Today my current company fuck itself.

We were in negotiations about the end of my contract/mission, I want to quit to create a company around AI.

And the actual chairman said to me "You think too highly of yourself. I could find a tenth of people to replace you so shut up and take what we offer".

30 minutes later they received my resignation. 1h after that, the 15 dev under me resigned (after two year working with us they are clearly under paid). At the end of the day, the Head of product and the two good PO resigned.

This morning I get an email, talking about suing me as I made everyone resigned and asking for a meeting.
So I went to the meeting with a lawyer, they weren't expecting it. Boring legal stuff came after that.

And the funny fact: at the end of the meeting the CIO, chief ops and the SRE resigned as well.... As they didn't want to have the run it without all the team...

Funny day :)

Last month the main product, 90% of the company use it, was launched. And in three months 80% if the IT profiles will be out...

Well, it happened. The stupidest request, no demand, I have ever, and most likely will ever receive...

Me: So what is it you're looking to do with your website.

Client: We're not showing up Facebook's home page. We need you to fix that. We have a budget of $10,000 to make this happen right now.

Me: As much as I'd love to take your money, that isn't something I can control. Every "home page" is profile-based, which technically isn't a homepage, but a "feed" that changes constantly. So say you create a profile on Facebook, only those you follow, and paid posts show up on your feed. What I can do however is use your budget to create and promote posts from your company page to show on users' feeds. If you're serious about marketing, we can start slow at $250/week, then work our way up or down based on results until your budget is exhausted, then re-evaluate the budget at that time. I can tailor a retainer for you based on the number of ads per week that you'd like to make.

Client: No, this is not what we're asking for at all.

Me: Okay...what is it you're looking for exactly? Run through this in as much detail as possible so I can get on the same page.

Client: We want to be on the main home page of facebook.com. We want our logo on that page when people sign up to make an account, linking to our website.

Me: That's simply not possible. That's Facebook's own home page. Nobody has a right to edit that other than Facebook itself.

Client: Bullshit. There's a Facebook developers section with APIs to edit and view Facebook's entire website. We would do it ourselves, but we signed up and don't understand how to change it in Chrome. That's why we need you and [referring client] said you were the best guy for our needs.

Me: That API has no control over Facebook's corporate data, including their own home page. That API designed ONLY for sections in which you are authorized to access or modify, such as your personal profile or created page for your business.

Client: We know that it can be done. If you don't do it, we'll find someone else who can.

Me: Well good luck with that, because the only way it would be remotely possible to do that WILL involve prison time, since that would be illegal. The only legal way to do it would be to buy Facebook, and they'll laugh you out of the building with that offer. But I'm done with this conversation because I have work to complete from clients that aren't delusional. Have a nice day! [hang up]

----

What. The. Fuck.

Met a guy in the gym, he asked me to make him an online shop for supplements.
I quickly made a reactive, angular based shop with an admin page.
He paid, I put my name as the creator, it was all good...

...then he removed all legal products and added tons of anabolic steroids for horses in little jars (yes, he even added pro level photos).

I received a call from the police and had to prove that I don't manage his content.

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

PM: You know that screen that pops up at the start of the app asking for permission to access health data?

Me: Yeah the iOS HealthKit permission screen. What about it?

PM: Can you take that out. I don't think people are going to agree to it. I want people to use the app.

Me: Well we can't do that, apple says if we want to use HealthKit we have to ask for permission. We shouldn't be touching that data without permission anyway.

PM: Oh no permission is fine I get that, but is it not implied by downloading the app, its clearly a health app. I really don't want people to download it and then uninstall it because they don't like this.

Me: Not really, not everyone will know what data is needed, some of it might be sensitive to them.

PM: Nah I don't buy into that. I asked 5 of my friends on the golf course at the weekend and 3 of them said they wouldn't agree to it, thats 60% of our user base, we can't have that.

Me: ... ok, well I don't agree that your 5 friends is a fair sample to judge the whole world by, either way we have no choice.

