I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

Gahaa!!! Finally back home, after 7 fucking hours of sitting in busses and trains!

BUT I GOT MY NEXUS 6P!! Yoo-hoo!!! :D

And I've got a nice story about it.

So when I bought it, the guy selling it to me was a nontechnical type (I think?) whose wife was the previous owner. So I thought to myself, cool a nontechnical user used it.. probably no hardware mods or anything to worry about. Apparently they even factory reset it for me :)

Now, when I left to go back home, I of course immediately booted up the thing and did the whole doodad of logging into it, setting up the device etc.

Then it struck me. When I booted up the device and wanted to log in, there was a lock from Google that required me to first authenticate as either a previous account of the device, or their unlock pattern. So I figured, eh fuck it, I'll just flash some AOSP without GApps or send the owner an email asking what the previous pattern is.

But I still had to wait 30 minutes at the bus stop so I thought to myself.. previous owner was a nontechnical woman.. maybe I could crack it. No way to know if I don't try. So I started putting in random unlock patterns.

3 attempts later - I shit you not! - pattern accepted.
Do you want to add this account?

Oh boy Google, of course I do! Thanks for letting me in pal!

3 fucking attempts. That's all it took to crack the unlock pattern of an unknown person. 😎

The first time I decided to hack around a bit:D

One of my teachers made a quiz software, which is only used by him(his lectures are about databases), and it is highly unsecure. When I heard that it is written in C# I decided to look in it's source code. The biggest problem I ran into: this program is only available on the computers in his classroom, and he monitors the computers display. However, I successfully put it into my pendrive without getting caught.

So when I got home, I just had to use a .NET decompiler(in this case: dotPeek) to get the fully functional source code. The basic function of the program was to download a quiz from his database server, and when it was finished, grade it client-side. Than, I realized how bad it was: It contains the number of questions, the number of correct and incorrect answers.
I've just made a modified .exe, which contained really little modification(like correctAnswers=maxQuestions, incorrectAnswers=0). Everything looks the same, you just have to click over it, and everytime it will return with 100%.

And the bonus: The program connects to the database as a user with root access, and without password. I was able to log in, download(dropping was available too, but didn't try) databases(with all the answers) and so on.

Never had to use it though, it was just a sort-of experience gaining.:)

I’m surrounded by idiots.

I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.

Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!

While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.

To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.

He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.

This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.

It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.

This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.

The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.

What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.

No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.

Asdfajsdfk.

One of my first jobs as a Web Designer / Developer.

Boss had me update a WordPress site that the previous dude built. It had some pages that only members were meant to access.

These were listed on a navbar at all times. If the user clicked on them, a JS alert would show up telling the visitor to log in first.

That was the ONLY protection those pages had. No matter it was a WordPress-powered site, to begin. If you knew the URL or simply altered the code right there on the browser to remove the onclick-bound JS, you could get in.

And that was just the beginning of it. Eventually I convinced the boss to rebuild the site.

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

At my first job, I got tired of having to type a user name and password every time I debugged the web application. Thinking I was clever, I put in a hack so that if you launched the application with the query string "?user=Administrator" it would log you in as the administrator. So much typing saved!

A couple days after the next release, I realized it shipped like that. In absolute horror, I walked into my boss' office, closed the door, and told him the tale of my mistake.

He just looked back at me, and after a moment or two said, "Loose lips sink ships."

And that was it.

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Someone just rang the IT Helpdesk moaning that outlook wasn't syncing his mail and it was because the brand new laptop he's just gotten is crap.

So first, the guy on the helpdesk asked to log into the users laptop to look at outlook.
He apparently isn't at his laptop and doesn't have time for anyone to log in!
Wtf lol
So he rings back 10 mins later when at his laptop but wont let the helpdesk log in as he has 'confidential' documents open.

Wtf, close them, why are you ringing us to look at your laptop if you won't let us log on?? lol

So helpdesk was like ok, just check cat cable is plugged in, check wifi is off, do a send/receive etc. and the user's like yes, they're all okay!

Helpdesk tells him to reboot his pc. He does so.
Doesn't resolve it.
Skip forward another 10 painful minutes while the helpdesk guy is pulling his hair out checking everything in the background, and all looks fine.

User then says "should i also turn off my iPhone?"
Helpdesk: 'No, outlook is just on your laptop'.
User: 'No *assured laugh* its on my phone too. I get emails there too'
Helpdesk: 'No, you use the generic 'Mail' app on your phone. Outlook is a separate app. We don't use it.'
User: 'But you're not listening, regardless of the app name, that's my problem, mail's not working on my phone'.
Helpdesk: '.....so why didn't you say so 20 minutes ago when i asked to log into ur laptop?'

User: 'Didn't think it was relevant. Laptop was fine. Assumed you'd know'.

...........

Why.

Why???

Why.

Shockingly, a phone restart fixed it. The user couldn't remember the last time he'd turned the thing off.

Received a urgent email from a business client saying that the application we support is completely broken. Their staff said they used the app to send several submissions that day but they did not come through. This is a major issue as these submissions need to occur daily.

I understand that this is a priority so I immediately check everything. I test the app, the server, check the database. Everything seems fine, but there's no record of these submissions. Maybe it's the specific device that was used. I reply saying that everything seems to be in order. Can I please be provided with more information about what occurred? What time were the submissions sent?

Client replies saying that the submissions were definitely sent and that the staff swear by it.

I now know something is up, so I remote into the the devices in question and check the logs. The app was not even used that day! I've got them! Those liars!

I am now quite pissed off, but remain professional and reply saying that we log all app events and that the logs show that the app had not been used at all that day. Now they have to own up to their lie. Right?

