The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

Ben:
damnum:
CAN YOU ALL JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY WITH YOUR COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM AND FREE MARKED AND TAXES BULLSHIT? THIS IS A CODING SITE. THANK YOU.

Isn't it interesting how we get a liberal point of view shoved down our throats all day long on TV entertainment shows, talk shows, 'mainstream' news media, at the office-- and yes, even on "coding sites"-- but as soon as somebody voices an opposing view, the side of "diversity" is the first to shout it down.

Isn't it interesting that, depending on your point of view and the ideas you agree with, you will always see the opposing view as the one that is being "shoved down your throat"?

Hooray for dialogue!!

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

jay:
RE password length: I don't see the WTF here. Surely there must be SOME limit on password length for programming practicality, storage considerations, etc. Is there really a need to allow for passwords to be 10,000 characters long? If their limit is, say, 3 characters, okay, that's a little crazy. But I would think that 20 or so would be plenty.

If the password is stored as a hash then no matter how many characters they enter for a password it still ends up being about 20 characters or so for the hash. So having a length less than what a string variable can hold is really a security reducing decision these days.

Having a max length implies that they are either a) storing the password in plain text or b) storing it using 2 way encryption, meaning that hackers just need to decrypt one password in the stolen database to get them all.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

"password too long" means they are probably storing it in plaintext and that you shouldn't use a good one anyway.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

darkmattar:
Yea, your gun is what stops the government from killing you. Are gun people truly that delusional?

Sure. The Newtown shooter wasn't killed by the government.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

jay:
PseudoBovine:
Combine all the money you'd pay to access private roads,

Actually I strongly suspect I'd pay zero in direct costs. The transaction cost to charge people a toll every time they got on a road would be very high, so that's an unlikely market plan. No, more likely if our roads were all privately run, the people who ran them would make their money by selling advertising space for billboards.

I once read that when radio was first invented, people said that of course this would have to be run by the government because there would be no practical way to charge people to listen to the radio, as anyone who could buy or build a radio could listen in and how would you know? But then the problem was solved by charging advertisers rather than listeners.

So you'd pay for the roads indirectly via the price of the products advertised (plus a profit margin for their producers, plus one for the advertisers plus one for the road owners). How is this better than direct payment (apart from the inconvenience of many micro payments, I'll give you that)?

By the way, I find it remarkable that capitalists on the one hand often promote advertising in many forms (like you do here), while on the other hand their whole theory is based on the idea of perfectly rational consumers. When advertising's puspose is to sway customers's opinions, i.e. to make them make less rational choices, how do you reconciliate this discrepancy?

In real life, if I buy a gallon of milk from Bob's Grocery Store I will presumably not discover until I'm sick that it is, in fact, contaminated. And then -- and here's the beauty of capitalism -- I don't buy from that grocery store any more or any other store since I'm dying.

FTFY. Sure, water and chalk was a silly example, but many dangers are not readily apparent and much too expensive to test for each customer by themselves.

Sure, you're gonna say, they'll find (or create) a privately run testing company that will test their food. But of course, this company is never susceptible to corruption because it's not the government, right?

Monopolies only exist when the government passes laws to keep out competition. For example, the only reason why I have to buy my electricity from one specified power company is because the government has declared it illegal for anyone else to sell electricity in my area.

BTW, contrary to what you may think, I don't support everything the government does. I strongly dislike artificial monopolies - and this includes patents.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

Buggz:
foo:
CommenFrist has expired.
Funny thing is, "frist" means deadline in norwegian.

That's not just Norwegian. It means the same in other Scandinavian languages.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

C-Derb:
Ben:
damnum:
CAN YOU ALL JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY WITH YOUR COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM AND FREE MARKED AND TAXES BULLSHIT? THIS IS A CODING SITE. THANK YOU.