Pm: No this isn't going to fly, can we not build our own HealthKit that doesn't have this kind of permission screen? Maybe we could start our own, and invite our partners to use it?

Me: ... no

Pm: why not? We'll have legal draw up something we put in the terms and conditions.

Me: ... it will take months to build for all the different types of devices we have, if they even let us get access to them, and then we will have a different standard to everyone else.

Pm: ... no your not seeing the big picture, i'll run the idea up the ladder.

**It was approved up the ladder, and subsequently cancelled when they realised the scale of the work involved which is both a "thank god" and a "wtf" moment**

Hacking/attack experiences...
I'm, for obvious reasons, only going to talk about the attacks I went through and the *legal* ones I did 😅 😜

Let's first get some things clear/funny facts:
I've been doing offensive security since I was 14-15. Defensive since the age of 16-17. I'm getting close to 23 now, for the record.

First system ever hacked (metasploit exploit): Windows XP.
(To be clear, at home through a pentesting environment, all legal)
Easiest system ever hacked: Windows XP yet again.

Time it took me to crack/hack into today's OS's (remote + local exploits, don't remember which ones I used by the way):
Windows: XP - five seconds (damn, those metasploit exploits are powerful)
Windows Vista: Few minutes.
Windows 7: Few minutes.
Windows 10: Few minutes.
OSX (in general): 1 Hour (finding a good exploit took some time, got to root level easily aftewards. No, I do not remember how/what exactly, it's years and years ago)
Linux (Ubuntu): A month approx. Ended up using a Java applet through Firefox when that was still a thing. Literally had to click it manually xD
Linux: (RHEL based systems): Still not exploited, SELinux is powerful, motherfucker.

Keep in mind that I had a great pentesting setup back then 😊. I don't have nor do that anymore since I love defensive security more nowadays and simply don't have the time anymore.

Dealing with attacks and getting hacked.

Keep in mind that I manage around 20 servers (including vps's and dedi's) so I get the usual amount of ssh brute force attacks (thanks for keeping me safe, CSF!) which is about 40-50K every hour. Those ip's automatically get blocked after three failed attempts within 5 minutes. No root login allowed + rsa key login with freaking strong passwords/passphrases.

linu.xxx/much-security.nl - All kinds of attacks, application attacks, brute force, DDoS sometimes but that is also mostly mitigated at provider level, to name a few. So, except for my own tests and a few ddos's on both those domains, nothing really threatening. (as in, nothing seems to have fucked anything up yet)

How did I discover that two of my servers were hacked through brute forcers while no brute force protection was in place yet? installed a barebones ubuntu server onto both. They only come with system-default applications. Tried installing Nginx next day, port 80 was already in use. I always run 'pidof apache2' to make sure it isn't running and thought I'd run that for fun while I knew I didn't install it and it didn't come with the distro. It was actually running. Checked the auth logs and saw succesful root logins - fuck me - reinstalled the servers and installed Fail2Ban. It bans any ip address which had three failed ssh logins within 5 minutes:
Enabled Fail2Ban -> checked iptables (iptables -L) literally two seconds later: 100+ banned ip addresses - holy fuck, no wonder I got hacked!

One other kind/type of attack I get regularly but if it doesn't get much worse, I'll deal with that :)

Dealing with different kinds of attacks:

Web app attacks: extensively testing everything for security vulns before releasing it into the open.
Network attacks: Nginx rate limiting/CSF rate limiting against SYN DDoS attacks for example.
System attacks: Anti brute force software (Fail2Ban or CSF), anti rootkit software, AppArmor or (which I prefer) SELinux which actually catches quite some web app attacks as well and REGULARLY UPDATING THE SERVERS/SOFTWARE.

So yah, hereby :P

My biggest dev blunder. I haven't told a single soul about this, until now.

👻👻👻👻👻👻

So, I was working as a full stack dev at a small consulting company. By this time I had about 3 years of experience and started to get pretty comfortable with my tools and the systems I worked with.

