An area sales rep once rang me to tell me his iPhone screen was cracked and was going blurry around some sections.

I told him to fetch me to look, and I will see what I can do.

5 minutes later I get a SCREENSHOT from his phone asking if I can see the crack and blurry edges.

HOW FUCKING DUMB ARE THESE PEOPLE!!!

I mean, come on. He seriously said when I called him: "But I can see the crack and blurry bits on the screenshot on my phone"

Receive a Nexus from my University to test new features on Android and now it have a wide crack on the screen.
I don't have the courage to tell the University

TL;DR: don't fuck with your IT guy.

One of the guys in our office treats his laptop like shit, has dropped it a number of times and had managed to break the screen. There was a nice crack diagonally corner to corner across the screen with a nice black splotch around it making a good chunk of his screen unusable. Servicing the laptop would be too expensive and would mean being without the machine for several weeks forced to use a Mac.

I offered to replace the screen for him since I have experience doing laptop repairs. Once the screen arrived I kept the laptop for the evening and spent an hour replacing the screen. I left a note telling him he owed me $60 for my time.

He sees the note, laughs and says "I'll buy you lunch."

Not only does this guy only keep his word when offering to buy lunch about 10% of the time, when he does actually do it he charges it on the company card so it isn't really him paying for it. So I spent my lunch break writing up a little Python app which randomly fucks with his mouse and keyboard.

I sent him a message that I needed to run some tests on his new screen tonight so I'll be able to install it and set it to run on boot.

The app does things like:
Jiggle the mouse
Minimize all windows to show the desktop
Double click
Right click

Can't decide if I want to add in reboots as well.

I figure I'll leave it going until I get $60 worth of entertainment out of 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.

for your next edition of "TI's constantly been smoking crack since the 80s and has no intention of ever stopping":

the TI-8x calculators have a hardware buffer and an OS-provided buffer for screen data, effectively being an "immediate" buffer in hardware, to be displayed next VBlank, and a "slower" buffer, being what's copied to the "immediate" buffer when the OS decides it's time to update the screen. All well and good, maybe a little weirdly done but all in all makes sense. (You can even define a third buffer in RAM if you need to triple-buffer your shit.)

The problem arises when you use TI-BASIC and try to draw to the screen:
If you do something like, say, draw a circle, you'll notice that it's visibly drawn to the screen one pixel at a time. However, looking through what bits of the SDK I can find, the OS' "draw circle" assembly routine *doesn't update the immediate buffer!*

This means that, in TI-BASIC, the "draw circle" routine doesn't use the ACTUAL circle-drawing routine the OS provides, but instead individually calculates and plots a pixel, then updates the hardware buffer (an ENTIRE 768 bytes are copied EVERY TIME) and waits for VBlank to pass before repeating for the next one. In other words, it's deliberately slow as fuck.

Why? All the drawing commands, outside of like 2 or 3, do this. Why would you deliberately slow down the process of drawing to the screen on a system that you KNEW would be popular for people to code on???

I've had my share of "Hey you know computers, right?".
When I was getting my degree I drove a taxi on the weekends.
My boss calls me:
"Hey, my laptop is acting weird, could you have a look?"
Curious; I ask what it's doing.
"There's a pair of sunglasses covering the entire screen. Maybe it's a bra, I don't know."
Wtf?
When I left the taxi at his house, I had a look. I start the computer, Windows boots up, and sure enough, it looks like a pair of sunglasses is covering the screen, kind of.
I also notice a crack in the screen from top to bottom.
"So what kind of virus is this?!"

He felt stupid when I told him what the problem was. I ordered a new screen and replaced it for him and told him not to sit on his laptop again. 😜

!dev but definitely a rant.

Ordered a lovely new UHD HDR tv for the family on Monday.

MFW I see the courier is Hermes (notoriously bad).

It arrived today.

Any guesses as to the condition it was in?

Yep. Lovely crack on the screen.

Took all day to clear it up with Amazon.

And the best they could bloody do was a refund, but I have to organise the collection and pay for that (which they said they’ll refund).

FFS.

You know what you shouldnt do? Leave your bag with your work laptop at the stairs.

Woke up as normal today and helped the kids down the stairs without checking. Then I just heard how I stepped on something.

Lets say its a big crack in the middle of the screen and you see shit. But gladly it work with work with external screens so its just the screen that are damaged. So tomorrow I must either:

- Work as normal with an external monitor and simply wait to call the boss for fix until after christmas.

- Or call the boss and tell him how stupid I am and hope its okay and I van get a new one/fix this.

Right now I feel for the first one.

Who says you can't use CMD on a Windows phone?

I managed to crack the screen of my precious Lumia (yes, haters, I <3 winPhone) and now the back and home buttons don't work. Everything must happen by searching it in cortana/search.

You can imagine what going back one level in settings must be like. And every operation is like a command on a shell. No tiles, no swipes, nothing. It feels raw.

I'm using an auxiliary android (ughh) phone for now, but there's no windows phone in the market right now. And the swipe on G-board sucks.

The point of this rant is a question: does anyone know when the surface phone is releasing?

Xiaomi

they crack the market of mid and low range mobile devices and nowdays they are just showing freaking ad too frequent.

like normally when you pause video you get to choose play button but in xiaomi they show you a big ad on screen. they even show ad on every operation of file, multimedia etc.. and also because they provide regular update at cost of useless app which consumes lot of storage.

So my friends laptop had a long crack on his screen from mid left of the screen, squiggle around to bottom left. Every time he boots to the login screen, he struggles to enter his password. Because the crack affected the laptop's touchscreen, it's not emitting a touch event at the bottom left of the screen every time. He did finally managed to get the password in afterwards, and struggled to get to device manager and disabled the touchscreen driver, then later uninstalled it.

TLDR; had a hard time using his laptop because it was touching itself.

You know I'm looking around a t a museum of 3d graphics programming right now.

Not my first time but the same arcade machines are playing the same tooons over and over again in an eerie way and strange;y thertes a basketball game up there on several large screen tvs too...

I remember my first detailed look at opengl.

For some reason it just never worked for me.
But I see all these incredible sources of past fortune sitting unplayed, and think.. wow... what a waste.

these brought me many hours of joy and gave me an opportunity or so I thought to try to make friends and meet other teens when I was younger.

They represent countless hours of lovingly crafted mind-crack, and noone smokes them anymore.

Aliens armaggedon sits right in front of me, holstered faux guns glowing in red alluringly.

the huge box of unclaimed mooks and stuffed sheep sit there sadly robotic arms that can never reach them just hanging rusting, unloved by a new generation to curse them for never grasping anything and stealing their quarters and a HUGE 96 inch or more screen for Tomb Raider, FUCKING TOMB RAIDER hums in a corner just slightly out of my full view.

and noone is here. why ?
and yet the gaming industry supposedly continued to thrive.

in a way arcades were better they kept people from being addicted to wowcrack.

just like raising gasoline prices would prompt the creation of cleaner more efficient mass transit.