The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Classic WTF: Functional Encryption

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2020-11-26

It's Thanksgiving Day in the US. Yesterday, we looked at a classic "encryption" story, and today, we should all be thankful that we don't have to support this encryption code. Original --Remy

Richard's company builds, hosts, and maintains a variety of small- and mid-sized web-based applications for their clients. Recently, one of their clients asked Richard to help audit a fraudulent transaction, which meant that Richard needed to dig through the code to see how to decrypt bank account numbers stored in the database. The search led him to H88493247329(), the method responsible for encrypting customer data. After spending a minute to add linebreaks and rename the variables, Richard asked his coworker why he obfuscated the code. His coworker scoffed, you should always encrypt your encryption functions -- it's completely insecure otherwise

19 comments - Last comment @ 2020-11-29

Classic WTF: Top-grade, SHA1 Encryption

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2020-11-25

Is it that time of year already? Here in the US, we're prepping for the Thanksgiving holiday, so let's take a trip way back into the archives, and learn about the life of a moderately-paid-consultant. Original --Remy

Paul B always thought of himself as a moderately-paid consultant. With no real overhead, a policy against ties when meeting with prospective clients, and a general pickiness about the projects he'll take on, his rates tend to be pretty low. One company that looked right up his alley was a mid-sized manufacturing company that wanted a custom webshop. They went to the highly-paid consultants in town, but weren't too happy with the six-figure price tag. Paul's quote was in the five-figure range, which he felt was pretty moderate given that it was a several month project. Of course, the company wasn't too happy with his quote either, so they searched high and low for a three- or four-figure price. They eventually found one overseas.

Despite losing the bid, Paul never bothered unsubscribing from the company's mailing list - there was always something exciting about learning the latest in gimbal clamps and engine nozzle extensions. About a year and a half later, he received an exciting newsletter announcing that the webshop was finally live. Out of curiosity, he created an account to check things out. A few days later, he received an apology for lost orders - they didn't know who had ordered what, so they sent it to everyone who had signed up. And then came the "data breach" email — everyone's personal data (which, for Paul, was just his throw-away email) was now in the hands of some hackers. You get what you pay for never rang so true.

20 comments - Last comment @ 05:40

Classic WTF: Covering All Cases… And Then Some

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2020-09-07

It's Labor Day in the US, where we celebrate the labor movement and people who, y'know, do actual work. So let's flip back to an old story, which does a lot of extra work. Original -- Remy

Ben Murphy found a developer who liked to cover all of his bases ... then cover the dug-out ... then the bench. If you think this method to convert input (from 33 to 0.33) is a bit superflous, you should see data validation.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2020-09-10

Classic WTF: Dimensioning the Dimension

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2020-07-06

It was a holiday weekend in the US, so we're taking a little break. Yes, I know that most people took Friday off, but as this article demonstrates, dates remain hard. Original -- Remy

It's not too uncommon to see a Java programmer write a method to get the name of a month based on the month number. Sure, month name formatting is built in via SimpleDateFormat, but the documentation can often be hard to read. And since there's really no other place to find the answer, it's excusable that a programmer will just write a quick method to do this.

I have to say though, Robert Cooper's colleague came up with a very interesting way of doing this: adding an[other] index to an array ...

18 comments - Last comment @ 2020-07-09

Classic WTF: Slightly More Sociable

by Alex Papadimoulis in Tales from the Interview on 2020-06-24

As we continue our vacation, this classic comes from the ancient year of 2007, when "used to being the only woman in my engineering and computer science classes" was a much more common phrase. Getting a job can feel competitive, but there are certain ways you can guarantee you're gonna lose that competition. Original --Remy

Today’s Tale from the Interview comes from Shanna...

Fresh out of college, and used to being the only woman in my engineering and computer science classes, I wasn't quite sure what to expect in the real world. I happily ended up finding a development job in a company which was nowhere near as unbalanced as my college classes had been. The company was EXTREMELY small and the entire staff, except the CEO, was in one office. I ended up sitting at a desk next to the office admin, another woman who was hired a month or two after me.

24 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-30

Classic WTF: The Developmestuction Environment

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2020-06-23

We continue to enjoy a brief respite from mining horrible code and terrible workplaces. This classic includes this line: "It requires that… Adobe Indesign is installed on the web server." Original --Remy

Have you ever thought what it would take for you to leave a new job after only a few days? Here's a fun story from my colleague Jake Vinson, whose co-worker of three days would have strongly answered "this."

One of the nice thing about externalizing connection strings is that it's easy to duplicate a database, duplicate the application's files, change the connection string to point to the new database, and bam, you've got a test environment.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2020-06-26

Classic WTF: A Char'd Enum

by Alex Papadimoulis in CodeSOD on 2020-05-25

It's a holiday in the US today, so we're reaching back into the archives while doing some quarantine grilling. This classic has a… special approach to handling enums. Original. --Remy

Ah yes, the enum. It's a convenient way to give an integer a discrete domain of values, without having to worry about constants. But you see, therein lies the problem. What happens if you don't want to use an integer? Perhaps you'd like to use a string? Or a datetime? Or a char?

If that were the case, some might say just make a class that acts similarly, or then you clearly don't want an enum. But others, such as Dan Holmes' colleague, go a different route. They make sure they can fit chars into enums.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2020-05-29

Copy/Paste Culture

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2020-02-19

Mark F had just gone to production on the first project at his new job: create a billables reconciliation report that an end-user had requested a few years ago. It was clearly not a high priority, which was exactly why it was the perfect items to assign a new programmer.

"Unfortunately," the end user reported, "it just doesn't seem to be working. It's running fine on test, but when I run it on the live site I'm getting a SELECT permission denied on the object fn_CalculateBusinessDays message. Any idea what that means?"

40 comments - Last comment @ 2020-02-26