What only relying on JavaScript for HTML form input validation looks like

"enter Phone number"
"numbers not allowed"

Finally I have something to rant about.

Your move, human...

Never trust the user with input...

Worst legacy experience...

Called in by a client who had had a pen test on their website and it showed up many, many security holes. I was tasked with coming in and implementing the required fixes.

Site turned out to be Classic ASP built on an MS Access database. Due to the nature of the client, everything had to be done on their premises (kind of ironic but there you go). So I'm on-site trying to get access to code and server. My contact was *never* at her desk to approve anything. IT staff "worked" 11am to 3pm on a long day. The code itself was shite beyond belief.

The site was full of forms with no input validation, origin validation and no SQL injection checks. Sensitive data stored in plain text in cookies. Technical errors displayed on certain pages revealing site structure and even DB table names. Server configured to allow directory listing in file stores so that the public could see/access whatever they liked without any permission or authentication checks. I swear this was written by the child of some staff member. No company would have had the balls to charge for this.

Took me about 8 weeks to make and deploy the changes to client's satisfaction. Could have done it in 2 with some support from the actual people I was suppose to be helping!! But it was their money (well, my money as they were government funded!).

Javascript Input validation

I was taking an introductory programming course. One assignment was to do a little payroll program, including some data validation. The program was supposed to accept terminal input and send output back to either the console or a printer.

Suddenly the printer began spewing out paper like crazy. One of the students (a particularly mouthy woman) had programmed a less-than-helpful error message ("YOU ARE WRONG") and then not provided any exit from the error-checking logic -- the program just re-read the last (failing) input and re-tested it. All in all, it was a very nice infinite loop.

After spitting through about fifty pages of "YOU ARE WRONG," somebody cut power to the printer, and the instructor had to flush the print queue manually. He went back to the student and asked if she had tested the program by sending the output to the console before trying to print it, and she said, yes, she had tested it on the console and ended up with a screen full of "YOU ARE WRONG" messages. Why, then, had she sent her output to the printer? "I thought I would be daring!"

The nightmare continues.

Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.

It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.

More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”

Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)

Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.

Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.

On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!

Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Root gets ignored.

I've been working on this monster ticket for a week and a half now (five days plus other tickets). It involves removing all foreign keys from mass assignment (create, update, save, ...), which breaks 1780 specs.

For those of you who don't know, this is part of how rails works. If you create a Page object, you specify the book_id of its parent Book so they're linked. (If you don't, they're orphans.) Example: `Page.create(text: params[:text], book_id: params[:book_id], ...)` or more simply: `Page.create(params)`

Obviously removing the ability to do this is problematic. The "solution" is to create the object without the book_id, save it, then set the book_id and save it again. Two roundtrips. bad.

I came up with a solution early last week that, while it doesn't resolve the security warnings, it does fix the actual security issue: whitelisting what params users are allowed to send, and validating them. (StrongParams + validation). I had a 1:1 with my boss today about this ticket, and I told him about that solution. He sort of hand-waved it away and said it wouldn't work because <lots of unrelated things>. huh.

He worked through a failed spec to see what the ticket was about, and eventually (20 minutes later) ran into the same issues Idid, and said "there's no way around this" (meaning what security wants won't actually help).

I remembered that Ruby has a `taint` state tracking, and realized I could use that to write a super elegant drop-in solution: some Rack middleware or a StrongParams monkeypatch to mark all foreign keys from user-input as tainted (so devs can validate and un-taint them), and also monkeypatch ACtiveRecord's create/save/update/etc. to raise an exception when seeing tainted data. I brought this up, and he searched for it. we discovered someone had already build this (not surprising), but also that Ruby2.7 deprecates the `taint` mechanism literally "because nobody uses it." joy. Boss also somehow thought I came up with it because I saw the other person's implementation, despite us searching for it because I brought it up? 🤨

Foregoing that, we looked up more possibilities, and he saw the whitelist+validation pattern quite a few more times, which he quickly dimissed as bad, and eventually decided that we "need to noodle on it for awhile" and come up with something else.

Shortly (seriously 3-5 minutes) after the call, he said that the StrongParams (whitelist) plus validation makes the most sense and is the approach we should use.

ffs.
I came up with that last week and he said no.
I brought it up multiple times during our call and he said it was bad or simply talked over me. He saw lots of examples in the wild and said it was bad. I came up with a better, more elegant solution, and he credited someone else. then he decided after the call that the StrongParams idea he came up with (?!) was better.

jfc i'm getting pissy again.

