infected attachments, then accidentally opened the messages. Check. I'm just missing the part where this is necessarily a bad thing, i.e. his computer becomes infected or something like that.
How does this lead to running the infected attachments? Is his email software so insecure that it a) opens attachments upon message reading, or b) shows remote images and scripts in html messages even when they're in the specific quarantine folder?

Do this in Gmail, Thunderbird, Yahoo mail, many university webmail interfaces, etc, even on just your inbox, and all you see is text, a list of links to download the attachments, and a button to show remote content. (unless you've whitelisted the sender)

presumably he opened the quarantine folder in a file manager window

2011-07-31 Reply Admin

2. Yes, "virus" comes from the Latin word "virus". But the Latin word means "rod", not "a tiny organism". So English "virus" != Latin "virus", so the rules of Latin grammar don't apply here.

Latin virus means poison. Clearly, they didn't apply enough stimulus to you in school to know what a rod is.

nomdeplume · 2011-08-01 Reply Admin

PG4:
nomdeplume:
PG4:
The real WTF is even scanning for stuff in email messages.
So you like to actually receive and have to manually delete emails with viruses attached? And you like having to allocate space on the email server and in your backups to store all these useless emails that nobody will actually ever read?
Read the rest of what I said. The email never gets in, the connection gets dropped as soon as sendmail checks that the IP address they are connecting from is on the dynamic block list. No disk space used, no backups, no processing time.

I did read the read of your post, but since I live in the real world where RBLs don't block 100% of viruses, I disregarded it as being irrelevant. Unless of course you're willing to block legitimate mail as well - which you appear to be - but again, that's a different world to the one I inhabit.

I've seen the two different scanners config used. I've also seen a virus get past both of them when a simple, "Hey the IP address doesn't reverse resolve" check in sendmail would have dropped it.

As well as a lot of legitimate mail. I've tried doing the SMTP-protocol-nazi thing, and it works fine for personal mail servers, but for ones where you can't actually make up arbitrary rules about who's allowed to talk to your server, it's a no-go.

nomdeplume · 2011-08-01 Reply Admin

C-Octothorpe:
Tripp:
At least it wasn't actually pornography. That might have been worse.
Please explain...

Well if it had been pornography, then he would've been stuck in a discussion with his boss about his boss's favourite types of porn, where he gets it from, what he likes to do as he views it, etc. Maybe he'd even get an invite to come over to his boss's place at watch porn with him. Awkward!

2011-08-01 Reply Admin

brazzy:
AC:
So, just to get this straight: There was a virus scanner that had all of the email-found viruses quarantined, but not a virus scanner that checked file system access?
Read again. It *did* check file system access. For 10k files at the same time. Presumably leading to a a few hours of disk thrashing.

Couldn't he, I don't know, hit the power button maybe? Restarting the server would have taken 5 minutes.

GFK · 2011-08-01 Reply Admin

Severity One:
GFK:
Severity One:
Some people might argue that there's not much of a difference between Amsterdam and what you'd associate with 'XXX'. Ever been to amsterdam.com? (Not safe for work last time I checked.)
It's a seriously beautiful and cool place to live, though.
Some people might argue that there's not much of a difference between Amsterdam and any other city in the world on this matter, apart from the presentation.
So what are we talking about here? The smut, or that Amsterdam is an incredibly cool place?

In my experience, (capital) cities are pretty much the same the world (or at least, Europe) over: you get some broad boulevards, some statues, some big monuments. One might have an Eiffel Tower and another might have a Colosseum, but it's more or less the same. Even Valletta (capital of Malta), which has barely 8000 inhabitants, has an astonishing number of churches and palaces, given its small size and the extensive damage during WW2.

Amsterdam, however, doesn't have an awful lot of palaces, let alone statues of famous people. What it does have, though, is a practically intact 17th century centre, and whilst there are extravagant modern buildings, they're all outside the historic centre and the early 20th century area (architecturally important, but often overlooked).

The centre is a collection of not-so-very-big, highly individualistic houses bordering canals, that give it more a look of a large village than a capital city. If you'd have to compare to something, that would probably be Florence, although the centre of Florence is about a century older. Venice has even more canals than Amsterdam, but it also looks rather poorly maintained, and it's excessively expensive.

I agree, Amsterdam is an amazing city for many reasons. I was just pointing out that paid sex can be found everywhere in the world, with just the presentation changing. I hope the 'live and let live' of this country never dies, but I'm getting old, and tired about hearing "in Dam you can get baked and have paid sex with hot chicks, and it's all legal, hurray for Freedom". I 'd like to see more people share this comprehension of what freedom is about things they don't do (nor fantasize about doing) or agree with for their personal lifestyle.