I was the person in charge of a system dealing with interactions between people in different roles. Some of this data could be sensitive in nature and users had a legal right to have data permanently removed from our system. In this case it meant remoting into the production database server and manually issuing DELETE statements against the db. Ugh.

As soon as my brain finishes processing the request to venture into that binary minefield and perform rocket surgery on that cursed database my sympathetic nervous system goes into high alert, palms sweaty. Mom's spaghetti.

Alright. Let's do this the safe way. I write the statements needed and do a test run on my machine. Works like a charm 😎

Time to get this over with. I remote into the server. I paste the code into Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. I read through the code again and again and again. It's solid. I hit run.

....

Wait. I ran it?

....

With the IDs from my local run?

...

I stare at the confirmation message: "Nice job dude, you just deleted some stuff. Cool. See ya. - Your old pal SQL Server".

What did I just delete? What ramifications will this have? Am I sweating? My life is over. Fuck! Think, think, think.

You're a professional. Handle it like one, goddammit.

I think about doing a rollback but the server dudes are even more incompetent than me and we'd lose all the transactions that occurred after my little slip. No, that won't fly.

I do the only sensible thing: I run the statements again with the correct IDs, disconnect my remote session, and BOTTLE THAT SHIT UP FOREVER.

I tell no one. The next few days I await some kind of bug report or maybe a SWAT team. Days pass. Nothing. My anxiety slowly dissipates. That fateful day fades into oblivion and I feel confident my secret will die with me. Cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

Been lurking here for a while. Finally pissed off enough to post.

Been programming in Ada for nearly a decade now. One of the few younger devs who knows the language well. Have a large collection of libraries and tools written in it, open source. Done contract work. Looking to get out of my current line of work, which is medicine, because fuck this recent legal climate. I'm spending all my time dealing with legal compliance and it rapidly changing.

I see a job posting from a company looking for a programmer to mostly write testing stuff for clients. They mostly work with Ada. I've written a whole unit testing and integration testing framework. Perfect. Apply. "You don't have the required skills." Oh... K then.

Wanna guess what I was just offered as contract work. Same company. I guess i'm fucking qualified if you asswipes sought me out to ask me to fix your fucking bullshit.

What the hell is wrong with management and HR in recent years?

Rant after a long time...

A week or two ago, I posted how my ISP is fucking up the net neutrality law by fast laning Google/Facebook while rest of the internet struggles for me.

I did the speed test multiple times and confronted them. This time I was really pissed and the support guy tried to fool me by saying that there's some download going on which is affecting the speed. I said that should not occur at all no matter the download. And there was no download going on in background.

He asked to share my screen via anydesk and I did. We tested the speed.

Now the son of a bitch says that my laptop is crappy and I need to get a new laptop in order to use their service or else I will struggle with speed.

I finally lost my patience. I was literally shivering and ripped his ass off for fooling me.

Motherfucker did not stop there. He now asks me how many devices are connected to the router, and I say 4.

He blames the router for not being able to bear the load.

I told him that if he doesn't stop fooling me I would literally grab his throat and punch the shit out of him.

To which he says, he will send an 'engineer' too check the issue as it is probably with local hardware and nothing from their end.

The so called stupid engineer arrives. Grabs the lan cable, clips off the connector, fits in a new one and asks me to test it.

DO I FUCKING LOOK LIKE A DICK SUCKING DONKEY?

HOW THE FUCK IS THAT GOING TO SOLVE THE SPEED ISSUE WHICH IS EVIDENTLY FROM THEIR END?

Anyways, he has done it multiple times and I know their trick. They throttle the speed for an hour or two for customer to calm down.

Shit works but this time I am gonna chop his dick off for sure.

Internet starts lagging again. I call him up and experiment in front of him that Facebook clearly works faster than Reddit.

I show this to his engineer as well. We speed test and the results fail.

I am not even getting the speed I paid for, let alone using Google/Facebook on fast lane.