Rather than singling out one person, I wanna present what I see as incompetent/stupid/ignorant:
- no will to learn
- failure to follow the very specific instructions & later asking for help when they FUBR sth & not even knowing what they did to fuck up in the first place
- asking how to solve stuff, then ignoring the suggestions & doing sth totally against recommendations
- failure to remember most basic stuff, especially if not writing it down to look at later when needed
- failure to check logs & 'google' stuff before asking why something isn't working the way they want it
- after two weeks, asking me how feature xy works, mind you they coded it, not me
- asking me why they did something in a specific way - WTF, am I a mind reader?! Who designed that crap?! Me or you?!!
- being passive/aggressive & snarky when told to do something or being asked why isn't it done already
- not testing their shit properly
- not making backups when upgrading (production) servers
- not checking the input value, no validation.. even after many many debacles on production with null ref exceptions
- failure to admit they fucked up
- not learning from (their) mistakes

Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.

Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...

Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.

No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.

I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.

What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.

We (as new hires) had to add a fallback logic for input validation on every input element using only JSP and Spring controllers just because the client still uses IE6 and fucking disables Javascript!!

This rings true even if the customer is internal. Built a feature and provided documentation on how to use it and one of the end users still used it wrong.

It was a simple validation process too. Input the member ID then click validate, the app then checks if the person is in the system and fills in some other fields and does some other backend stuff. How could you get that wrong?! 🤔

Woke up this morning to a fucking giant snowstorm and my first reaction was 'fml' , poured some coffee , lit a smoke and started checking my work mail 'Issue xxxx response : Not solvable '...what the...I go through the files on my phone , look at what that issue was : lack of proper validation , filtering and encoding of input thus enabling xss . Not solvable my ass ...simply adding literally 3 more characters to that fucking retarded filter would stop all the bypasses . This issue is a showstopper for their project and that is what they answer ?
Sorry to indians out here but some of your colleagues are as stupid and unimaginative as they can possibly ever come .

I might be fucked up, but I have a tendency to gravitate towards the shit that everyone else dislikes for the sake of knowing if their bias against is actually because shit is truly fucked up or if shit is legit plain WRONG.

From all technologies that I have worked with professionally I can count:

Java(currently in the form of old JSP services for an "enterprise level application")

Java for Android development - i was the lead engineer for a mobile project

Swift with IOS dev, same gig as the above.

C++ for Android development in the form of OpenCV with Java as well.

Javascript in all possible forms, basic input validation, ajax services, jquery datatables, jquery animations and builders.

Css/sass heavily

Clojure for an ldap active directory application

Python for glue scripts

Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript

VB Net forms

C# For ASP.NET MVC

Bootstrap for multiple intranet frontends

Node+Express for a logistics warehouse management tool

Ruby on Rails freelancing small gigs

Php in all ways possible from complete standalone php apps to Laravel and just php+composer apps aaaaall the way to wordpress

Django consulting

I have found that the one that I dislike the most is wordpress. And the one that I like working with the most is Node. Don't know why, i just do really fucking like messing around with Javascript, the language has changed a fuckload throughout the years and continues to increase and change. It was my first scripting language following a stint in me trying to learn cpp way when i was starting and royally FAILING

Never really got the hate for it, even when I used JScript with classic ASP i just enjoy working with Javascript a lil too much. And from all the above mentioned stacks safe from Php is the one, or one of the ones in which i don't royally suck :V

Putty remote executuon vulnerability(no patch yet)

The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the target system.

The vulnerability exists due to unspecified input validation error when processing data, received from SSH server. A remote attacker can trick the victim to connect to a specially crafted SSH server and execute arbitrary code on the target system with privileges of the current user.

Successful exploitation of the vulnerability may allow an attacker to compromise vulnerable system.

I coded the app so good
I optimized the UX SO GOOD
I made the UI look GOOD
I made the error handling and input validation ROCK HARD SOLID BULLETPROOF

NO FUCKING WAY COULD YOU FUCK THIS UP

NO WAY COULD YOU BE DUMB ENOUGH NOT TO KNOW HOW TO USE IT AND NOT FUCK IT UP

I GAVE IT TO MY DAD AS A NORMAL USER TO TEST THE APP AND HE FUCKED IT UP ON THE FIRST TRY

HE DIDNT UNDERSTAND THE UX.

.

'17:15' < '09:45' === false
'5:15pm' < '9:45am' === true

I either need a language with a stronger type system, or coworkers who understand that comparing raw time input in validation is a bad idea 😡

About to punch Android studio in the face! My SYNTAX IS CORRECT!!!! 😡😡😡😡

I just created a free Spotify account using the email spotify@spotify.com. The leisurely breeze that is the input validation team's work at Spotify.

Only because i write validation for your input does not mean you can shut down your brain.

A few years ago I would whine, complain and rant about shitty software, which I knew could be so much better than it was. But I didn't yet write software of my own.