Wrong. Client replies with: The issue has been fixed. Thanks.

Can you believe the bloody nerve? The client doesn't even have the decency to apologise but rather insinuates that it was all our fault.

Well I'm not having that. I reply: It is great that the app is functioning correctly. However, I believe it is important to understand the cause of the issue as to prevent it from occuring again.

Client: No reply.

Well, if you want to waste other people's time, here's the fat bill.

Moral of the story. Don't trust anything that the client says and for any issue, debug the user before doing anything else.

I started a job as a developer on Monday for a large retail company. There was no computer available for me because of the IT department but I'm told it will arrive later in the day. It doesn't.
On Tuesday I get told that the PC is coming and later in the day a keyboard, mouse, monitor stand and two monitors arrive but no computer.
Today, Wednesday, I get into work and find that I now have a PC. Woo! I load windows, log into my user account with my new user and pass and go to install VSCode only to find that I don't have admin privileges and can't install almost anything. I'm told that IT will add me to the admin user group soon(tm). I wait. All day. They don't do what they are supposed to do despite us pushing them to do it.
I hope that tomorrow I can actually dev, but at least I've been paid three days wage for doing nothing lol

Anyone have any shitty IT department stories?

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

I'm going to kill management.
After a serious migration fiasco at one of our biggest costumers the platform was finally usable again (after two days instead of 10 hours) and, of course, users started to report bugs. So good old po came in ranting that we as qa did a horrible job and basically tried to fault us for a fucked up update (because we produced user pain, which of course not being able to log in didn't do). Among the issues: If the user has more than a hundred web pages the menu starts looking ugly, the translation to dutch in one string on the third submenu of a widget doesn't work and a certain functionality isn't available even if it's activated.
Short, they were either not a use case or very much minor except for that missing function. So today we've looked through the entire test code, testing lists, change logs and so on only to discover that the function was removed actively during the last major update one and a half years ago.

Now it's just waiting for the review meeting with the wonderful talking point "How could effective QA prevent something like this in the future" and throwing that shit into his face.

I mean seriously, if you fuck shit up stand by it. We all make mistakes but trying to pin it on other people is just really, really low.

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

Anyone remembers that in windows XP you coud set any exe as screen saver, and it would run on time, even before you log into any user, as a default system user with administrator privileges?

tl;dr:
The Debian 10 live disc and installer say: Heavens me, just look at the time! I’m late for my <segmentation fault

—————

tl:
The Debian 10 live cd and its new “calamares” installer are both complete crap. I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian prior to this, save with getting WiFi to work (as expected). But this version? Ugh. Here are the things I’ve run into:

Unknown root password; easy enough to get around as there is no user password; still annoying after the 10th time.

Also, the login screen doesn’t work off-disc because it won’t accept a blank password, so don’t idle or you’ll get locked out.

The lock screen is overzealous and hard-locks the computer after awhile; not even the magic kernel keys work!

The live disc doesn’t have many standard utilities, or a graphical partition editor. Thankfully I’m comfortable with fdisk.

The graphical installer (calamares) randomly segfaults, even from innocuous things like clicking [change partition] when you don’t have a partition selected. Derp.

It also randomly segfaults while writing partitions to disk — usually on the second partition.

It strangely seems less likely to segfault if the partitions are already there, even if it needs to “reformat” (recreate) them.

It also defaults to using MBR instead of GPT for the partition table, despite the tooltip telling you that MBR is deprecated and limited, and that GPT is recommended for new systems. You cannot change this without doing the partitions manually.

If you do the partitions manually and it can’t figure out where to install things, it just crashes. This is great because you can’t tell it where to install things, and specifying mount points like /boot, /, and /home don’t seem to be enough.

It also tries installing 32bit grub instead of 64bit, causing the grub installer to fail.

If you tell it to install grub on /boot, it complains when that partition isn’t encrypted — fair — but if you tell it to encrypt /boot like it wants you to, it then tries installing grub on the encrypted partition it just created, apparently without decrypting it, so that obviously fails — specific error: cannot read file system.

On the rare chance that everything else goes correctly, the install process can still segfault.

The log does include entries for errors, but doesn’t include an error message. Literally: “ERROR: Installation failed:” and the log ends. Helpful!

If the installer doesn’t segfault and the install process manages to complete, the resulting install might not even boot, even when installed without any drive encryption. Why? My guess is it never bothered to install Grub, or put it in the wrong place, or didn’t mark it as bootable, or who knows what.

Even when using the live disc that includes non-free firmware (including Ath9k) it still cannot detect my wlan card (that uses Ath9k).

I’ve attempted to install thirty plus times now, and only managed to get a working install once — where I neglected to include the Ath9k firmware.

I’m now trying the cli-only installer option instead of the live session; it seems to behave at least. I’m just terrified that the resulting install will be just as unstable as the live session.

All of this to copy the contents of my encrypted disks over so I can use them on a different system. =/

I haven’t decided which I’m going with next, but likely Arch, Void, or Gentoo. I’d go with Qubes if I had more time to experiment.

But in all seriousness, the Debian devs need some serious help. I would be embarrassed if I released this quality of hot garbage.

(This same system ran both Debian 8 and 9 flawlessly for years)

I previously worked as a Linux/unix sysadmin. There was one app team owning like 4 servers accessible in a very speciffic way.
* logon to main jumpbox
* ssh to elevated-privileges jumpbox
* logon to regional jumpbox using custom-made ssh alternative [call it fkup]
* try to fkup to the app server to confirm that fkup daemon is dead
* logon to server's mgmt node [aix frame]
* ssh to server directly to find confirm sshd is dead too
* access server's console
* place root pswd request in passwords vault, chase 2 mangers via phone for approvals [to login to the vault, find my request and aprove it]
* use root pw to login to server's console, bounce sshd and fkupd
* logout from the console
* fkup into the server to get shell.

