The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Wizard Algorithm

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-06-20

Password requirements can be complicated. Some minimum and maximum number of characters, alpha and numeric characters, special characters, upper and lower case, change frequency, uniqueness over the last n passwords and different rules for different systems. It's enough to make you revert to a PostIt in your desk drawer to keep track of it all. Some companies have brillant employees who feel that they can do better, and so they create a way to figure out the password for any given computer - so you need to neither remember nor even know it.

Kendall Mfg. Co. (estab. 1827) (3092720143)

History does not show who created the wizard algorithm, or when, or what they were smoking at the time.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-08-24

The Manager Who Knew Everything

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-06-13

Have you ever worked for/with a manager that knows everything about everything? You know the sort; no matter what the issue, they stubbornly have an answer. It might be wrong, but they have an answer, and no amount of reason, intelligent thought, common sense or hand puppets will make them understand. For those occasions, you need to resort to a metaphorical clue-bat.

A few decades ago, I worked for a place that had a chief security officer who knew everything there was to know about securing their systems. Nothing could get past the policies she had put in place. Nobody could ever come up with any mechanism that could bypass her concrete walls, blockades and insurmountable defenses.

41 comments - Last comment @ 2018-07-11

Many Happy Returns

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2018-06-06

We've all encountered a situation where changing requirements caused some function that had a single native return type to need to return a second value. One possible solution is to put the two return values in some wrapper class as follows:

32 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-24