Two factor authentication atrocities 😍😍

Today I found out that I could inject HTML into our documentation system.
I quickly tested it with the <style> tag by setting all paragraph tags to have eye bleeding red backgrounds.
Then when seeing that it works I've made a modal that displays a blinking red alert with the headline "Access Denied!", a loading bar that says "Tracing intruder IP..." and another line "Erasing confidential information.. .".
Then I've added an animation to run on all paragraph, heading and list tags - first they bounce and then the become transparent.

Then I asked one of the interns to go to that specific document - one of the longest and most important manuals they have access to.
I then left the room and through a window watched the poor, panicking guy looking into the abyss and "realizing" that he somehow deleted the important files and will be traced down soon.

I had to tell him the truth to avoid a suicide in the office.

It was perfect! I will definitely do this to others! :D

Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.

Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.

The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.

I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.

Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P

When the sysadmin changes the root password

ANTI VIRUSES AREN'T ALWAYS YOUR FRIEND!

So I'm under a little pressure to get an assignment done so I came home an was planning on working on it but Windows had other plans and decided to finish its update which I suspect copied my hard drive and uploaded it to the NSA at dial up speed because it it forever!!

But anyway back to the text in caps lock... I started working on it then when I hit compile I got an "access denied" error in the console and didn't know what the f*** was going on. So I decided to copy my filed to another directory and tried again... amazingly this worked so I carried on and after about 2 hours I get the same error -_- So instead of messing around and loosing my work I decided to commit it... but I cant... again "access denied" error.

After threatening my computer with a trip out the window, I finally decided to reboot it... cause "have you tried turning it off and on again" kept on rattling in my head.

After logging in I tried again and still the same error... Then I opened up my anti virus dashboard and went through the logs and found the screen shot attached.....

This is from my days of running a rather large (for its time) Minecraft server. A few of our best admins were given access to the server console. For extra security, we also had a second login stage in-game using a command (in case their accounts were compromised). We even had a fairly strict password strength policy.
But all of that was defeated by a slightly too stiff SHIFT key. See, in-game commands were typed in chat, prefixed with a slash -- SHIFT+7 on German-ish keyboards. And so, when logging in, one of our head admins didn't realize his SHIFT key didn't register and proudly broadcast to the server "[Admin] username: 7login hisPasswordHere".
This was immediately noticed by the owner of a 'rival' server who was trying to copy some cool thing that we had. He jumped onto the console that he found in an nmap scan a week prior (a scan that I detected and he denied), promoted himself to admin and proceeded to wreak havoc.
I got a call, 10-ish minutes later, that "everything was literally on fire". I immediately rolled everything back (half-hourly backups ftw) and killed the console just in case.
The best part was the Skype call with that admin that followed. I wasn't too angry, but I did want him to suffer a little, so I didn't immediately tell him that we had good backups. He thought he'd brought the downfall of our server. I'm pretty sure he cried.

Today was fucking awesome!

I always wanted to do a project in C++ since I've been more of a Java guy for years now.
And today, I finally wrote a full console program in C++! (For windows, it's a .exe)

The purpose of that program is to show if a file has a file lock on it (because of copying for example).

It started as simple as that, but got complicated quickly:
- It needs colors! So I added colors.
- Just a single file? Boring. I need wildcards, so I can put a * for anything in the file name! Jup.
- Just one directory? Boring. I need a recursive directory walk! Got it.
- But wait! There has to be an option to switch between recursive and wildcard/single mode! So I checked if the first argument equals "-r"! Hacky but works.
- Oh uh... that spams a lot now! The purpose was to show locked files, so I need another argument to specify that I only want to see locked files! Damn now it get's hard... I need a Linux-like command line argument parser (this -h and -s "hello" stuff). So I took the opportunity to write one myself! Done.
- Refactoring everything to use my new fancy parser...
- Adding more and more arguments, just because I can:
- "-d" hides "access denied" messages
- "-l" shows only locked files
- "-r" activates recursive directory walk
- "-f" formats everything nicely, basically printf("%-150.150s | %s", filename, locked); a maximum width which get's truncated if too long so everything lines up nicely
- "-h" which of course displays the help page
- "-w file" watches a file, if the file is locked it will refresh every 500ms, if it's still locked nothing happens, if it's unlocked, the program prints "unlocked" in green and exits. And yes, it does have a rotating line (something like this: "-" "\" "|" "/" "-" and so forth...)