Isn't it interesting how we get a liberal point of view shoved down our throats all day long on TV entertainment shows, talk shows, 'mainstream' news media, at the office-- and yes, even on "coding sites"-- but as soon as somebody voices an opposing view, the side of "diversity" is the first to shout it down.
Isn't it interesting that, depending on your point of view and the ideas you agree with, you will always see the opposing view as the one that is being "shoved down your throat"?

Hooray for dialogue!!

It's also interesting how he felt his side was being shouted down, when the OS (original shouter) targeted both sides the same. Selective reading, right? Just like with TV (or politics), everyone who's not 100% on his is is the enemy. OTOH, please keep doing that. Kick out the moderates in the Republican primaries and when you can't, put them down during the general campaign. It worked well this year, don't stop.

(FWIW, as far as I understood the OS just wanted to get rid of politics at all and return to this site's usual content like "TRWTF is $LANGUAGE" and "Fixed the WTF code: $EVEN_MORE_BROKEN_EXAMPLE". And trolls, of course.)

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

Kasper:
Buggz:
foo:
CommenFrist has expired.
Funny thing is, "frist" means deadline in norwegian.
That's not just Norwegian. It means the same in other Scandinavian languages.

That's not just Scandinavian languages. It means the same in German.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

jay:
In real life, if I buy a gallon of milk from Bob's Grocery Store I will presumably discover the first time I try to drink it that it is, in fact, chalk and water. And then -- and here's the beauty of capitalism -- I don't buy from that grocery store any more. I go somewhere else that provides a decent product.

Sadly, this only works if there is actually at least one place that does provide a decent product. (Right now, for instance, I have my choice of ISPs: either Verizon, which doesn't always work, doesn't care about you as a customer and wishes you would screw off already but keep paying them, and Charter, which costs a little more, but otherwise is basically the same. You want an ISP that cares if you're having a problem? Too bad, those don't exist anymore, Verizon and Charter pushed them all out.)

The "your password is too long" thing is totally a wtf, but a much larger one than just that one site being dumb. I've seen loads of sites with arbitrary length restrictions on passwords, it always bugs the crap out of me. Why do people do that? It's pretty common.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

darkmattar:
Ozz:
Meep:
Of course we're not proper communists. If we were true communists, unlike Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin who didn't butcher quite enough people to make it actually work, then we'd all be in a workers' paradise.
They can't butcher the people due to the 2nd Amendment. Now, if only they could figure out a way to ban guns...
Yea, your gun is what stops the government from killing you. Are gun people truly that delusional?

So, I've served in Iraq in a regular unit, and served in an opposing forces unit to train regular units, so I'm familiar with both insurgent tactics and counter-insurgent tactics.

Any army that tried to occupy the US, to include the US Army, would lose decisively. And yes, it would be the gun nuts hiding in the woods picking off soldiers a few at a time, classic, bloody asymmetric warfare by attrition, that would do it. It took us ten years and thousands of casualties to bring Iraq and Afghanistan to an unclear resolution, and those assholes can hardly shoot straight.

And it's not like being meaner would have made any difference, as the Soviets were utterly ruthless against Afghanistan and were routed even more decisively. We have only been successful in counter insurgency because we finally figured out how to get the local population on our side. So, no, the gun folks are absolutely right, and it appears you simply haven't been paying attention to the news for the past ten years.

ekolis · 2012-12-21 Reply Admin

You don't want to overload the password field with a buffer overrun, do you?

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

C-Derb:
Ben:
damnum:
CAN YOU ALL JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY WITH YOUR COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM AND FREE MARKED AND TAXES BULLSHIT? THIS IS A CODING SITE. THANK YOU.

Isn't it interesting how we get a liberal point of view shoved down our throats all day long on TV entertainment shows, talk shows, 'mainstream' news media, at the office-- and yes, even on "coding sites"-- but as soon as somebody voices an opposing view, the side of "diversity" is the first to shout it down.
Isn't it interesting that, depending on your point of view and the ideas you agree with, you will always see the opposing view as the one that is being "shoved down your throat"?