That's not the worst part... Aix'es are stable enough to run for years w/o needing any maintenance, do all this complexity could be bearable.

However, the app team used to log a change request asking to copy a new pdf file into that server every week and drop it to app directory, chown it to app user. Why can't they do that themselves you ask? Bcuz they 'only need this pdf to get there, that's all, and we're not wasting our time to raise access requests and chase for approvals just for a pdf...'

oh, and all these steps must be repeated each time a sysadmin tties to implement the change request as all the movements and decisions must be logged and justified.

Each server access takes roughly half an hour. 4 servers -> 2hrs.

So yeah.. Surely getting your accesses sorted out once is so much more time consuming and less efficient than logging a change request for sysadmins every week and wasting 2 frickin hours of my time to just copy a simple pdf for you.. Not to mention that threr's only a small team of sysadmins maintaining tens of thousands of servers and every minute we have we spend working. Lunch time takes 10-15 minutes or so.. Almost no time for coffee or restroom. And these guys are saying sparing a few hours to get their own accesses is 'a waste of their time'...

That was the time I discovered skrillex.

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

Whelp. I started making a very simple website with a single-page design, which I intended to use for managing my own personal knowledge on a particular subject matter, with some basic categorization features and a simple rich text editor for entering data. Partly as an exercise in web development, and partly due to not being happy with existing options out there. All was going well...

...and then feature creep happened. Now I have implemented support for multiple users with different access levels; user profiles; encrypted login system (and encrypted cookies that contain no sensitive data lol) and session handling according to (perceived) best practices; secure password recovery; user-management interface for admins; public, private and group-based sections with multiple categories and posts in each category that can be sorted by sort order value or drag and drop; custom user-created groups where they can give other users access to their sections; notifications; context menus for everything; post & user flagging system, moderation queue and support system; post revisions with comparison between different revisions; support for mobile devices and touch/swipe gestures to open/close menus or navigate between posts; easily extendible css themes with two different dark themes and one ugly as heck light theme; lazy loading of images in posts that won't load until you actually open them; auto-saving of posts in case of browser crash or accidental navigation away from page; plus various other small stuff like syntax highlighting for code, internal post linking, favouriting of posts, free-text filter, no-javascript mode, invitation system, secure (yeah right) image uploading, post-locking...

On my TODO-list: Comment and/or upvote system, spoiler tag, GDPR compliance (if I ever launch it haha), data-limits, a simple user action log for admins/moderators, overall improved security measures, refactor various controllers, clean up the code...

It STILL uses a single-page design, and the amount of feature requests (and bugs) added to my Trello board increases exponentially with every passing week. No other living person has seen the website yet, and at the pace I'm going, humanity will have gone through at least one major extinction event before I consider it "done" enough to show anyone.

help

Social Captain (a service to increase a user's Instagram followers) has exposed thousands of Instagram account passwords. The company says it helps thousands of users to grow their Instagram follower counts by connecting their accounts to its platform. Users are asked to enter their Instagram username and password into the platform to get started.

According to TechCrunch : Social Captain was storing the passwords of linked Instagram accounts in unencrypted plaintext. Any user who viewed the web page source code on their Social Captain profile page could see their Instagram username and password in plain text, as they had connected their account to the platform. A website bug allowed anyone access to any Social Captain user's profile without having to log in ; simply plugging in a user's unique account ID into the company's web address would grant access to their Social Captain account and their Instagram login credentials. Because the user account IDs were for the most part sequential, it was possible to access any user's account and view their Instagram password and other account information easily. The security researcher who reported the vulnerability provided a spreadsheet of about 10,000 scraped user accounts to TechCrunch.

They've been in a meeting with some clients the whole morning.
12PM, time for me to go. Say Happy New Year and am on my way home.
12:20 Got home, took shirt off, got something to eat from the fridge.
12:22 Bit the first slice of pizza. Phone rings.
- "Yo' we wanted to show them app 2 but I can't log in."
+ "I left the laptop (and the whole dev environment) there, and there's no PC on in my house (and no dev environment whatsoever)."
- "Well check with your phone. [SIC] Tell me when you fix it."
12:32 I had turned my personal computer on; checked the problem was what I imagined (unpkg lib with no version defined on the link had a new major/non-retrocompatible version); grabbed an online FTP tool; remembered IP, user & password; edited the single line that caused the problem; and checked it worked. Calling back.
+ "It's fixed."
- "Thanks!"
12:38 CEO sent me an image of the app not working, due to a known bug.
+ "That happens if you try to access app 1 having accessed app 2 and not logging off." (app 2 isn't being used / sold, as it's still in development) "Try logging off and logging in again from app 1."
- * radio silence *
+ * guess they could get in *

They had the whole freaking morning. 😠
I'm the hero CMMi's level one warns you about. But at what cost.
Happy early New Year's Eve everyone.