That project was just awesome to make. I learn languages fastest if I just do a big project in them, and today, I really learned a lot.

Thank you for reading all this!

Unaware that this had been occurring for while, DBA manager walks into our cube area:

DBAMgr-Scott: "DBA-Kelly told me you still having problems connecting to the new staging servers?"
Dev-Carl: "Yea, still getting access denied. Same problem we've been having for a couple of weeks"
DBAMgr-Scott: "Damn it, I hate you. I got to have Kelly working with data warehouse project. I guess I've got to start working on fixing this problem."
Dev-Carl: "Ha ha..sorry. I've checked everything. Its definitely something on the sql server side."
DBAMgr-Scott: "I guess my day is shot. I've got to talk to the network admin, when I get back, lets put our heads together and figure this out."
<Scott leaves>
Me: "A permissions issue on staging? All my stuff is working fine and been working fine for a long while."
Dev-Carl: "Yea, there is nothing different about any of the other environments."
Me: "That doesn't sound right. What's the error?"
Dev-Carl: "Permissions"
Me: "No, the actual exception, never mind, I'll look it up in Splunk."
<in about 30 seconds, I find the actual exception, Win32Exception: Access is denied in OpenSqlFileStream, a little google-fu and .. >
Me: "Is the service using Windows authentication or SQL authentication?"
Dev-Carl: "SQL authentication."
Me: "Switch it to windows authentication"
<Dev-Carl changes authentication...service works like a charm>
Dev-Carl: "OMG, it worked! We've been working on this problem for almost two weeks and it only took you 30 seconds."
Me: "Now that it works, and the service had been working, what changed?"
Dev-Carl: "Oh..look at that, Dev-Jake changed the connection string two weeks ago. Weird. Thanks for your help."
<My brain is screaming "YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO LOOK FOR WHAT CHANGED!!!"
Me: "I'm happy I could help."

My parents are real sticklers for who is allowed to be on Netflix. They only let people on when they are present, and they never click 'save password'.

Me being a poor college student and desperate for the Netflix password, created a fake website for one of my parents to sign into.

How did I do this? I created my own localhost server with a backend database for the password to go to. I then copied the Netflix home screen and log in and asked them to log me into their account.

They said I can be on for one hour, and then they were signing me out.

I agreed to these terms.

As a small twist, I had also copied the no internet tab from Chrome for the page to redirect to. Knowing that once they logged in they would be expecting the main UI.

They logged in and then waited for the page to load. I, of course, put in a delay for the page to load and then displayed the no internet tab. They were confused and asked me to refresh, still nothing. I asked them if the router was out, and they went to check.

While they were away I quickly switched back to the real Netflix website and yelled back saying I got it working again. They came back over and saw that it was asking for a password again. They signed in and saw the main homepage and none were the wiser that day.

Once they left I checked inside the DB and found the plaintext password they typed in... The damn password was so simple, I cursed myself for not having figured it out sooner. No matter, I had my parents Netflix password.

So you're probably wondering how they didn't see the URL above and think something was off?

I pressed F11 and fullscreened my entire browser. They did ask, and I simply replied with, I don't like seeing all the crap up above when I'm streaming. No further questions, perhaps I was lucky.

I just got denied access to a metro station because I use the old BuzzyPazz over the new Mobib card, that digitally authorizes you and knows where you are, and when. I refuse to use it over privacy concerns and because my BuzzyPazz is indefinitely valid. LONG LIVE FUCKING TECHNOLOGY, DESIGNED NOT FOR LEGALLY GETTING ON A FUCKING METRO, BUT FUCKING DATA COLLECTION!!!!

Me trying to use Linux for first time:
Sudo node index.js
access denied
Sudo shutdown
access denied (noob)
Me: im going back to Windows now....