Something like "I understand that wether or not a specific person can raise children is really not my (or the government's) business to decide, and even less based on sexual preferences when on the other hand douches have the right to raise as many as they want".

2011-08-01 Reply Admin

foxyshadis:
Matt Westwood:
Well thst's as maybe, but in Amsterdam you can walk into a coffee-shop or pub and buy cannabis, stroll into a bookshop and buy one-handed reading material to whatever taste you desire, and on the way back to the hotel you can legally partake of any of a number of highly proficient whores. There are not too many cities in the world which offer a person that degree of freedom.
Oh, and in the winter you can often skate on the canals, and at other times of year you can ride on the canal boats, and any time you can visit some breathtaking museums and experience some fascinating campanology.
That's on its way out, sadly. Since 2008 they've been shutting down brothels and cannabis cafes, and in May announced that by the end of the year, tourists will be banned from the remaining ones. Residents will have to show proof of citizenship to get in.

What a shame. The political position of the whole world is moving to the right, away from the concept of individual freedom and responsibility. More and more people seem to believe that the "general public" can not be trusted. This, in my opinion, is an unwelcome move.

No doubt the pendulum will swing the other way, but if the politics of paranoia is allowed to continue to grow, it won't be until after a seriously nasty war.

See you on the other side.

redundantman · 2011-08-01 Reply Admin

Came here for the inevitable goatse reference. Leaving relieved.

2011-08-01 Reply Admin

saltimoco:
andres:
Even better "sudo rm -rf . /" vs "sudo rm -rf ./"... yeah that happen to me once. The server was never the same again.
Or a script that includes that (or something similar) that suddenly starts sayinf:
"Command not found" "Command not found" "Command not found" "Command not found" "Command not found" "Command not found" "Command not found" "Command not found" "Command not found"

This reminds the old dos, i always erase my f..ing commmand.com by accident. Comspec not found!

2011-08-01 Reply Admin

Don L:
All virus scanners I've seen renames files placed in quarantine (e.g. adding .vir to the file names) if they're accessible through the file system. Furthermore some of them might also prevent execution through NTFS deny permissions.
Now, if the point is that he was executing the 10k virus exes, so what? The scanner could already detect those, else they wouldn't be quarantined.

And if the point is "wow, 10k files executed simultaneously bogs the server down", I'd say "so what? That shouldn't take long. If it actually made the server perform bad for more than a few minutes, the customer has other, much worse problems....

Something's wrong here.

TRWTF is the performance of NTFS, especially in folders with 30k+ files...

Worse but it works, better than receive "Too many arguments" from command line, yes i know i can use "for" in these cases.

2011-08-02 Reply Admin

+1 for embedding Cornify on the "CTRL-A" text! LOL

2011-08-03 Reply Admin

The plural of virus is...

Viruses!

In Latin, virus is an uncountable noun.

Saying 'viri' as if it were a third declension noun would be just like saying 'a bucket of vomits'. Coincidentally, in Latin, virus was used like "revolting substance".

Since we use virus to mean something entirely different in a medical and computing sense, we make up an Anglicized plural: Viruses.

Lol, the captcha for this post was "validus" and we're talking about Latin.

2011-08-11 Reply Admin

Actually, it could have been meant that way. To queue something means to place it in a line, such as queueing print jobs. In other words, "queue comments" might have been a sarcastic way to say "line up the Linux comments right after this one".

I'm not saying the author intended it (only they know for sure), but just because you see it as incorrect doesn't mean they're necessarily failing at word play.

2016-09-02 Reply Admin

Wow, I was the one who submitted this story to DWTF, many years ago. I didn't realize it was published until today because I submitted anonymously and I only browse casually. . Anyways a few clarifications for the peanut gallery. This was 1999, no, the virus software didn't rename the files in the vault, no, windows NT didn't prompt you before executing a file on clicking enter, and for the person who called me a "Moran" ( learn how to spell) but no I didn't have an IT person, I was the IT person. I was a 3rd party, self employed, IT administrator who took care of several local businesses, I helped them make IT decisions, PM'd their systems, trained their people etc.. But none of them were large enough to really need a full time person so in a typical week I'd work maybe 10 hours and got paid whether I worked or not so I was making a very nice full time wage and rarely worked a full time week. I was very young and very green, this article was certainly not the worst of my mistakes at that time, it was just the most DTWF worthy.

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2021-12-16

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The Plural of Virus is not Virii

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