When I was in 11th class, my school got a new setup for the school PCs. Instead of just resetting them every time they are shut down (to a state in which it contained a virus, great) and having shared files on a network drive (where everyone could delete anything), they used iServ. Apparently many schools started using that around that time, I heard many bad things about it, not only from my school.
Since school is sh*t and I had nothing better to do in computer class (they never taught us anything new anyway), I experimented with it. My main target was the storage limit. Logins on the school PCs were made with domain accounts, which also logged you in with the iServ account, then the user folder was synchronised with the iServ server. The storage limit there was given as 200MB or something of that order. To have some dummy files, I downloaded every program from portableapps.com, that was an easy way to get a lot of data without much manual effort. Then I copied that folder, which was located on the desktop, and pasted it onto the desktop. Then I took all of that and duplicated it again. And again and again and again... I watched the amount increate, 170MB, 180, 190, 200, I got a mail saying that my storage is full, 210, 220, 230, ... It just kept filling up with absolutely zero consequences.
At some point I started using the web interface to copy the files, which had even more interesting side effects: Apparently, while the server was copying huge amounts of files to itself, nobody in the entire iServ system could log in, neither on the web interface, nor on the PCs. But I didn't notice that at first, I thought just my account was busy and of course I didn't expect it to be this badly programmed that a single copy operation could lock the entire system. I was told later, but at that point the headmaster had already called in someone from the actual police, because they thought I had hacked into whatever. He basically said "don't do again pls" and left again. In the meantime, a teacher had told me to delete the files until a certain date, but he locked my account way earlier so that I couldn't even do it.
Btw, I now own a Minecraft account of which I can never change the security questions or reset the password, because the mail address doesn't exist anymore and I have no more contact to the person who gave it to me. I got that account as a price because I made the best program in a project week about Java, which greatly showed how much the computer classes helped the students learn programming: Of the ~20 students, only one other person actually had a program at the end of the challenge and it was something like hello world. I had translated a TI Basic program for approximating fractions from decimal numbers to Java.
The big irony about sending the police to me as the 1337_h4x0r: A classmate actually tried to hack into the server. He even managed to make it send a mail from someone else's account, as far as I know. And he found a way to put a file into any account, which he shortly considered to use to put a shutdown command into autostart. But of course, I must be the great hacker.

As a webmail user, I want to be logged out automatically without any reasonable reason, to be able to read your notice that I have forgotten to log out, once I log in again.

Fucking fuck shit monkeycocksucking gargling wtf!

I was getting some stuff done in my accounting software and it bugged me that the fields were dark and the fonts as well, thus seeing fucking shit. This was clearly a bad choice of a gtk3 dark theme, thus i switched to the fucking default adwaita, suddenly gnome session crashes.
Ok, i just log out and log back in.
Logout.... Nothing happens.... Ctrl-alt-backspace , nothing happens (and i knew i enabled that in the settings)
Ok let's do it a bit more forceful and restart the display manager... Gdm starts... I insert my credentials... It fucking crashes.

WTF!!!

I desperately try to debug it, xsession error msg'es? Nope. Something in /var/log/messages? Nope. Something, anything at all, nope sherlock nopedinope!

About to go batshit crazy, purging and reinstalling all of gnome, thibking that, what ever setting lust have broke it, it will be fixed now.

No fucking fuck desktop!!!

I lost my nerve and replaced gdm with lightdm, and i finally, after three hours wasted on my machine, i get my gnome desktop back... But in a state of mess! Extensions don't work and make it crash again, user themes? Nope, go fuck yourself with plain default.

I'm really losing my shit, business is almost non-existant, and now ly FUCKING desktop refuses to work like i want to. Everything is fucking broken to shits !!

I'm gon a go to my gf, and relax a little, at least i still have a working laptop.

Question is, for how long???

Fml

This literally happened in my current team, and I'm not even an experienced dev yet.
Incident happened like this :
Our team is working on a RCP based on eclipse plugins, which has a headless mode and a GUI mode. Now, in the GUI mode, my manager cum architect thought there are no need of user log files (long story) because the user can see the info on screen, whereas in the headless mode, she wanted me to print the logs onto the console and a log file as well.
Now it just so happened that our team had got a recent addition as a replacement to our lead developer (she left the company) who claimed she had 3 years of expertise and a masters degree, and she was assigned a task. The task was to format a custom file we were generating out of the product (basically dumping info in a file) in a human-readable format. Miss new-addition-masters-degree decided it would be a very good idea to redirect the standard java output stream to a file output stream ( which she used for generating the formatted file ) but somehow never realized that she needed to reset the output stream back to standard output.
Consequences were devastating. I wrote the logic for the logger ( yes, apparently any available logging mechanism won't do it, again, long story ) and had it printing to a file in tmp directory. The logs seemed to be working fine initially but after a few logs, specifically from the point where the formatter started working, all the logs got printed in the formatted file. And this file was supposed to be used by our clients to develop something on top of it. Naturally, I got the heat of it and then naturally, worried and nervous and curious and in a frenzied state of mind, I started debugging.
When I got to the actual fault, I seriously could not decide whether to cry or laugh or call up miss masters and scream at her. I decided to ask her about what the hell she had written and her answer was most of it was written by the developer she replaced, so she didn't know it would cause this much problem. Anyway, I fixed the leak after that and averted the catastrophe.
And that, fellow devs, is the story of how I solved a crisis in my first year at corporate.

I have an issue with my Laravel routing. Can you help me out, @bittersweet?

I have a custom "/home" route called "/admin" and I set the protected property in the LoginController:

$redirectTo = "/admin";

And it works fine, if I log in from guest. But when I navigate to "/login" as auth-user it still redirects me to "/home".

What the fuck is this? What do I have to change to make this work? Who has to be fucked? Is it possible to solve this without sacrificing a virgin at bloodmoon? And why are Platypus so fucking ugly?

Win10: your password has expired.
Me: ok *click*
Win10: oh btw I forgot which account has its password expired, so you have to write the account name
Me: ... Okay
Me: *resets password, then clicks next*
Win10: let me empty that form and let you redo everything without me showing you an error
Me: ....... Okay
Me: *same info*
Win10: sorry, can't find user "username"

Me: Ok you know what fuck off I'm restarting you
Win10: but I... *ded*

...