Now I complain about shitty libraries, API's and users. Not much has changed really. And every time I write code, I curse myself, and whoever made this trashpile I have to work with. I curse the user to the moon and beyond for using the program wrong. Funny thing is, exactly the thing I was complaining about (input validation, see earlier rant) is also exactly what no more than 5 minutes after release, a user fucked up with. The bot just does not respond at this point. But fuck these braindead retards for users.

In a few years I expect myself to be complaining about shitty compilers and buffer overflows, segmentation violations, bad coding style (don't make your program a fucking colander kthx), and so on.

Next decade I expect myself to be complaining about physics itself, and why the universe is governed by the laws it's governed by. Whoever this God is, he's a fucking retard. Funny thing is, the signs for it are already there. Electron theory! If only those electrons were positrons, then the math would check out properly. Instead of negative electrons traveling from negative to positive, we'd have positive positrons traveling from positive to negative. At least from what I understand so far, this is still a decade away after all.

The point I'm trying to make is that nothing changes, only my understanding of the world around me does, as I tumble further and further down the rabbit hole. Sometimes I wish I had taken the blue pill... Either complain about others' software or perhaps not give a shit at all. Become one of those filthy users I now despise.

Looking for a second opinion/validation.

*Me: “Perhaps this simple and concise way to ensure the user doesn’t lose their data before they leave the page that requires non-zero yet minimal input from the user. (Read: ya gotta push a save/submit button)”

*Everyone else: Let’s pretend to read the user’s mind and perform relatively complicated functions behind the scenes, of which the user will most likely be unaware, that will add an undetermined amount of complexity to the development because we think it’s “where things are going,” by saving the value of a certain HTML element as it loses focus.

Edit: this is an exclusively-internally used app.

Not adding input validation to that one page that time.

I knew my users were bad. I knew they'd fuck up. But I trusted the spec I trusted them.

Never again.

!rant
We were finishing another sprint of our grocery shop site at school and it was time for a demo.
There we are, showing our work before the other students. Our teams have a healthy habit of always checking each other not to leave some stoopid mistakes in the final versions, so everybody always regExes and validates THE SHIT out of every input field, both in the view and on the server side. But this one team found out that sometimes it's not enough.

Like every team, they're asked to buy a negative value from their shop. The guy clicks through the process, buys exactly -1 of a banana. He clicks the button to purchase and the site returned "Added banana to the cart!" and we're like "haha n00bz". But someone asked them to show the cart and everyone stopped immediately.

There were 9999 bananas in the cart.

Turns out the member responsible for purchase validation made it add 10000 if the quantity of a bought product was negative.
To this day I can't understand why he did that. xD

*laughing maniacally*

Okidoky you lil fucker where you've been hiding...

*streaming tcpdump via SSH to other box, feeding tshark with input filters*

Finally finding a request with an ominous dissector warning about headers...

Not finding anything with silversearcher / ag in the project...

*getting even more pissed causr I've been looking for lil fucker since 2 days*

*generating possible splits of the header name, piping to silversearcher*

*I/O looks like clusterfuck*

Common, it are just dozen gigabytes of text, don't choke just because you have to suck on all the sucking projects this company owns... Don't drown now, lil bukkake princess.

*half an hour later*

Oh... Interesting. Bukkake princess survived and even spilled the tea.

Someone was trying to be overly "eager" to avoid magic numbers...

They concatenated a header name out of several const vars which stem from a static class with like... 300? 400? vars of which I can make no fucking sense at all.

Class literally looks like the most braindamaged thing one could imagine.

And yes... Coming back to the network error I'm debugging since 2 days as it is occuring at erratic intervals and noone knew of course why...

One of the devs changed the const value of one of the variables to have UTF 8 characters. For "cleaner meaning".

Sometimes I just want to electrocute people ...

The reason this didn't pop up all the time was because the test system triggered one call with the header - whenever said dev pushed changes...

And yeah. Test failures can be ignored.
Why bother? Just continue meddling in shit.

I'm glad for the dev that I'm in home office... :@

TLDR: Dev changed const value without thinking, ignoring test failures and I had the fun of debunking for 2 days a mysterious HAProxy failure due to HTTP header validation...

Stakeholder: We have users who are putting like “John and Mary” on their membership’s first name field. Can we restrict that field so they can’t do that?

Me: But what if that user does identify as “John and Mary”?

Besides, what’s to stop any user from taking out the “and” and making it “John Mary” so they can get around input validation for words like “and”?

What the hell is wrong with the browser on iOS....
For Christ sakes almost no input attributes work. I have a Sign Up feature that validates passwords with a pattern attribute; doesn't work, required attribute; doesn't work, input type number; doesn't work.
What the fuck is wrong with this thing. Even Internet Explorer knows what those attributes means. Absolute joke now i need to implement it manually. Fuck off apple.