I ask him the reason and why they are doing this. This is fraud and clearly illegal.

I said, that I will register a police complaint to which he says they have 'special certificate' and are allowed to do this.

I THINK THESE ASSHOLES CONSIDER THEIR CUSTOMERS AS MINDLESS PIGS.

I ask him to produce the certificate to which he says that he has the privacy right to not show it.

FUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKER.

I posted this on Reddit seeking help.

I registered a consumer forum complaint.

I tweeted the net neutrality organisation of India seeking help.

I contacted IT ministry of India seeking help.

Looking forward to sending them a written legal notice and contacting few more authorities to teach this bastard some lesson.

If any of you can help in anyway to fuck this assholes, do let me know.

Let's DDoS them, if that's possible. 🤣🤣

[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]

Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.

That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.

If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!

Where do I even start?

Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.

Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.

Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.

Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.

I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.

The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.

I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.

The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.

The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.

Literally JUST told a client FUCK YOU, PAY ME! We both gonna legal up for this shit.

With the wake of some rants shouting at Linuxers who express their opinion in a considered to be very not good way, I decided to make such a rant. Not to be annoying but because, although I get that fanboyism in that way isn't even good in MY opinion, I do think that one should be able to express their opinion.

But, If you'd like to express your opinion, I think you at least should do that with some good arguments. Not everyone might agree with those arguments but hey, that's the point of opinions sometimes :)

I don't hate windows/mac for being windows or mac. Nope.

I hate the systems for not giving the user freedom to do what they wish with the system but more importantly, for integrating their users in worlds biggest mass surveillance program AND on top of fucking that, not giving peoples the option to look at the source code aka at what's ACTUALLY going on in the system. Next to that, Windows 10's data collection is officially not legal in the netherlands so don't even try justifying their fucking data slurping.

Of course there's a chance that they don't contain any bad stuffs but since the Snowden revelations I don't trust those commercial companies anymore on their 'blue' eyes.

Yeah, I've ranted about this before, I know, felt like doing it again in combination with my reason above. I also know that I will probs receive hate for this but oh well, i'm used to that by now.

So yeah, windows and osx: go fuck yourself.

So today my middle company put a meeting with the new HR.

Meeting subject: you can't poach inside the company.

Context: I resigned, and I'll be taking with me 3 profiles.

HR: If you do take them, we'll take you to court.

Me: Why?

HR: It's poaching and by contract, you can't.

Me: You can show which clause?

HR: That's not the problem.

Me: Also in France, you need to notify the employee as you are denying his right to get a job. And pay him for that.

HR: What? That's none sense! Stop talking and listen.

Me: Ok

HR: We'll sue you and crush you. You'll have so much legal problem that you...

Me: I'll just start recording on my phone, so you say that you accept it and continue your intimidation rant.

HR: What? No!! Stop that.

Me: *stop it* Would you rather have my lawyer with us? Because we'll need to reschedule the meeting.

HR: If you continue that way, we'll tarnish your name and no company will hire you.

Me: You really aren't familiar with IT, right? Because I could delete ALL production. No system work. The BCP will kick in. You will lose one or two days. Then make an article of it, showing what kind of process or security should have been implemented. And I will still get a high pay job!!

HR: You know what? Get out! If you want to go to war, your problem.

Me: Ok, so you'll be getting news from my lawyer by mail.

HR: what?

Me: Yeah, that harassment. And my lawyer will get in touch. And I might also post on LinkedIn. And talk about it in the next events I'm invited.

HR: that's, that's...

Me: freedom of speech. Don't worry I'll write it so it's only viewed as my opinion. Have a nice day.

Two hours later my friend, lawyer, send them a mail and email.

Three hours later the COO calls me. Saying that HR was out of line and that it'll no occur again. It was an error and I should be forgiving.

So now all discussion with HR must be held with my attorney :). And middle company pay for it.