Win10: Hello Phlisg, please log in normally as usual

Me: what the fuck

---
Disclaimer: I use Linux, osx and windows ;)

I've just spent the last hour or so banging my head against a brick wall trying to figure out why I'm unable to retrieve some data via AJAX even though I know data is being returned as I can see it in my error log.

Turns out the permission system I wrote a few days ago actually works and because I didn't specify a permission it automatically denied my user from retrieving the data. One thing I forgot to add was an error message to tell me when I don't have sufficient permission to do something. Adding a message could have just saved me a lot of time :/

So just now I had to focus on a VM running in virt-manager.. common stuff, yeah. It uses a click of le mouse button to focus in, and Ctrl-Alt-L to release focus. Once focused, the VM is all there is. So focus, unfocus, important!

Except Mate also uses Ctrl-L to lock the screen. Now I actually don't know the password to my laptop. Autologin in lightdm and my management host can access both my account and the root account (while my other laptop uses fingerprint authentication to log in, but this one doesn't have it). Conveniently my laptop can also access the management host, provided a key from my password manager.. it makes more sense when you have a lot of laptops, servers and other such nuggets around. The workstations enter a centralized environment and have access to everything else on the network from there.

Point is, I don't know my password and currently this laptop is the only nugget that can actually get this password out of the password store.. but it was locked. You motherfucker for a lock screen! I ain't gonna restart lightdm, make it autologin again and lose all my work! No no no, we can do better. So I took my phone which can also access the management host, logged in as root on my laptop and just killed mate-screensaver instead. I knew that it was just an overlay after all, providing little "real" security. And I got back in!

Now this shows an important security problem. Lock screens obviously have it.. crash the lock screen somehow, you're in. Because behind that (quite literally) is your account, still logged in. Display managers have it too to some extent, since they run as root and can do autologin because root can switch user to anyone else on the system without authentication. You're not elevating privileges by logging in, you're actually dropping them. Just something to think about.. where are we just adding cosmetic layers and where are we actually solving security problems? But hey, at least it helped this time. Just kill the overlay and bingo bango, we're in!

Random guy messages me on WhatsApp that he needs help, that his friend told him I'm good at blah blah blah.........

the issue: he paid for some random php bitcoin thingy blah blah, sent me a link to the site, pretty straightforward instructions on how to use it. I explained everything to him and he says he wants to tweak the php script before he puts it out.
me: then do it

him: how do I start?

me(in my head): did you not think of this before paying for the script?!

also me: oh well, download xampp, good for beginners, easy to setup.

him: not working! please help me

I knew from the onset that he was a windows user.

he started by running it without admin privileges
I had no idea and kept solving problems that didn't exist until I asked him to snap the log, after explaining how to run a software as administrator, we Solved it

port 80 was taken. had to go through the process of changing the ports, I had to validate every single change.

going through the procedure of reinstalling because he installed to some crappy directory. after all the headaches and then redoing all the processes stated above, it still doesn't work.

one final solution left and I am dropping him like a hot potato. I must have close to a hundred pictures of someone's screen on my phone.

little question: when he types localhost on his browser windows IIS page thingy pops up. I was thinking of changing the server name to localserver: new port address

## Learning k8s

Okay, that's kind of obvious, I just have no idea why I didn't think of it..

I've made a cluster out of a rpi, a i7 PC and a dell xps lappy. Lappy is a master and the other two are worker nodes.

I've noticed that the rpi tends to hardly ever run any of my pods. It's only got 3 of them assigned and neither of them work. They all say: "Back-off restarting failed container" as a sole message in pod's description and the log only says 'standard_init_linux.go:211: exec user process caused "exec format error"' - also the only entry.

Tried running the same image locally on the XPS, via docker run -- works flawlessly (apart from being detached from the cluster of other instances).

Tried to redeploy k8s.yaml -- still raspberry keeps failing.

wtf...

And then it came to me. Wait.. You idiot.. Now ssh to that rpi and run that container manually. Et voila! "docker: no matching manifest for linux/arm/v7 in the manifest list entries."

IDK whether it's lack of sleep or what, but I have missed the obvious -- while docker IS cross-platform, it's not a VM and it does not change the instructions' set supported by the node's cpu. Effectively meaning that the dockerized app is not guaranteed to work on any platform there is!

Shit. I'll have to assemble my own image I guess. It sucks, since I'll have to use CentOS, which is oh-so-heavy compared to Alpine :( Since one of the dependencies does not run well there..

Shit.

Learning k8s is sometimes so frustrating :)

Status: Got off hour+ long call with provider teir2 tech support because their "sync service" isn't syncing. "It's all cloud controlled" they tell me. Whatever.

It does have the ability to install a Windows service to do the needful! 🎉

However the program that does the actual syncing is the "launcher" application, and the service's only job is to tell the launcher to run. 🤦‍♂️

Their assumption is that there will be a user that gets smacked in the face with a UAC prompt when they first log in and just shrug it away. Which is the Launcher application.

The sync service is not capable of running the sync application without a desktop session I guess?

MOTHERTRUCKERS do you understand what the point of a Windows Service is?!?

I tried relating this situation to how Windows Update works: It will update whenever the fuck it wants without the user doing anything because of the Service, and you only configure the service with the Control Panel/Settings App. You don't need the Control Panel/Settings App running in order for Windows Update to work, but it's there for status info and configuration.

Anyways, this software does not do that. It apparently *requires* both the service AND the launcher program running in order to work. Not work properly, to work *at all*.

