Hey everyone - just a note on rants about politics: we've had a long-standing policy not to really allow any of them. So if you post one and see it quickly disappear from the feed, that's why.

We've gathered a lot of feedback on this and Tim and I both agree that Facebook is ridden with posts about politics and one of the more refreshing aspects of devRant is we've kept it free of that. It's also an aspect of Facebook that many people I've talked to really hate.

Thank you, and feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

*Email*
"We updated our Privacy Policy"
"We updated our Privacy Policy"
.
.

*opens devRant*
**Rants on Privacy Policy**

-_-

Didn't want to post it as there's been already a lot of posts like this. But I just can't help myself to rant over this. This happened yesterday. I helped him earlier with his phone.

Friend of my dad: Hey, I need your help with my laptop I bought from eBay.

Me: *flashbacks of devRant posts*

Him: Everything works. It's just that nothing comes up in display.

Me: Okay, you need to take that to a repair shop. If at least something came up on screen I could help.

Him: Aren't you a computer engineer? I bought this because I knew you can fix it.

Me: *more flashbacks*

Him: You gotta help me with this. I can't lose money on this

Me: You didn't even ask me anything before buying. Ask your buyer if they have a 30 day return policy.

Him: Why are paying this much to study Computer Engineering? I'll talk to your dad.

This people man. I told my dad and he never received his call anymore

Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.

That time when...

He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.

He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).

He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).

He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.

He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.

He set up a new email account for each individual online service.

He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).

He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).

He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).

He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.

He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.

He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).

He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.

(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).

He ate a sim card.

He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).

He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.

He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).

He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).

He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.

I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.

Yay devRant stickers!! I suppose I could rant about how they took almost 2 months to get here, but I have a policy against complaining about free things so I won't! And because, well... DevRant is awesome!

Ladies and gentleman, I've done it.
Remove your hacker game trophies from your wall.
That nasty bug you fixed a couple of nights ago? Meh.
Your top devRant post? You'll delete it after reading this.
Every awesome accomplishment you can think of: it all means shit now.

>> I have SUCCESSFULLY changed my business Microsoft account password into something I can remember AND Microsoft accepted it in under an hour of trying!!!!! <<

I want to say a big FUCK YOU to MICROSOFT for WASTING MY BLOODY TIME.

FUCK YOU for giving me a max of 16 characters. DASB&(*(&G*HH*& for telling me every time my password is 100% strength and then after every submit tell me I have to change it AGAIN because it should be harder to guess. WUT?! It was 16 characters including a (capital) letter, number and multiple special characters, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! UNICODE EMOJI'S???!!! ALLOW ME TO USE MORE CHARACTERS SO I WILL MAKE IT HARDER TO GUESS IT, IT'S 2018 FFS.
I don't even understand why my new password is accepted compared to the other one, but fuck it I can access my account again.
Now I might have to find a new job before the company password policy kicks in again.

/me drops everything and walks out of the office to get wasted (not sure if celebrating or just really pissed off)

I feel I should open a github repo, for people to contribute privacy policy parts into, have say folders like "google analytics" and then whenever people encounter those in the wild, add examples there, so people could fetch together a full privacy policy for free, as all those new cashgrab websites are just fucking insane. But I am not really sure, if that would find any contributors tbh sadly.

P.S: I seem to have developed now a third sense, when the devrant post cooldown is down, so I can rant more lol, because whenever I feel like posting the thought or rant, the cooldown is just about to expire

devRant is nice.
If you move rant feed to "Recent" and saw a bunch of rant u already read but you keep scrolling down hoping to see new rant but u fail cause rant policy keep people from posting new rant for 2 hour and not many new rant has been post.
This is a nice feature. It make u self aware that "crap, maybe too much time on devRant". Even if you addict to devRant but by this policy -> It force you to really close its app and checking it on another free time. (more healthy than another social media I guess 😂)

DevRant has many privacy-conscious people and honestly just people who don't like when their personally identifiable data gets shared.

Yet, DevRant uses Carbon Ads owned by BuySellAds. Here's what their privacy policy reads:

"Some Personally Identifiable Information may also be provided to intermediaries and other Third Party Service Providers (defined in part (4) below) who assist us with the Services"

You know what's the funniest thing? In "part 4 below" they never actually state which companies do they share personally identifiable information with.

Just a quick reminder that when you use DevRant, your personally identifiable information may be shared with any amount of third parties, and you could bet a lot of money that the list includes Google and Facebook because of remarketing. Remarketing is a fancy term that means not selling personal data but instead giving it away for free.

Use AdGuard or any other browser extension that blocks analytic scripts. Buy a Raspberry Pi Zero W and make yourself a PiHole. When you're using DevRant mobile app, use analytics-blocking VPN.

I was going to rant today about lack of self-awareness and emotional intelligence in some developers, this rant was based on the interviews I have seen flop over the years.

But then, as I am typing it, people in my office start having this exact conversation. We get together and discuss it and in the end we come to the same conclusion as my rant.

Now it feels like a waste to rant about something on the internet when I got to have a real in-person discussion about it.

It’s like devRant in real life!

——

The outcome of the offline chat...

- Have a cultural policy that is strictly NO ASSHOLES
- Watch for people who are nasty on the internet, especially LinkedIn
- Be careful with people who have a lot of questions for you but answer your questions with “we are in stealth mode” or something similar
- There is no point in wasting your time on these folks in an interview, just politely conclude it as fast as you can and move on

Fantasizing about stabbing SharePoint in the throat, I'm being forced to contact Microsoft tech support, so I need to obtain our software assurance account info.
Our company's rep sends me our SA account numbers (assuming that was all I needed) and the link to create an incident.

Step through Microsoft support ticket 'wizard' which ends with requiring a login with a Microsoft account.

Me: "What login account should I be using?"
Rep: "You shouldn't need one. Just use the SA account number and access ID I sent you."
Me: "There is no entry for those values. I step through a support 'wizard' and the final page redirects me to the Microsoft login page."
Rep: "Use your work email address."
Me: "I can, but I shouldn't have to use my personal outlook email address. Can I just send you the issue and you submit the ticket? After the ticket is created, all the correspondence will be through email anyway."
<30 min. later>
Rep: "I just linked your work email address to your company's account. You should be able to login now."
Me: "Same error. I think you're messing with me."
<30 min. later>
Rep: "Select the option to create an account with your own email."
Me: "Now I know you're messing with me. Already tried that and received the error 'You cant sign up here with a work or school email address'."
Rep: "Weird...I guess Microsoft changed their policy."
Me: "So now what?"
<1 hour later>
Rep: "You might have to send me your SharePoint issue and I'll get a ticket created. After the ticket is created, I'll change the contact email address to you."

WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THAT TWO HOURS AGO!

Whew! Thanks devRant...that's better. I put the knife down and now only want to punch SharePoint in the face.

!development related

The problem with working for a school is depending on the district and there policy the sites you need are blocked. The district I'm at today blocks devRant and I'm posting this using mobile data.

LIKE WTF I FUCKING WORK HERE YOU ASSHATS LET ME FUCKING ACCESS THE SITES I NEED/WANT TO VISIT. I WORK FOR THE FUCKING DEPARTMENT THAT KEEPS ALL YOUR SHIT WORKING!

I was wondering if it is allowed to crawl all posted rants on devrant to do some fancy data mining stuff while learning python. Any clue?