My school just tried to hinder my revision for finals now. They've denied me access just today of SSHing into my home computer. Vim & a filesystem is soo much better than pen and paper.

So I went up to the sysadmin about this. His response: "We're not allowing it any more". That's it - no reason. Now let's just hope that the sysadmin was dumb enough to only block port 22, not my IP address, so I can just pick another port to expose at home. To be honest, I was surprised that he even knew what SSH was. I mean, sure, they're hired as sysadmins, so they should probably know that stuff, but the sysadmins in my school are fucking brain dead.

For one, they used to block Google, and every other HTTPS site on their WiFi network because of an invalid certificate. Now it's even more difficult to access google as you need to know the proxy settings.

They switched over to forcing me to remote desktop to access my files at home, instead of the old, faster, better shared web folder (Windows server 2012 please help).

But the worst of it includes apparently having no password on their SQL server, STORING FUCKING PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT allowing someone to hijack my session, and just leaving a file unprotected with a shit load of people's names, parents, and home addresses. That's some super sketchy illegal shit.

So if you sysadmins happen to be reading this on devRant, INSTEAD OF WASTING YOUR FUCKING TIME BLOCKING MORE WEBSITES THAN THEIR ARE LIVING HUMANS, HOW ABOUT TRY UPPING YOUR SECURITY, PASSWORDS LIKE "", "", and "gryph0n" ARE SHIT - MAKE IT BETTER SO US STUDENTS CAN ACTUALLY BROWSE MORE FREELY - I THINK I WANT TO PASS, NOT HAVE EVERY OTHER THING BLOCKED.

Thankfully I'm leaving this school in 3 weeks after my last exam. Sure, I could stay on with this "highly reputable" school, but I don't want to be fucking lied to about computer studies, I don't want to have to workaround your shitty methods of blocking. As far as I can tell, half of the reputation is from cheating. The students and sysadmins shouldn't have to have an arms race between circumventing restrictions and blocking those circumventions. Just make your shit work for once.

**On second thought, actually keep it like that. Most of the people I see in the school are c***s anyway - they deserve to have half of everything they try to do censored. I won't be around to care soon.**

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

Heh, so I was working in tech doing the physical side of the department (going and moving computers or hardware fixes etc.)

Anyways since I got that job I noticed some of our recurring systems tickets are time consuming so I wrote some scripts to speed up the parts that I could.
(Like getting us all the useful information for hunting down missing machines or machines that haven't been able to be backed up in a while)

So yeah, made the scripts and some higher ups were like great you should submit them to our repo so they don't just disappear. Do it and get told by one of the like cto kinda guys that, "instead of doing a script to do what the original script should do, maybe go in and fix our original one."

So I told him, I don't get paid enough to fix your guys scripts, I don't know perl(which is what those ones are in) and honestly it's not my department for fixing those scripts, it's yours.

I had made a big post about what my scripts did and gave access to them and what they could have fixed in an hour they argued with me for months about just fixing their originals instead.

So now I've just actually gotten promoted out of that dept and into another where I will finally get paid to do more code, so I was closing my last tickets and the "trying to add my scripts to their repo" was one. The guy had denied my PReq Esso I closed the ticket thinking meh.

This guy re opens and again says just fix the scripts. Luckily I had done a personal repo for the scripts so others in my (now old) dept can keep using them. So I said I'm not in that department anymore, I made them available to the others and I still don't know perl. Not sure what your wanting me to do...

Got a laugh when he replied "oh yeah, just heard about the promotion... Congrats.. Where's the repo?"

I feel like I won finally

I need a new 'main' language to do all my projects in as java is kind of grinding away at my psyche.

Golang I liked quite a lot when I used it for my job a year ago, I'll give that a try..

Golang installed and up and working fine.

Oh, I know lets see if there are GLFW bindings for golang. And sure there are lets go!

Oh I need gcc and mingwex + mingw32 which I will acquire through cygwin.

hmm.. mingwex + mingw32 not found and my drive is almost full. I'll reinstall on my D:\ drive before continuing troubleshooting.

> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> Change permissions Access denied.

No problem I just don't own this object!