I don't even know if this should be a rant or a good thing, but here it goes:

my boss smokes (legal) weed in the office, under the AC, so the smoke goes up and it spreads all over the place => we all get a bit stoned

Sales manager: Hi all, we are launching a new internal hackathon. Form up a team with the right expertise to help with address the problem statement and get going!

Me: what’s the problem statement?

Sales manager: you have to sign up first. There’s proprietary company info with our plans for next year involved. You have to agree to terms and conditions before continuing. Legal say so.

Me:

*signs up*,
*fills in docU-sign*,
*clicks through 3 other screens*

Ok let’s see this problem statement.

“What new and magical customer experience can you create and launch to win in our markets”

... that’s not a fucking problem statement ... and why the fuck does that require filling out a docu-sign form to see?

I REALLY fucking hate legal / sales people. Wasting everyone’s time.

Business idea: panties with HTTP status codes printed on them.

451 for our underaged customers - unavailable for legal reasons

411 to crush a man's self esteem - Length required

429 for girls with stalkers - too many requests

402 for our professional customers - payment required

And, of course, 202 - Accepted

Tonight I want to try to setup an openvpn server with mysql based authentication because I'd love to somehow setup/become a vpn provider.

Of course there's a huge ass legal part but let's first make sure I know the technology of the top of my head!

Just ranting this out because I'm excited 😊

I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.

But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.

So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.

So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.

So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.

Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)

So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.

I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now

Again I am unemployed, and now in a worse situation than before. In a country far from family, parents and everyone I know, just me and my wife and in a very difficult situation.

Summing up what happened was as follows:

My previous boss had a very horrible habit of being rude to everyone, yelling at the developers in the middle of the office and being rude whenever he could. And when he saw that we did not lose his composure and showed no fear he used the tightening of salary and employment to threaten us and do unpaid overtime.

Then he decided to yell at me, I asked him not to do this in the middle of the office that is not polite and everything else, he resigned me.

Since last year it's very difficult to find a good job, I'm not even talking about salary, I'm talking about a good job even where I earn some money to live in the least in humility but at least work with legal and educated people.

Today is my last day in hell. I have next week off and then i start my new and significantly better payed job.

As usual i have to get the final paperwork over with and surrender my equipment. Yesterday i get an IM from the person in charge of equipment notifying me that I also have to come in Monday because the she's not there on Friday and I can't finish the procedure without her signature.

Ok. Sure. So i sent an IM myself notifying that I won't be in today since I've been called on Monday and i won't be using my own time because no one ever delegates.

I got a reply saying that it's abnormal to procede this way because if anything happens to me today the firm is acountable and when I asked "So, if something happens to me on Monday, when i'm on my own fucking time, that IS PERFECTLY ALRIGHT ISN'T IT?"
The reply was Yes. 😂😂😂😂

Needless to say, I'm relaxing at home right now and will be going on Monday to finish up.

God I'm glad that i'm leaving this shithead company!!!

Fuck my life...

Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.

Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.

Goes well as fuck.

CEO: “when can we get this out?”

Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”

Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:

Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”

Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”

Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”

Me: “Wait, you what when?”

Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”

Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”

Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”

Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”

Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”

Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”

Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”

Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.

Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”

“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”

“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”

“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼‍♂️ private what mate?”

“Private cloud”

“You... you mean a server rack?”

“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”

“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”

“No, no it’s the private cloud”

“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”

“It has to go on internal infr”

“Shut up, that won’t work”

I turned fucking 18!!! Finally it's legal for me to drink beer!!

Gotta try coding while bring drunk😱 I wonder what it would be like.

The story of Netscape and Internet Explorer really proves the irony of fate! And how life will come back to bite you.

Back in the 90's you had to pay for browsers like Netscape (it was called a navigator but same thing) but after Microsoft released IE for free with your windows copy in 2002 it crushed Netscape and nobody used it anymore (the graph below).