It seems a bit Freudian. The thing with the media, though, is not that they force their views on anyone, but precisely the opposite. If anything, what's irritating about lefties is the pretense of being objective or scientific. There's nothing wrong with being a liberal, just put all your damned cards on the table instead of pretending that you have no agenda.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

neminem:
jay:
In real life, if I buy a gallon of milk from Bob's Grocery Store I will presumably discover the first time I try to drink it that it is, in fact, chalk and water. And then -- and here's the beauty of capitalism -- I don't buy from that grocery store any more. I go somewhere else that provides a decent product.

Sadly, this only works if there is actually at least one place that does provide a decent product. (Right now, for instance, I have my choice of ISPs: either Verizon, which doesn't always work, doesn't care about you as a customer and wishes you would screw off already but keep paying them, and Charter, which costs a little more, but otherwise is basically the same. You want an ISP that cares if you're having a problem? Too bad, those don't exist anymore, Verizon and Charter pushed them all out.)

But economics isn't about a system that works. There is no such thing!

Economics is the science of scarcity, that is, it observes how we allocate resources when there are not enough resources to meet demands. And there never are, that's a given.

The market isn't failing because you can't find a product that you want at the price you want. There is no system that can guarantee that you always will. What a market tends to do is to restructure itself in such a way that shortages are minimized and growth is maximized, but that takes time and pain.

The problem with demanding that the government come in and fix things is that the political system has little if any information as to what is important and what is really broken. People always think that corporations are buying off senators and whatnot, but in fact most corporate handouts and other perverse incentives are wildly popular because people simply have no clue what they're voting for.

Zecc · 2012-12-21 Reply Admin

jay:
RE password length: I don't see the WTF here. Surely there must be SOME limit on password length for programming practicality, storage considerations, etc. Is there really a need to allow for passwords to be 10,000 characters long? If their limit is, say, 3 characters, okay, that's a little crazy. But I would think that 20 or so would be plenty.

NO, I should totally be able to submit a 144,14 Petabyte password!!

Seriously though, while 20 characters should be enough for 99.9% of the users, it still is a rather small limit. Why can't I use, say, 'It was the best Of times, it was the Worst of times' as my password? Even 'correct horse battery staple' is 39 characters long.

But most importantly, like people have mentioned already, the most probable cause of them imposing a hard limit on password length is they're doing it wrong.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

Jack:
eVil:
Capitalist:
...this communist government...
For very small values of communist, right?
At combined tax rates approaching 50% (higher for some) we're halfway there. What are you spenders going to do when taxes exceed 100%? No one will be able to afford to work!

Here's one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/business/at-102-his-tax-rate-takes-the-cake-common-sense.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

That's just when the government obeys its laws. When the government violates its laws, things get worse.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

Hantas:
So, how much is 21,58,391?

In the US it's 2,158,391. In China or Japan traditionally it was 215万8391 (or 二五万八三九一 or 二百十五万八千三百九十一, but anyway grouped four digits per group). I'm not competent to write Arabic so I'm not going to write it in actual Arabic, but I've seen numerals written there with no separators at all, sort of like 2158391, which no one in this forum would ever write.

2012-12-21 Reply Admin

The USB Seagate drive is probably counterfeit. Look at the serial number for one thing. The case might or might not contain a hard drive. The hard drive or other (e.g. flash memory) contained inside the case can be whatever size the counterfeiter had handy at the moment. The USB bridge chip was programmed to report whatever size the counterfeiter wanted it to report.

I temporarily had a Western Digital drive and temporarily thought it was real. It was an actual hard drive, not a USB case with unknown contents. It came in a sealed plastic antistatic envelope, passed Smart testing, it reported the same serial number as printed on the label, I could write its full capacity and read it back, and it worked perfectly. But then I noticed hints that it was counterfeit. Western Digital confirmed that it was counterfeit. The seller agreed to a refund, though it took a while. After I knew what to look for, I recognized a few eBay auctions as being counterfeits too.