> Change to be the 'object owner' Success!
> Change permissions Success!
> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> takeown /F C:\Cygwin /A /R /D Y Success!
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.

At this point it would be more efficient to manually open up my ssd, and using a fridge magnet change every single bit to be exactly what I want it to be.

Or install linux.

40 minutes to realize that the "Access denied" error was not about the database on the server but about a local file.
And a sudo solved everything

I was supporting a legacy CRM app which front end used Visual Basic 6 and almost the entire business logic was written on SQL store procedures.

A "feature" of the product was the open code, anyone with admin access could modify forms, code and store procedures.

We also sold "official" (and expensive) consulting services to modify the code.

A long time customer owned this thing and it was heavily customized. They had hired us to change something, hired a third party to make other changes and decided to modify some stuff themselves because, why not?

Suddenly they came to product support asking to fix a bug. The problem happened on a non customized form.

After reviewing, I realized the form used several of the modified store procedures in the business layer. I tried saying we don't support custom code but my boss was being pushed and said "look into it"

All 3 parties denied responsibility and said their changes were NOT the problem (of course). Neither of them commented or documented their changes.

The customer started to threaten to sue us.

I spent 5 full days following every field on the form through the nested and recurrent SQL store procedures and turns out it was a very simple error. A failed insert statement.

I was puzzled of why the thing didn't throw any error even while debugging. Turns out in SQL 2003 (this was a while ago) someone used a print line statement and SQL stopped throwing errors to the console. I can only assume "printing" in SQL empties the buffered error which would be shown in the console.

I removed the print statement and the error showed up, we fixed it and didn't get sued
:)

Even people can be private, public or protected 😁

Welcome back to Britain - The true consequence of #Brexit 🤣

Why the fuck is this site blocked. How the fuck is it remotely adult content? ITS A GODDAMN WEBGL GAME. And you blocked is as being EDUCATIONAL. WHY THE FUCK WOULD MY SCOOL BAN A GODDAMN EDUCATIONAL WEBSITE?

P.S. for all those that know me, i made a website a year ago, during english class, and it got blocked at school (my goal was to get it blocked). Or so I thought. It turns out it didn't get blocked at my school, it was blocked across the whole county! I feel accomplished.

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

Big company issues: Try access something "access denied". Spend rest of day trying to figure out who can provide access to that page and what manager that needs to approve it :(

I got denied work from home status on black friday because I did not have RDP access for our solution.

let 👏 me 👏 use 👏 s 👏 s 👏 h 👏

Ready...
> access security
access: PERMISSION DENIED.
> access security grid
access: PERMISSION DENIED.
> access main security grid
access: PERMISSION DENIED...and...
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!
YOU DIDN'T SAY THE MAGIC WORD!

So I work for a VPN company as the Info Sec manager long story short I'm not usually the pleb who does customer support.

But today I ended up having to do this. I spent over 1 hour helping a client that a support agent escalated the request for to me. So I figure out that his network adapters are sharing incorrectly.
I fix problem.
He tries to connect.
Denied access so I check our servers for the request and he's blocked.
I think that's odd.....

I check active subscription and this person ISNT A CLIENT THATS ACTIVE....

WHY IS SUPPORT SO IGNORANT.
UGH.

Access denied

Tldr: fucked up windows boot sector somehow, saved 4 months worth of bachelor thesis code, never hold back git push for so long!

Holy jesus, I just saved my ass and 4 months of hard work...
I recently cloned one of my SSDs to a bigger one and formatted the smaller one, once I saw it went fine. I then (maybe?) sinned by attaching an internal hdd to the system while powered on and detached, thinking "oh well, I might have just done smth stupid". Restart the system: Windows boot error. FUCK! Only option was to start a recovery usb. Some googling and I figured I had to repair the boot section. Try the boot repair in the provided cmd. Access denied! Shit! Why? Google again and find a fix. Some weird volume renaming and other weird commands. Commands don't work. What is it now? Boot files are not found. What do I do now? At this point I thought about a clean install of Windows. Then I remembered that I hadn't pushed my code changes to GitHub for roughly 4 months. My bachelor thesis code. I started panicking. I couldn't even find the files with the cmd. I panicked even more. I looked again at the tutorials, carefully. Tried out some commands and variations for the partition volumes, since there wasn't much I could do wrong. Suddenly the commands succeeded, but not all of them? I almost lost hope as I seemed to progress not as much as I hoped for. I thought, what the hell, let's restart and see anyway. Worst case I'll have to remember all my code😅🤦.
Who would have thought that exactly this time it would boot up normally?

