The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Screen Recording HARDWARE

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2013-06-24

It was an all-hands meeting for the entire Los Angeles branch staff at InstaPet, the kind that Ellen always hated. It typically meant one of the three Ls: layoffs, lawsuits, or Lindbergh, their temperamental and flaky CEO. This time, it was the third L.

“It has come to my attention,” Lindbergh said from the front of the conference room, “that some divisions are using insecure software. As you know, we have a reputation for the most secure processes in our entire industry.”

86 comments - Last comment @ 2013-09-16

In Fool We Trust

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2013-06-19

Stan arrived one morning to find his boss, Monty, typing up a storm. This meant two things: a horrible spec would land in Stan’s inbox by the next morning, and that spec would shoehorn in a database where none belonged. Monty was a database “expert.” There was no problem his weighty and ill-performing hammer couldn’t nail. During Stan’s first year on the job, he had implemented everything the way Monty described, because he hadn’t known better. Now more knowledgeable of the company’s system, he yearned for an opportunity to do something properly.

In his inbox, Stan found a copy of the customer request that occupied Monty. It asked for two existing ASP.NET applications to be hooked up to one another: a pleasant surprise. This is a perfect case for a simple web service, Stan thought, and since they’re using .NET, WCF is all we need.

99 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-02

Excellent Sex

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2013-06-17

Thomas was outrunning a hurricane.

Storm clouds loomed from the south, the outer fringes of hurricane Gustav. He and the other employees at a volunteer center in New Orleans had been mandatorily evacuated a few hours earlier. The battery LED indicator on Thomas’s phone shone red, the battery drained to 1%. He was still a few hours from Hattiesburg, where a couch at his brother’s house was waiting for him.

193 comments - Last comment @ 2024-03-21

The Email Virus

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2013-06-12

Joe worked hard every day fighting the good fight against viruses and malware for a large financial firm in the UK. Their security setup suffered flaws, but it worked well enough. Scanners on incoming email, an antivirus product on the mail servers, signature updates every 30 minutes, and a basic antivirus on desktops all worked at Joe’s command to protect their network. There was no default route back out to the Internet and a Machiavellian filter restricted web access. Despite all this, Joe had to contend with one vulnerability not even the most advanced security system in the world could defend.

Spam changed faster than their filter-rules, and sometimes bad things slipped through. Joe’s team hoped to lessen the risk of this by educating their users to NEVER, EVER, EVER OPEN SOMETHING THAT LOOKS SUSPICIOUS. As predictable as an Enterprise Red Shirt dying on an Away Team mission, users would always go ahead and crack open malicious EXE files from their “long-lost cousin Frank” and completely fry their computer in minutes.

133 comments - Last comment @ 2016-12-02

Welcome to the New Order

by Bruce Johnson in Feature Articles on 2013-06-11

Matthew was the system administrator of a smallish warehousing company. His responsibility was to more or less keep the facility's computer systems working at a reasonable pace and ensure that nothing unexpected would bring the company's business to a screeching halt. Due to the typical resource constraints (money, time, qualified people), companies of this size frequently contract the development work for their internal software out to a third party. Moreover, as you might expect, the quality of those 'third parties' varies widely. Luckily, John, the third party responsible for his warehousing company's software was an industry veteran and was held in very high regard. You could say that there were those in the company thought he walked on water, but that would be unfair to the original. John's following was more devout.

One Monday morning, calls started pouring in complaining that the systems had slowed down markedly. As any good administrator would do, Matt checked to see if a number of potential culprits that had previously been identified and corralled in the past had popped up again. In this case, however, none of the usual suspects were at fault so, Matt reached out to John.

69 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-19

From Three Days to 15 Minutes

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-06-05

The Abstractor, as Greg and his team liked to call him, was a contractor at their company. The Abstractor had built a C# framework architecture (affectionately called Big Momma) that quickly went from being the company's framework, to being his personal baby. At the heart of Big Momma were abstract "Values" collections that wrapped the normal microsoft.net collections. This was so that any time The Abstractor decided that using arrays, XML or List<T> was bad, he could easily change "Values" to store data in some other data structure, and the code using it would be none-the-wiser. After all, enlightened developers use encapsulation, right?

While The Abstractor tended to stay away from any code that involved business logic due to his time being too valuable to be spent researching anything, he was eventually forced into creating a service that populated a database table for the new e-commerce website. The table would be used as a quick "real time" check for determining if a product was available at a location for in-store pickup. The records for each and every product needed to be updated every 30 minutes. Using Big Momma and armed with his "Values" collections, The Abstractor quickly had a solution in place. Unfortunately, it took 3 days to process 500,000 rows in the database - once. Greg was amazed that it could run that slowly. That was until Greg saw this error exception:

93 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-12

Who Automates the Automation?

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2013-06-03

Steve huffed up the steps of the state Capitol to his office in the IT department. As he caught his breath in the lobby elevator, his PDA buzzed. The flag coordinator, responsible for processing state flag orders from citizens, had written him an email in his typical tone. WHY ARE THERE NO FLAG ORDERS IN THE SYSTEM? IT’S YOUR JOB TO GET THEM TO US!

Still panting from the climb, Steve logged in at his work computer and checked the FTP server where flag orders were stored after being faxed or mailed to the Capitol. Requests were uploaded as PDF files and renamed automatically with a numeric suffix, such as “flag_order_1234.pdf,” by the automated system in the flag coordinator’s office.

160 comments - Last comment @ 2013-07-06

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