The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Bank $Security

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-03-20

Banks. They take your money and lend it to others. They lend money deposited by other people to you, either as a car loan, mortgage, or for credit card purchases. For this privilege, you give them all of your personal information, including your social security number. Implicit in that exchange is the fact that the bank should keep your personal information confidential. Security is important. One might think that such a concept would be important to banks. One would be wrong.

To be fair, the high ranking people at the banks probably believe that all of their customer information should be - and is - secure and protected. Unfortunately, there are multiple layers of middle and lower management (that we all know all too well) that might not comprehend that point.

47 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-27

Daylight Losing Time

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2018-03-12

The second Sunday of March has come to pass, which means if you're a North American reader, you're getting this an hour earlier than normal. What a bonus! That's right, we all got to experience the mandatory clock-changing event known as Daylight Saving Time. While the sun, farm animals, toddlers, etc. don't care about an arbitrary changing of the clock, computers definitely do.

Early in my QA career, I had the great (dis)pleasure of fully regression testing electronic punch clocks on every possible software version every time a DST change was looming. It was every bit as miserable as it sounds but was necessary because if punches were an hour off for thousands of employees, it would wreak havoc on our clients' payroll processing.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-15

The Unbidden Password

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2018-03-06

So here's a thing that keeps me up at night: we get a lot of submissions about programmers who cannot seem to think like users. There's a type of programmer who has never not known how computers worked, whose theory of computers in their mind has been so accurate for so long that they can't look at things in a different way. Many times, they close themselves off from users, insisting that if the user had a problem with using the software, they just don't know how computers work and need to educate themselves. Rather than focus on what would make the software more usable, they program what is easiest for the computer to do, and call it a day.

49 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-21

Recent Feature Articles

Bank $Security

Daylight Losing Time

The Unbidden Password