2012-12-22 Reply Admin

Protip for person who provided the Time Machine error:

When you photoshop dialog boxes, make sure you keep the digit grouping correct. In this case, it should be "2,158,391 items", not "21,58,391 items".

Seriously, NO ONE at TDWTF caught that?

AndyCanfield · 2012-12-22 Reply Admin

When I got internet access to my bank, I set a nine-character password. But the login prompt only accepts eight characters. I can change my password by logging in, which of course I can not do. I gave up. Years later I got a new account. That computer has a user who has never logged in. I wish to $#@! that they had told me my password was too long.

2012-12-22 Reply Admin

dp:
Protip for person who provided the Time Machine error:
When you photoshop dialog boxes, make sure you keep the digit grouping correct. In this case, it should be "2,158,391 items", not "21,58,391 items".

Seriously, NO ONE at TDWTF caught that?

Protip for the person who feels the need to give others their protips:

When you think you found something mentionable, at least read a few other comments to find that dozens of others have done the same before.

Seriously, NO ONE at TDWTF ever had this brillant idea?

2012-12-22 Reply Admin

If I wanted to read ill-thought out right-wing brain farts I'd go ALMOST ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE INTERNET.

Shut it. Idiots.

2012-12-22 Reply Admin

commoveo:
Capitalist:
$13000 taxes for a bag of Belly Flops. Better get used to it! Under this communist government this will be the new normal.

You're under a fascist government. Learn some politics.

You are right, it's an important distinction.

Communism and fascism are at the opposite ends of the circle.

"Fascism is man's exploitation by man. Communism is the opposite".

2012-12-22 Reply Admin

In fact Fascism is a form of Government where politicians collude with businessmen , and Communism is a form of Government where politicians collude with the bureaucrats. In both cases they collude in ripping off ordinary people.

2012-12-23 Reply Admin

fjf:
Sure, water and chalk was a silly example, but many dangers are not readily apparent and much too expensive to test for each customer by themselves.

Such as a petrol station selling a galleon of petrol as .99 galleons?

2012-12-23 Reply Admin

...also in german...

2012-12-23 Reply Admin

Buggz:
foo:
CommenFrist has expired.
Funny thing is, "frist" means deadline in norwegian.

...also in german...

2012-12-23 Reply Admin

jay:
RE password length: I don't see the WTF here. Surely there must be SOME limit on password length for programming practicality, storage considerations, etc. Is there really a need to allow for passwords to be 10,000 characters long? If their limit is, say, 3 characters, okay, that's a little crazy. But I would think that 20 or so would be plenty.

20 characters isn't really a lot. As an iPad user, where mixing letters, digits, upper and lowercase is painful, I like passwords made of three or four words that each on its own would be unsafe, but the combination is quite safe. And quite long.

2012-12-23 Reply Admin

Catprog:
fjf:
Sure, water and chalk was a silly example, but many dangers are not readily apparent and much too expensive to test for each customer by themselves.

Such as a petrol station selling a galleon of petrol as .99 galleons?

Maybe even that (in the long run, you lose quite something), but what I meant was more like contaminated milk. Which is, BTW, just what I wrote. Try reading next time.

Matt Westwood · 2012-12-23 Reply Admin

... so the real WTF is trying to buy Mike Oldfield tracks off the internet? Jeez, how sad ...

OTOH TRTRWTF is recognising from the two visible tracks that these are Mike Oldfield tracks that are being displayed on the screen.

Quinnum · 2012-12-23 Reply Admin

fjf:
dp:
Protip for person who provided the Time Machine error:
When you photoshop dialog boxes, make sure you keep the digit grouping correct. In this case, it should be "2,158,391 items", not "21,58,391 items".

Seriously, NO ONE at TDWTF caught that?
Protip for the person who feels the need to give others their protips:

When you think you found something mentionable, at least read a few other comments to find that dozens of others have done the same before.

Seriously, NO ONE at TDWTF ever had this brillant idea?