First thing I immediately did: GIT PUSH --ALL ! Never ever hold back code for so long!
Thanks for reading till the end! 👌😅

Welp, this made my night and sorta ruined my night at the same time.

He decided to work on a new gaming community but has limited programming knowledge, but has enough to patch and repair minor issues. He's waiting for an old friend of his to come back to start helping him again, so this leads to me. He needed a custom backend made for his server, which required pulling data from an SQL/API and syncing with the server, and he was falling behind pace and asked for my help. He's a good friend that I've known for a while, and I knew it wouldn't take to long to create this, so I decided to help him. Which lead to an interesting find, and sorta made my night.

It wasn't really difficult, got it done within an hour, took some time to test and fix any bugs with his SQL database. But this is where it get's interesting, at least for me. He had roughly a few hundred people that did beta testing of the server, anyways, once the new backend was hooked in and working, I realized that the other developer he works with had created a 'custom' script to make sure there are no leaks of the database. Well, that 'custom' script actually begins wiping rows/tables (Depends on the sub-table, some get wiped row by row, some just get completely dropped), I just couldn't comprehend what had happened, as rows/tables just slowly started disappearing. It took me a while of checking, before checking his SQL query logs (At least the custom script did that properly and logged every query), to realize it just basically wiped the database.

Welp, after that, it began to restrict the API I was using, and due to this it identified the server as foreign access (Since it wasn't using the same key as his plugin, even though I had an API key created just so it could only access ranks and such, to prevent abuse) and begin responding not with denied, but with a lovely "Fuck you hacker!" This really made my night, I don't know why, but I was genuinely laughing pretty hard at this response.

God, I love his developer. Luckily, I had created a backup earlier, so I patched it and just worked around the plugin/API to get it working. (Hopefully, it's not a clusterfuck to read, writing this at 2 am with less than an hour of sleep, bedtime! Goodnight everyone.)

!dev && rant

Looking for a song's lyrics... A very complicated task apparently. Blinding Lights by The Weeknd for whoever's interested.

Firefox: just one small thing to keep going, sorry we just updated our CA certs again. Screw you, close the browser. I will not restart it for you but I will tell you that I would. When you restart the browser, you will lose whatever search you were just doing. Sucks for you bastard! Enjoy the update.

Go to Genius Lyrics, please turn on JavaScript to run this "app". Done that? Okay now solve this CAPTCHA please. Um.. let me just leave that ingenious site.

Next one, AZ Lyrics: Yeah sorry your IP is from a hosting provider, but we will not tell you that is the reason. You've just been denied access to the site. See you next time! Everyone using a VPS to make a VPN connection with is obviously an abuser after all.

Finally found the lyrics on lyrics.com after a long journey that was way more complicated than it should've been. It's a good song.

Oh and Firefox consumed well over a GB for just a single tab of course...
I want Gopher, BBS, IRC and the likes back.

I was Just college fresher who completed his Engineering. My first week in the office. And a system was provided to me, since it was support project so I was given direct access to production database.

Fresher + Production Database + Access of Admin credentials = Worst Possible Combination

So it was my night shift, I was told to update new tariff plan for our client (which was one of the largest telecom service in India) .

If someone recharges for more than 200 Rupee, that person will get 10% or 20% extra talk time. Which was only applicable for particular circle (Like Bihar and Rajasthan).

Since I was fresher, I was told to update given query from my senior employee which he shared on the shared folder. Production downtime was in the mid night, so at that time I updated that query on the production database.

Query successfully updated. I completed my night shift, went home and slept.

When I woke up, I saw my mobile it had 200+ missed calls from different locations of India. They were Circle heads of that telecom service provider who contacted me. I realized something unexpected is expecting me.