Amount of text you need to read to do something the framework way.
At the end it turns out you can’t do it cause nobody thought about it and it’s just another piece of crap for doing simple things. You start digging inside framework code and see that something is wrong. You see copyright Google and you wonder if they have phd for selling their ass on street. Why the fuck you override the validation flag to true every time ?
Then you start invoking couple of methods and one of them works and stops that madness but you don’t know why but you proceed further so you can glue shits together to stop the ship sinking.
At the end after you’ve tried all the “simple” examples that works cause they’re stupid and you need something special you start to think if this framework is so unique and special cause it covers 90% of things, left you with hands full of crap ?
At the end after wasting whole day to change the border color of the input using couple of separate controls the framework way and when you succeeded you ask yourself really ?
One fucking event emit and couple of listeners with style change ? Damn you frameworks with your bidirectional easy fast doing shit.
Another day in paradise.

I was so bored with work in the end. It was more administration than programming. So, i kinda quitted full application development. The thing is, it's expected that you use some existing framework. First of all - they never work how you want and the programming part of your work is mainly solving the limitations the framework brings without hacking too much. You keep within the boundaries of the framework. Besides that - since all fun stuff is already done by the framework builders all you have to do left is kinda administration. Field here, field there, rest call here. Extremely boring. When you've setup the base good, there's no challenge anymore, just producing windows and input forms.

Now, a few days ago, I started to make a clone of rocket chat. I use minimalist http framework (aiohttp) and you have to build most features yourself on top. Same for the ORM, i use dataset which does schema synchronisation for you but doesn't come with models. So i made a complete model / mapper entity framework on top of that. I made one single validation system that applies on models, forms and frontend validation. There's only one truth of valid data. Within the models, services, mappers and forms there's always the services variable available making it possible to fetch any data from any object. Never weird exceptions has to be done to get data. The implemented global LRU cache system is super in auto synchronizing the objects, don't have to do anything manually.

Finally software development of a full product is fun again. If you know how to do it - making your own framework is way easier than an existing one. On top of that, it's more advanced. I do understand that frameworks are aiming to be a bit minimal to be multi purpose, but with that attitude in mind, they still achieve to make it annoying as fuck.

Regarding time, it's just a few days of development. That's nothing for something that does exactly what you want. We have to drop the use-a-framework-because-it-is-stupid-to-do-yourself mentality. We should be programmers again! Not administrators! It's not weird that chatGPT can do so much of our jobs, our projects became lame.

I finally got the lstm to a training and validation loss of < 0.05 for predicting the digits of a semiprime's factors.

I used selu activation with lecun normal initialization on a dense decoder, and compiled the model with Adam as the optimizer using mean squared error.

Selu is self-normalizing, meaning it tends to mean 0 and preserves a standard deviation of one, so it eliminates the exploding/vanishing gradient problem. And I can get away with this specifically because selu *only* works on dense layers.

I chose Adam, even though this isn't a spare problem, because Adam excels on noisy problems and non-stationary objectives (definitely this), and because adam typically doesn't require a lot of hyperparameter tuning its ideal here, especially considering because I don't know what the hyperparameters should be to begin with.

I did work out some general guidelines on training quantity vs validation, etc.
The initial set wasn't huge or anything, roughly 110k pairs for training.

It converged pretty quick all things considered, and to the low loss like I mentioned, but even then the system always outputs the same result, regardless of the input, so obviously I'm doing something incorrectly.

The effectiveness of this approach for training and validation makes me question if I haven't got something wildly wrong. Still exploring though and figuring out how to get my answers back out. I'm hoping I just fucked up the output, and not the input as well.

So here I am debugging a factory in an algorithm I didn't write in a library I didn't write all so I can jam an exception throw into the code to handle input validation.

I am being forced to use exception handling. To handle input validation.

What is my life? It wasn't supposed to be this way. I was supposed to work with smart people who do smart things. Why?

When you work on a project for months, the newly appointed tech lead says "we all (him, the boss and other colleagues not involved in this project) looked at your code and decided that it should be dropped and we are starting from scratch again....now I'm not against code review (which we never did) so I welcome the input but allow me to vent my frustrations about how this is being done. Also to have a review & verdict without me being present?

So I ask what was so wrong:
* You changed the database structure. Valid, I tried to make your db an actual db with relationships, so I added some foreign keys, delete fields that were never used, all because they told me to use an ORM.
* You used to much logic in setters, validation etc, valid again but this would be something we could look at and fix imho.
* You are passing classes in your constructor, valid I wanted to use DI to make unit testing possible. Ohh but I don't like unit testing so I don't see the point and it makes it to complicated was the response.

So not only was the project cancelled, the new iteration is being developed without me, I'm shunned from all meetings. Ohh and from what I see they are now using 5 tables instead of 25 and completely started the db model from scratch...