Indeed. In fact number separators used in India are exactly like this, and a quick googling reveals Vatsan appears to be an Indian name. But as we know many of our readers shoot from the hip without checking the facts first

2012-12-24 Reply Admin

fjf:
Catprog:
fjf:
Sure, water and chalk was a silly example, but many dangers are not readily apparent and much too expensive to test for each customer by themselves.

Such as a petrol station selling a galleon of petrol as .99 galleons?
Maybe even that (in the long run, you lose quite something), but what I meant was more like contaminated milk. Which is, BTW, just what I wrote. Try reading next time.

I was adding another case to the milk case

2012-12-24 Reply Admin

Left-wingers can do this, too. I, as a pro-gun leftist, learned this over the past week or so.

2012-12-24 Reply Admin

You are so not Pi Patel.

2012-12-24 Reply Admin

Valued Service:
Seems like someone wants international socialism. Not only do we take from the rich to hand-out to the poor in our own country. We take from our rich to hand-out to the countries that can't manage their own people.

The same people your ancestors fucked, robbed, looted or killed? Yes, that sounds like a real injustice to me.

2012-12-26 Reply Admin

¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
Damn. I was only looking for 3.141592653589732 acres.

That's a nice round size!

2012-12-27 Reply Admin

"Unused Plural Form" sounds like something Zippy the Pinhead would say.

2012-12-28 Reply Admin

jay:
RE password length: I don't see the WTF here. Surely there must be SOME limit on password length for programming practicality, storage considerations, etc. Is there really a need to allow for passwords to be 10,000 characters long? If their limit is, say, 3 characters, okay, that's a little crazy. But I would think that 20 or so would be plenty.

For the love of Gord, don't even think about writing code that comes anywhere near handling a password until you've read the Scrypt paper and understand it fully. You are the problem.

Please report all of your previous employers to Plain Text Offenders.

2012-12-30 Reply Admin

Buggz:
foo:
CommenFrist has expired.
Funny thing is, "frist" means deadline in norwegian.

in german too :-)

2013-01-02 Reply Admin

I've used a system that didn't complain about the length of the password, but the hashing function only looked at the first eight characters, so it really should have complained so as to avoid giving users a false sense of security.

2013-01-02 Reply Admin

jay:
I once read that when radio was first invented, people said that of course this would have to be run by the government because there would be no practical way to charge people to listen to the radio, as anyone who could buy or build a radio could listen in and how would you know? But then the problem was solved by charging advertisers rather than listeners.

I take it you've never heard of the BBC?

2013-01-07 Reply Admin

"In real life, if I buy a gallon of milk from Bob's Grocery Store I will presumably discover the first time I try to drink it that it is, in fact, chalk and water. And then -- and here's the beauty of capitalism -- I don't buy from that grocery store any more."

Fine as far as it goes.

"The Food & Drug Administration delays life-saving drugs from reaching the market, and increases the cost of those that do."

Even if you are a pharmacologist, there might be some problem with testing medication on your own like you do with milk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey

"presumably with my doctor's advice"

Which you get for free by an absolutely desinterested doctor, because if the advice turns out to be bad, you won't visit the doctor those advice killed you again. That'll show him.

"Bureaucrats in Washington"

The one thing I don't get, is: why do all these enterprisey people not simple team up on one spot on earth so that they get absolute majority there and take over a state on their own which they can run according to their hearts desire with all Bureaucrats being eliminated. This should spare them all the time and effort spent to try to convince those pesky communists. This state will be an enormous success story, so all the world will follow it's example in no time at all. Problem solved 4e4.

2013-01-14 Reply Admin

Buggz:
foo:
CommenFrist has expired.
Funny thing is, "frist" means deadline in norwegian.

So it does in German. Those languages all come from the same roots at some point.

2013-06-22 Reply Admin

There is still reason to impose a limit. Not something ridiculously low like 20 characters but low enough that you can't DOS the server hashing it. 4k seems reasonable to me, 32k if you want to be sure.

Unused Plural Form

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