Then at that moment my team lead called me and he asked me to come office right away.

Reminding you I was a fresher, I was shivering. What have I done there?

When I reached office, I came to know that the query I updated on production bombarded.

Every person who recharged that day (duration from midnight to morning 10 AM) got 10 times or 20 times more talktime.

A part of Query was something like this where error was made:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10/100; (Bihar)
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20/100; (Rajasthan)
But instead of this query, I updated below one:

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 10;
or

TalkTime = RechargeAmount + RechargeAmount * 20;
In a span of 10 hours, that telecom service lost revenue of 6.5 crore Rupees. Thanks to recovery team they were able to recover 6 crore but still 50 lakh Rupees were in loss.

One small query, and approx 1 million dollar was on stake.

Aftermath of this incident

My Mistake:

I should have taken those queries on mail. Or, there should have been mail communication regarding this.
Never ever do anything over oral communication. Senior employee who did this denied and said he provided correct query, and I had no proof of communication.
I told them, it was me who executed that query on production. Since I was fresher, and took my responsibility of that incident. My team lead rescued me from that situation.
Lesson Learned:

Always test your query and code multiple times before you execute or Go live it on production.
Always have email communication for every action you take on production.
Power comes with responsibility. If you have admin credentials of production never use it for update/delete/drop until you are sure.
Don’t take your job lightly.
I was not fired from that Job, but I have learnt my lesson very well.

Even though I've done this, I still get a real chuckle every time I see this.

It's 2022 and Firefox still doesn't allow deactivating video caching to disk.

When playing videos from some sites like the Internet Archive, it writes several hundreds of megabytes to the disk, which causes wear on flash storage in the long term. This is the same reason cited for the use of jsonlz4 instead of plain JSON. The caching of videos to disk even happens when deactivating the normal browsing cache (about:config property "browser.cache.disk.enable").

I get the benefit of media caching, but I'd prefer Firefox not to write gigabytes to my SSD each time I watch a somewhat long video. There is actually the about:config property "browser.privatebrowsing.forceMediaMemoryCache", but as the name implies, it is only for private browsing. The RAM is much more suitable for this purpose, and modern computers have, unlike computers from a decade ago, RAM in abundance, which is intended precisely for such a purpose.

The caching of video (and audio) to disk is completely unnecessary as of 2022. It was useful over a decade ago, back when an average computer had 4 GB of RAM and a spinning hard disk (HDD). Now, computers commonly have 16 GB RAM and a solid-state drive (SSD), which makes media caching on disk obsolete, and even detrimental due to weardown. HDDs do not wear down much from writing, since it just alters magnetic fields. HDDs just wear down from the spinning and random access, whereas SSDs do wear down from writing. Since media caching mostly invovles sequential access, HDDs don't mind being used for that. But it is detrimental to the life span of flash memory, and especially hurts live USB drives (USB drives with an operating system) due to their smaller size.

If I watch a one-hour HD video, I do not wish 5 GB to be written to my SSD for nothing. The nonstandard LZ4 format "mozLZ4" for storing sessions was also introduced with the argument of reducing disk writes to flash memory, but video caching causes multiple times as much writing as that.

The property "media.cache_size" in about:config does not help much. Setting it to zero or a low value causes stuttering playback. Setting it to any higher value does not reduce writes to disk, since it apparently just rotates caching within that space, and a lower value means that it just rotates writing more often in a smaller space. Setting a lower value should not cause more wear due to wear levelling, but also does not reduce wear compared to a higher value, since still roughly the same amount of data is written to disk.

Media caching also applies to audio, but that is far less in size than video. Still, deactivating it without having to use private browsing should not be denied to the user.

The fact that this can not be deactivated is a shame for Firefox.

God fucking damn this stupid MariaDB is full of bugs... First access denied because I tried to login as root as non root and now that... Damn...

Any Windows Sysadmins here? I have a question for you - How do you do it?

I only very rarely have to do something that would fall under "Windows System Administration", but when I do... I usually find something either completely baffling, or something that makes me want to tear our my hair.

