The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Super Hacker

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-04-30

As a junior network administrator at a small local ISP, Kiefer R.'s job is pretty mundane. Aside from the occasional bandwidth problem investigating, cable laying, and spline reticulating, there's not too much excitement.

One morning, Kiefer's boss said he was going to come down for a chat, so Kiefer loaded up a bandwidth monitoring utility and pretended to be busy. "Kiefer," Mike began, "I just wanted to give you a heads up. We're having a guy come down next week to run some security checks on our systems here. Particularly our main web server."

112 comments - Last comment @ 2011-04-13

The Mother of all Interfaces

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2008-04-24

Back in the early 1990's, G.R.G. worked at a certain university as a programmer. In addition to breaking into server rooms and deafening cute little chinchillas, G.R.G. built one of the university's first web applications. It was a fairly simple CGI program that provided web-access to the student registration known as Old Yeller.

Even in those days, the university’s student registration system was considered to be ancient. Running on an System/370 that had long since seen its day, Old Yeller was based off of an off-the-shelf system and customized over the years with various COBOL and Assembler patches. Though it wasn't too pretty, Old Yeller reliably handled 85,000 registrations each semester and brought in about $400 Million a year. And all in less than a megabyte of RAM.

123 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-20

Halfway in the Digital Age

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-04-23

Bug tracking software? Who needs it! I was confident in my ability to maintain several Outlook folders of bug reports, flagging completed ones 'orange' — or was it 'green' that meant done? No, wait, I think it was purple. My system was perfect. Then Alex came along and ruined it all. I can't pinpoint exactly when I started regularly using the bug tracking software that he liked, but it may've had something to do with being held at gunpoint. You probably thought Alex was kidding in that article. "You don't have a choice in this. Use the software," Alex suggested. After the ~~threat~~ ~~encounter~~ training session with Alex, I called my loved ones, then started copying the unresolved bugs (yellow flags) from my Outlook manual bug tracking system. Wait, crap, blue flags.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that change — such as introducing a bug tracking system — is gradual. Byron's team had reluctantly installed and began using Bugzilla, which ironically appeared to be full of bugs. His team would report updating and resolving issues, but these updates were not appearing in the system.

113 comments - Last comment @ 2008-04-29

The Defect Black Market

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2008-04-17

When Damon's coworker stopped by his cubicle for a chat, Damon wondered if they should have met in a dark alley somewhere. Damon, a developer, and his coworker in quality assurance were meeting to trade bugs on the newly created Defect Black Market.

It all started a week before, when the CTO of Damon's midsize warehousing and transportation company in Northern California announced an innovative program to motivate employees and boost the quality of their logistics software. For every bug found by a tester and fixed by a programmer, both would get $10.

Bonus Plan in Operation

137 comments - Last comment @ 2008-08-28

Toppling the Stack

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-04-16

When programmers disagree, generally one of two things happens. One, they talk it over like mature adults and agree on a solution that works for everybody. Two, they have a swearing match that ends on an angry compromise, then the programmers go off and do their own thing anyway and blame the whole mess on a "miscommunication."

Guess which path was taken by Skip S.'s predecessors.

78 comments - Last comment @ 2008-04-19

Oklahoma Leaks Tens of Thousands of Social Security Numbers, Other Sensitive Data

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2008-04-15

One of the cardinal rules of computer programming is to never trust your input. This holds especially true when your input comes from users, and even more so when it comes from the anonymous, general public. Apparently, the developers at Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections slept through that day in computer science class, and even managed to skip all of Common Sense 101. You see, not only did they trust anonymous user input on their public-facing website, but they blindly executed it and displayed whatever came back.

The result of this negligently bad coding has some rather serious consequences: the names, addresses, and social security numbers of tens of thousands of Oklahoma residents were made available to the general public for a period of at least three years. Up until yesterday, April 13 2008, anyone with a web browser and the knowledge from Chapter One of SQL For Dummies could have easily accessed – and possibly, changed – any data within the DOC’s databases. It took me all of a minute to figure out how to download 10,597 records – SSNs and all – from their website:

241 comments - Last comment @ 2024-08-06

Announcement: Content Survey Results

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2008-04-11

Thank you all for participating in last week's survey! I crunched the numbers and read through the 150+ printed pages of comments, and learned some pretty neat things along the way:

Quite a number of readers missed the invisible <AprilFools> tag, and hate the new⁴ name The Daily WTH.
Not too many paid attention to the distinction between features (like Code SOD, Error'd, etc).
The non-coders usually don't understand the code snippets, and they're OK with that. Some would prefer an explanation in the comments, though.
The general consesus for the comic (MFD) was that, while the idea of having a comic here is good, MFD isn't quite "there" yet. It does show some potential, but in the mean time, the reader-submitted comics are "where it's at." There was also a lot of very helpful constructive critisism.
Despite hating the content here, and especially disliking me, some of you still visit on regular basis and actually take the time to leave survey comments. I'm flattered. Especially by you, Survey Taker #2883:
- Alex, please stop trying to be funny. You are completely devoid of any sort of sense of humour and impervious to being told this. Your idea of an April Fool's joke was to pretend to rename the site what, three months after actually renaming it and renaming it back? That's not funny. You don't know what funny is. You don't get it, and no matter how much you're told, you *won't* get it. When three thousand people call you an ass, start looking for a saddle. I don't want your worthless prose, your insipid writing, or your mean-spirited forays into OS/platform wars. Basically, any time your personality creeps through, we all suffer.
For those of you who asked about another programming contest: yes, soon!

Of course, my analysis of the numbers is limited by complete lack of any statistical skills, so I've put together a CSV file (data only - no comments/ip) and a basic page that explains what the fields are. So here's your challenge: I will send out the official, extra-large 15'oz WTF mug to whoever comes up with the most interesting analysis (post in the comments).

139 comments - Last comment @ 2008-04-21

I Think I'm Going To Be Sick

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2008-04-09

For the most part, it was like any other sales meeting. Robert sat in a dark conference room with the potential client's CTO, COO and a few other managers. A projector lit up the whiteboard with PowerPoint slides and screenshots from their in-house billing system. Janice, the CTO, went over the automated billing application and related processes so that Robert, an IT consultant, and his team could develop a proposal for maintaining it.

One thing seemed off, however. Janice spoke in absolutes, "When you start the contract ..." At first, Robert figured he was just that good in his pitch, and that she had already made a decision. But as Janice presented the Web application and its history, Robert realized it was something else. She was trying to sell him on taking the contract.

73 comments - Last comment @ 2014-02-21

The Service Awards Ceremony

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-04-08

The store was abuzz leading up to the most gala event that Computer Czar store 893 would have the honor and privilege of hosting. After the big night, they'd have to wait an agonizing three months until the next one. It was time for the Quarterly Computer Czar Store 893 Service Recognition Award Ceremony.

To even be considered for such an honor required a strength of will and determination that only a small number of the employees lacked. Not only did you have to not get fired or quit, but you had to continue to not get fired or quit for one, five, or ten years!

85 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-07

Tech Support Heck

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-04-03

I'm sure many of you have had or are currently working in a tech support position. Consider yourself fortunate if you've never had experiences like these.

Duly Noted from Ed

134 comments - Last comment @ 2008-06-22

Announcement: Content Survey

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2008-04-02

Yeah, yeah, yeah: Yet Another Survey on The Daily WTF. However, unlike the recent survey from December, this one is not so much about you, but about what you think about the content here.

You see, as editor and lead writer here, it’s a bit of a challenge to figure out exactly what you come here to read. Sure, there are page views, referrers, visit paths, and all sorts of other statistics and numbers I could try to distill, but nothing beats just asking you directly.

53 comments - Last comment @ 2008-04-06

Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2008-04-02

Lee B. was ready to impress. The night before his first day on the contract he laid out his outfit for the day, ironed his clothes, and made sure to get a good night's sleep. He wanted to leave a great impression, and had planned and visualized exactly how he would do so.

On the drive to the bank where he'd be working, he couldn't help but smile. The radio said that it would be cold and that there was stormy weather ahead, but that didn't phase him — he had a feeling that everything would be coming up Lee.

99 comments - Last comment @ 2010-05-22

Front-Ahead Design

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2008-04-01

In the past, I didn’t mix TDWTH and work too often, but with the tweaked name and tweaked direction on content, I knew this article would be a perfect fit.

As some of you know, I fill two important roles in my day job at Inedo, LLC. Not only am I a software developer, but I’m also the Chief Front-Ahead Design Evangelist. In this latter role, it’s my duty to spread and champion the revolutionary software development methodology known as Front Ahead Design (FAD).

176 comments - Last comment @ 2013-12-14

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