Anyways, It's installed on a computer that's not normally logged into, but is always on (where other "always needs to be running" programs live). Normally the hackaround would be to launch the program via Scheduled Task.

This program apparently does not want to run as a scheduled task, or the Task Scheduler is being stupid and can't figure out "Hey, it's time to run this program. Do it!". Naturally it runs if told manually.

The fact that I'm even doing this at all is stupid, but even more infuriating is that it's just not working unattended. You know, what the service should be doing. But no, the service runs happily all alone, doing nothing of note, while Task Scheduler sucks its stick running OneDrive installer but not the launcher program.

Pluckin' donuts...

So a while back I had found a hole in a website's security, one that I has used pretty frequently. I was able to change my cookies and become any user I wanted. The only caveat was that I had to log in as a user in order to get things started. But once I was in I could basically be anyone I wanted to be just by changing a few numbers in the user ID of the cookie. They also did all of their user processing on the client side. Even password checks.

A couple weeks back I decided to go back in to see if anything had changed since then. It did! But not in the way I had thought.

So these guys decided that instead of fixing their security hole, they would have users just contact their people directly in order to get a new account.

Wow that's so much fucking overhead for basically being a lazy shit and not fixing the security holes. I mean how bad is your architecture if you can't go in and fix this?

Not only that I found that they actually stripped all of the users of their original subscriptions. So now if you want to get back on your subscription you'll have to fork over another $399. So that means going to their shitty form filling out your name, your number, email, and just hope that someone contacts you via phone call.

I'm glad I dropped this service. They clearly can't get their shit together.

some call
- yo bro do you have some time ?
- quick cause I'm taking a dump
- I think I have been hacked, got black screen kernel panick, linux freeze seldomly I have to reboot, no internet connexion
- save your stuff and reinstall linux
- I don't have enough stockage to backup
- Then buy one and save, probably either OS is fcked up or you have some hdd problems

Time that it will take: ~30min to reinstall whole shit
Peace duration: ~2years

Later on the same day
aunt
- I can't log into windows
- Did you change the password ?
- Yes but it does not work anymore
* looking at shit
* logs successfully. Reason: interface changed after automatic update.
* wait.
* wait some more so fucking windows fucking starts
* Desktop is ugly as fck.
* Some stupid settings messed up (like high contrast set, black theme or so)

aunt (the same)
- I can't log into my (other) laptop either
* logs
* wait more more more

Guess what: automatic updaaaates. Freezes 100%cpu

* Being a very experienced user: wait before reboot because this suckass os will probably fail to boot otherwise
* Blackscreen with a percentage: Installing updates...
* reboots
* Blackscreen with a percentage: Installing updates continuing...
* finally boot (feels like a miracle windows succeeds lol)
* still slow
aunt now sleeps
* look at running process and install programs
* sees shits like camera recognition (vendor installed), candycrush
* occasionnaly get adds

time lost: 2h
peace duration: ~3month

FFS I am a dev, not a fucking trash lover
It is already pain to fix someone os, but windows is the cream of cream

It brings no ease of use for novice user
It is so insanely slow
It has stupid settings set up by default!!!!!!!! Who FFS wants candycrush and ads
The maj are so fcking hazardous. It is 2022 pretty much the same as 15y back then. Updates take fucking eternity. And needs reboot. and are not even finished!!!

I swear I am gonna stretch my ass and install linux and any fckin other toolsuite needed so they can use Micro$$ word, which is the only fucking usecase they need windows for in the first case anyway
I SO wish this OS would die

I mean, even more than safari

>finally gets around to installing vsftpd on home server RPi
>doesn't work
hmm.mp2
>configurating
>confusing as fuck template documentation
>man page isn't much better
>gets it working
>goes to log in
User: pi
Password: a
(What? It's a home file/command server isolated from the Internet. Sue me.)
nope.avi
>why
>tries again
nope.svg
>FUCK
>sees small raw-command log in bottom-right of phone FTP client
hmm.flac
>tries again, watches log
PASS *****
>the fuck
>goes to change user pass over SSH
# passwd
"Current password?"
about half a second later
"passwd: auth token manipulation denied"
>the delay tho
>WAIT A SECOND
one time i got past some parental software bullshit on a tablet by abusing the delay between opening a banned app and the redirect to the normal software at like age 7. (Doing so let me enable remote wipe through Google. bye bye software!)
>*inner 7 year old has autistic screech*
# nano temp
a
abcdefghi
abcdefghi
^O Y ^X
# passwd < temp
>fucking works
>logs in to FTP server successfully
>does the one file download that was needed

why and how did that fucking work

So following my previous post, the issue happened again. And actually for background what I've been telling my boss, for years, we need ELK setup and integrated into all our APIs ASAP.

I think it's a punishable crime if any program is released into prod at a tech company with out real time logging/monitoring built in?

So issue still happening, user sent us the request details. So now need to find the actual now that handles the request and look into it's logs to see the details.

Now he's doing it the hard way.... Just finished took 1hr, and the best answer her can come up with is "I think .... Maybe ..."

And if course this is based on infinite data. He stopped after finding a "probably cause"

I have a script that is like promotion ELK, downloads all looks and parsed then so I can run queries to pinpoint the exact call and which log it's in. And can see what's happening around it.

We'll see what my way find but definitely does not take more than 1hr...

Loading data maybe but that's because it needs to download the logs and parse them all...

On a side note, guess I'm Beck on devrant as I have something to rant about. Though it's the same something that I was wanting about years ago... Monkeys...

How should I name NPM package which works as console log for errors, but throws user to stack overflow page with error massage included in the link?

Found a meme here at DevRant in which this idea was presented, haha.