This time, I had a simple issue - Sis brought me her tablet laptop (You know, the kind of tablets that come with a bluetooth keyboard and so can "technically" be called a laptop) and an SD card stating that it doesn't work.

Plugging it in, it did work, only issue was that the card contained file from a different machine, and so all the ACLs were wrong.

I... Dealt with Windows ACLs before, so I went right to the usual combination of takeown and icacls to give the new system's user rights to work with the files already present. Takeown worked fine... But icacls? It got stuck on the first error it encountered and didn't go any further - very annoying.

The issue was a found.000 folder (Something like lost+found folder from linux?) that was hidden by default, so I didn't spot it in the explorer.

Trying to take ownership of that folder... Worked for for files in there, safe for one - found.000\dir0000.chk$Txf; no idea what it is, and frankly neither do I care really.

Now... Me, coming from the Linux ecosystem, bang my head hard against the table whenever I get "Permission denied" as an administrator on the machine.

Most of the times... While doing something not very typical like... Rooting around (Hah... rooting... Get it?! I... Carry on) the Windows folder or system folders elsewhere. I can so-so understand why even administrators don't have access to those files.

But here, it was what I would consider a "common" situation, yet I was still told that my permissions were not high enough.

Seeing that it was my sister's PC, I didn't want to install anything that would let me gain system level permissions... So I got to writing a little forloop to skip the one hidden folder alltogether... That solved the problem.

My question is - Wtf? Why? How do you guys do this sort of stuff daily? I am so used to working as root and seeing no permission denied that situations like these make me loose my cool too fast too often...

Also - What would be the "optimal" way to go about this issue, aside for the forloop method?

The exact two commands I used and expected to work were:
takeown /F * /U user /S machine-name /R
icacls * /grant machine-name\user:F /T

My journey into learning Docker, chapter {chapter++}:

Today I learned that when you use a database image in your docker-compose file, and you want to rebuild the whole thing for reasons (say, a big update), then if you change your credentials ("root" to "a_lambda_user" or change the db's password) for more security, and you rebuild and up the whole thing... It won't work. You'll get "access denied".

Because the database (at least mysql and mariadb) will persist somewhere, so you need to run "docker rm -v" even though you didn't use any volumes.

I love loosing my fucking time.

Code in index.php: if(!isset($_COCKIE['access'] == '123') {
echo 'Denied'; die;
}

And then there was the access.php which set the cookie.

So you had to go to foo.com/access.php which displayed a white page and set the cookie. Then navigate back to foo.com for access

Can't git push
because of an "access denied" error message
because I didn't set up my key file properly (with right paths, right format and so on)
because I'm working from my home laptop device
because I'm in home office
because Corona
..but..
I can connect to my work computer where git is set up properly but also I
can't git push
because I can't "cd" into the project path
because the samba mount point is messed up
because I don't reboot my machine to fix it
because I can't enter my password
because it does have a full hard drive encryption and the password screen shows up before the network services are started.

Android studio emulators suck dick. I've been trying to put some goddamn files on the emulator in order to film my app working- hey, whaddaya know, the app doesn't see any of the files (On my phone it works flawlessly) and when I try to get to "emulated" folder- access is denied. What the actual fuck android studio?

For some reason I keep over engineering stuff to the point I spend 2 hours thinking the best way to do something. I'm making the backend for a project of mine and I wanted somewhat decent error handling and useful error responses. I won't go into detail here but let's say that in any other (oo) language it would be a no-brainer to do this with OOP inheritance, but Rust does OOP by composition (and there's no way to upcast traits and downcasting is hard). I ended up wasting so much time thinking of how to do something generic enough, easily extendable and that doesn't involve any boilerplate or repeated code with no success. What I didn't realize is that my API will not be public (in the sense that the API is not the service I offer), I'm the only one who needs to figure out why I got a 400 or a 403. There's no need to return a response stating exactly which field had a wrong value or exactly what resource had it's access denied to the user. I can just look at the error code, my documentation and the request I made to infer what caused the error. If that does not work I can always take a quick look at the source code of the server to see what went wrong. So In short I ended up thrashing all the refactoring I had done and stayed with my current solution for error-handling. I have found a few places that could use some improvement, but it's nothing compared to the whole revamp I was doing of the whole thing.