Fucking Ruby.

Installed my new job's codebase on my machine and it's fucked everything.

While trying to get the database working, someone's dropped my User table, so I can't log in as 'Josh' anymore.

Now I can't compile scss assets without a fucking gem error.

I'M IN A PYTHON ENVIRONMENT, FUCK OFF!

GRR.

I have to build a database migration that generates user handles. The user handles are unique within an organization. The user can change them. The auto generated handles are either the first name + last name, or the business name depending on which user type it is. Unless it would be a duplicate. Duplicates auto increment if the handle is taken. The character limit for a user handle is the same length as first name plus last name so I have to check for possible overflow if I add digits. I also have to see if the generated name is in the DB already because a user could have custom entered the result of the auto generation.

This has to be programmed async. The DB driver is using a transaction but multiple calls have to be made to check if the generated handle exists for that organization. Also I have to check the migration script itself for possible duplicates. 3/4 of the users have a handle and with the scale there will definitely be duplicate names.

My idea is if there is a collision, use a UUID and let the users pick something nicer next time they log in. Business says “Reeeeeee!!!! The users shouldn’t see a UUID!!! You can do this!!!” Absurd uniqueness requirements. Absurd backfill procedure. Absurd business rules.

Am I in developer hell already? A shitty project is about to come to an end (hopefully), or should I rather say: It needs to come to an end. But I am still quite lost in how to deal with it, hence procrastinating on it - making the deadline come closer and with it the realization that I'll probably have to rewrite almost everything. I'm not sure how, but I do know that the current code is a dumpster fire.

Basically what I need to do is dealing with the APIs of different payment providers/gateways (like PayPal, AmazonPay). For most cases I'll get a payment ID from the shop and need to act on it later, e.g. capture the authorized money in the case of a credit card transaction or do refunds (without user interaction, unless there is an error). Now at first I put something together where I try to abstract the payment information into two tables:
orders{1}<->{0..n}payments
payments{1}<->{1..n}paymentDetails

Unfortunately trying to abstract the different payment methods and to squeeze them (and their different possible stati and functions) in these tables was not very successful, it's a total mess with magic numbers, half-broken behavior and without any consideration for partial payments/captures or unfinished requests (i.e. if there is an exception before the response is dealt with, there is no indication that anything has ever been sent). Also the current amount is calculated through the history of the paymentDetails table, which basically works differently for each payment type.

How to fix this mess in a way that I'll still have a job by next week?

I'm trying to improve the db schema first, as I think my biggest problems are lying there. Through some research I've come across a recommendation for making payment type specific subtables (with a magic number/string in the main table to prevent having to look up all subtables). That way I can record what I send and receive without having to abstract it too much, so I'll have an acceptable transaction log. The paymentDetails table can be removed (necessary fields go to the payments table). The payments table gets multiple fields for the amount (differentiating between open, authorized, captured, processing and refunded values) and always reflects the current status.

Tables:
payments
paymentRequestsPaypal
paymentRequestsAmazonpay
paymentRequestsXyz

I think I'm going in the right direction here. hm. Maybe there's some light at the end of this long, dark tunnel. Or a train. I'll have two days to find out.

Windows 10 , I just want a flipping built in command line executable to log off another (local) user. I'm not a server, I don't have active directory, I don't want to switch to log in as that user first, i want to just kill their inactive local session because cisco freaking vpn doesn't allow you to connect when a other user is logged in. I can kill the session from admin task manager, I just want to be in the commandline. If your gonna let software check the number of logged in users, let the freaking administration modify the number of logged in users with a cli.

Idk if I could turn it off an on again. On a server I would just issue "query sessions" or "query users" followed by "logoff ##". Why not let me do the same damn thing on my home computer sk I don't have to restart MY SESSION just to close MY WIFE'S session. You stupid fraking company that cannot provide consistent command line programs across various systems. SCREW YOU MICROSOFT AND YOUR UTTER ASANINE DECISION MAKING REGARDING WHAT FEATURES TO INCLUDE IN WHAT BUILDS.

So I've been using Duet on my iPad Pro for a couple years now (lets me use it as an external monitor via Lightning cable) and without issue. Shit, I've been quite happy with it. Then the other day, whilst hooked up to my work laptop, there was a power fluctuation that caused my laptop to stop sending power to connected devices. Which is fine - I have it plugged into a surge protector so these fluctuations shouldn't matter. After a few seconds the laptop resumed normal operation and my connected devices were up and running again.

But the iPad Pro, for some reason, went into an infinite boot loop sequence. It reboots, gets to the white Apple logo, then reboots again.

In the end, after putting the iPad into recovery mode and running Apple's update in iTunes (as they recommend), it proceeds to wipe all my data. Without warning. I lost more than a couple of years of notes, illustrations and photos. All in one fucking swoop.

To be clear, you get 2 options in iTunes when performing a device update:

1. UPDATE - will not mess with your data, will just update the OS (in this case iPadOS)
2. RESTORE - will delete everything, basically a factory reset

I clicked UPDATE. After the first attempt, it still kept bootlooping. So I did it again, I made sure I clicked UPDATE because I had not yet backed up my data. It then proceeds to do a RESTORE even though I clicked UPDATE.

Why, Apple? WHY.

After a solemn weekend lamenting my lost data, I've come a conclusion: fuck you Apple for designing very shitty software. I mean, why can't I access my device data over a cabled connection in the event I can't boot into the OS? If you need some form of authentication to keep out thieves, surely the mutltiple times you ask me to log in with my Apple ID on iTunes upon connecting the damn thing is more than sufficient?! You keep spouting that you have a secure boot chain and shit, surely it can verify a legitimate user using authenticated hardware without having to boot into the device OS?