This is not the first time I over engineer stuff (and probably won't be the last). I think I do it in order to be future-proof. I make my code generic enough so in case any requirements change in the future I don't have to rewrite everything, but that adds no real value to my stuff since I'm always working solo, the projects aren't super big and a rewrite wouldn't take too long. In the end I just end up wasting time, sanity and keystrokes on stuff that will just slow down my development speed further down the road without generating any benefits.

Why am I like this? Oh well, I'm just glad I figured out this wasn't necessary before putting many hours of work into it.

That feeling when you really wanted to get the most of your travel time and do some programming. Access denied I guess?!

Good afternoon guys. Long time no hear from me and I'm sorry about that. Had a lot health problems to fight.

I'm currently trying to list all processes that are running on my pc with a C# program. VS is running with admin rights but I'm still getting an error: "System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: Access denied Error"
I tried googling it but if found the answer I didn't understand it.
Please help me.

AWS test error: An error occurred (AccessDenied) when calling the PutObject operation: Access Denied"

Hmmmmmmm

* proceeds to spend 2 hours correcting the role and policy for said user *

Alright, let's test!

AWS test error: An error occurred (AccessDenied) when calling the PutObject operation: Access Denied"

fuck you.

i'm not fucking sleeping until this is resolved

Crated a small program that would make life with an external hard drive easier.
Part of it includes copying music. Since I didn't have the EHD on me I decided to test this part on my music folder.
After going though circles because of a directory not found folder, I decided that the problem was that I workout one 0 in the spelling of my user directory. Finally, I thought that it was fixed, I was all excited and then "access to directory denied (I'm paraphrasing)", this is my music folder we are discussing here... 😓😒

AWS IAM permissions: a love-hate relationship! 😫🔐 On one hand, they promise control, but on the other, they're a labyrinth of confusion. Navigating JSON policies, deciphering documentation, and debugging 'Access Denied' errors. Oh, the joys of IAM! 😅

I don't understand this:
xtrabackup --backup --datadir=/Path/To/Database/ --target-dir=/Path/To/DBBackup/ --host=172.25.0.51 --port=3306 --user=backup --password=...

When I execute it out put says:
Access denied for user 'backup'@'172.25.0.1'

Why is it using user@GATEWAY instead of user@HOST?

On build "Access to the path 'bin..' is denied". Close and reopen Visual Studio. Fixed. Repeat every hour.

If I need to write a script to do something quickly and I encounter an error:

try:
do_something()
except:
pass # if curious, even print bad item

i.e. stupid errors such as url not found, access denied or whatever else I'm too lazy to find in a mess I wrote in 5-10 minutes, which mostly consists of a regex fetched stuff or similar

!rant

Got a question since I've been working with ancient web technologies for the most part.
How should you handle web request authorization in a React app + Rest API?
Should you create a custom service returning to react app what the user authenticated with a token has access to and create GUI based on that kind of single pre other components response?
Should you just create the react app with components handling the requests and render based on access granted/denied from specific requests?
Or something else altogether? The app will be huge since It's a rewrite off already existing service with 2500 entities and a lot of different access levels and object ownerships. Some pages could easily reach double digits requests if done with per object authorization so I'm not quite sure how to proceed and would prefer not to fuck it up from the get go and everyone on the team has little to no experience with seperated frontend/backend logic.

I decided to delete Apache Zookeeper on my Windows system but I cannot delete

1)CreateTxn.
2)DeleteTxn.
3)SetACLTxn.
4)TxnHeader.

in "docs\apidocs\zookeeper-jute\org\apache\zookeeper\txn\class-use"

It should be easy to delete but Windows said it cannot delete the file. I try to delete using command prompt but it said access denied.

I hate AWS sometimes, their error codes and messages for s3 is a whole load of bullshit.

do getObject on a file that doesn't exist that's 403: AccessDenied: Access Denied

do a headObject on a file that doesn't exist
4.3: Forbidden: null

Company denied me access to geckoboard stating compliance. Damn, created a self one with gridster & dashing. Now, they want me to make it reusable. .