And on the subject of backing up my data, you really only have 2 manual options here. Either (a) open iTunes, select your device, select the installed app, then selectively download the files onto my system; or (b) do a full device backup. Neither of those procedures is time-efficient nor straightforward. And if you want to do option b wirelessly, it can only be on iCloud. Which is bullshit. And you can't even access the files in the device backup - you can only get to them by restoring to your device. Even MORE bullshit.

Conversely, on my Android phone I can automate backups of individual apps, directories or files to my cloud provider of choice, or even to an external microSD card. I can schedule when the backups happen. I can access my files ANYTIME.

I got the iPad Pro because I wanted the best drawing experience, and Apple Pencil at the time was really the best you could get. But I see now it's not worth compromise of having shitty software. I mean, It's already 2021 but these dated piles of excrement that are iOS and iPadOS still act like it's 2011; they need to be seriously reviewed and re-engineered, because eventually they're going to end up as nothing but all UI fluff to hide these extremely glaring problems.

Relatively often the OpenLDAP server (slapd) behaves a bit strange.

While it is little bit slow (I didn't do a benchmark but Active Directory seemed to be a bit faster but has other quirks is Windows only) with a small amount of users it's fine. slapd is the reference implementation of the LDAP protocol and I didn't expect it to be much better.

Some years ago slapd migrated to a different configuration style - instead of a configuration file and a required restart after every change made, it now uses an additional database for "live" configuration which also allows the deployment of multiple servers with the same configuration (I guess this is nice for larger setups). Many documentations online do not reflect the new configuration and so using the new configuration style requires some knowledge of LDAP itself.
It is possible to revert to the old file based method but the possibility might be removed by any future version - and restarts may take a little bit longer. So I guess, don't do that?

To access the configuration over the network (only using the command line on the server to edit the configuration is sometimes a bit... annoying) an additional internal user has to be created in the configuration database (while working on the local machine as root you are authenticated over a unix domain socket). I mean, I had to creat an administration user during the installation of the service but apparently this only for the main database...

The password in the configuration can be hashed as usual - but strangely it does only accept hashes of some passwords (a hashed version of "123456" is accepted but not hashes of different password, I mean what the...?) so I have to use a single plaintext password... (secure password hashing works for normal user and normal admin accounts).

But even worse are the default logging options: By default (atleast on Debian) the log level is set to DEBUG. Additionally if slapd detects optimization opportunities it writes them to the logs - at least once per connection, if not per query. Together with an application that did alot of connections and queries (this was not intendet and got fixed later) THIS RESULTED IN 32 GB LOG FILES IN ≤ 24 HOURS! - enough to fill up the disk and to crash other services (lessons learned: add more monitoring, monitoring, and monitoring and /var/log should be an extra partition). I mean logging optimization hints is certainly nice - it runs faster now (again, I did not do any benchmarks) - but ther verbosity was way too high.

The worst parts are the error messages: When entering a query string with a syntax errors, slapd returns the error code 80 without any additional text - the documentation reveals SO MUCH BETTER meaning: "other error", THIS IS SO HELPFULL... In the end I was able to find the reason why the input was rejected but in my experience the most error messages are little bit more precise.

Since my question, in all likelihood, won't get answered on StackOverflow, I hope I can ask it here instead. I hope that's alright.

So, I am currently developing a Feathers + Nuxt boilerplate, and am using localStorage to store the jwt.
But I noticed if I set the localStorage with the jwt manually, it will act as if I'm logged in, bypassing the entire login-function. So I solved this by using an iframe with a script that clears localStorage (and log out the user, if logged in) when something changes in the localStorage (by using the eventListener "storage"). (I am also observing the iFrame if someone deletes it, in the console, and re-inserts itself).

My question is if this would carry any security risks? Like, would this be a bad thing to do, security wise? Is it alright to leave it alone and let users/visitors to set the jwt manually?

So I think I have answered this, but here goes.
I have ddns service I need to update periodically. I chose once every 5 minutes. I am using this command:
/usr/bin/wget -O /dev/null -o /dev/null <webcall url>
I have it running every 5 minutes in a cronjob. I checked and wget is using port 443 to connect to my webcall url which is https. I am assuming this is hiding the details of the url. Is this true? Also, I don't like that the cronjob is sending the whole command to syslog. Is there a way to prevent it from syslogging this? I would rather keep the details of the url hidden as much as possible. I am the only user on the server, but am curious if there is a way.

So questions are:
1. Is wget hiding the details of the url from prying eyes? It is using port 443 for https.
2. Cannot I not log the cronjob command in syslog? I supose I could create a script that hides this.

>Be me
>Have the COMPAL modem with the DOCSIS OS
>Change my bedroom router's IP to static after doing factory reset on the modem
>As expected, I get booted from the modem settings page
>Cannot log in now, because "another user is already signed into the modem settings page"

Stupid piece of silicon waste, whyyyy. I hate that thing, ugh!

Sometimes I have to connect to production database and alter my dev environment so I can “log in” as a user and see what’s wrong with their account. Once in a while there is a legitimate website issue that is unique to that user’s profile. Other times it’s user error, like the user not understanding that they have to connect their membership to their online account (they think signing up for an account will connect it automatically).

I don’t like circumventing the user’s log in like this, but sometimes it’s necessary since the website is so confusing. I inherited this website, so many of the problems were formed way before I took over.

My stakeholders want a log in as user feature for website admins to use. My manager and PM don’t think that’s a good idea right now since there are over two dozen people with admin access and admin access means access to everything in the admin (there aren’t options to give permissions as needed).