But! Netscape wouldn't give up and before the company died after it made legal accusations against Microsoft and Bill Gates and made them pay for that they did, but Netscape was too far gone and already were falling apart they decided to make a self detonation (I guess that's what they thought being in that tight corner) and they released the code as open source which would later get taken by Mozilla and be the code base for Firefox.

Now look at how much better Firefox is and how nobody uses the shitty IE!

Kind of reminds me of the scene from watchmen where Rorshack was in prison and said the best sentence in the movie "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here WITH ME!"

Just wow. I am amazed by what just happened.

A year ago my parents decided to switch from desktop to laptop for convenience. Knowing their needs, i bought them one without an OS and installed Ubuntu 16.04 on it. The thing is that if you do a regular maintenance of the laptop once a year at their partner company, you get additional 4 years of warranty (this offer is amazing).

So today was the day I brought the laptop for this maintenance for the first time. They make you a profile on their support website where you can track shit regarding your device, super convenient. First thing I notice that the login page was not https. Awkward, but there is no sensitive data here so i let it pass. Naturally i forgot my password, so I requested a new one and guess what? I recieved it in plaintext via mail. A tech repair oriented company does this, my god.

I went there, gave them the laptop in question and got a piece of paper, where they wrote that the laptop is in their hands now, and the current physical state of the laptop, and blabla.

I got home and I read what the guy wrote among other things: THE OPERATING SYSTEM IS NOT LEGAL.

How the fuck is Ubuntu not legal??? What the fuck is this shit? I sure as hell didn't torrent it or bought a booteged copy on the streets.

God damn it, i said so many times that this functionality is proof of concept and needs more investigation into technical/legal details...why the flugzeug mr account manager have you gone and emailed all your client accounts telling them we are now offering it?... why are you messaging me starting your sentence with "now that we provide..." god...damn...it

On call: part 2... WHY THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO ASK US TO STOP RESTORING *YOUR* SERVICES SO *YOUR* CUSTOMER HAS ACCESS TO *YOUR* STUFF BECAUSE YOU WANT TO SLEEP. If you call me because shits down, I'm going to fucking fix it. Idgaff if you're tired because it's been an 8 hour day, I've been working for 15 hours and I am contractually obligated to get this shit up asap and you needing your fucking beauty sleep is not a damn good reason to fuck up my contact...

(They got my boss' boss' boss' boss' boss' boss on the line who told them that but nicer -its why she gets paid more- and they still insisted. But at least they owe US more money to cover some *legal contractual mumbled jargon* it makes it better, and it's documented so they can't turn it around on us)

Will someone please send coffee? I have 2 more days of this.

If slack is down for more than 15 minutes you're legally allowed to leave work

I am from Germany.
And I wanna make a (new) website.

This is fucking exhausting 😩
(Do I have to translate it to english as well? The site will be bilingual).

I miss the time when I was a careless teenage who would just code and not care about bureaucracy...

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

Omg, when does the Stupid stop? New Zealand just passed a law that empowers immigration officials to compel travellers to unlock their devices. Otherwise, you pay a hefty fine. They are also allowed to copy the data and do God knows what with.

The horrible invasion of privacy aside, it also brings with it some legal hurdles. What if you are making a presentation or report to an investor or someone you have a fiduciary obligation with. You are carrying IP bound by several NDA's and other funding red tape that would end your life if it got out. Are you in breach if the data gets copied by the gov officials? Worse yet you have zero control over what they do afterwards.

I don't think any of this inspires investor confidence.

Government needs to stop touching things!

Client : can you add a calling feature to our android app?
Me : Ok.

*** after updating the app ****

Client : what is this **** dialog (calling permission request for android)!
Users are complaining about it and refuse to use the app!!! Don't you know I can get into legal problems with this???
Me :But you just asked for this feature?
Client : I want this feature but remove the dialog.
Me : you can't that's not how google works.
Client : I don't care do something remove the dialog or edit it but keep the feature.
Me : 😑😑😑😑 nvm I'll figure out something.

Ended up with copying the number to the dial screen instead of direct call from the app.

There is this service that I want to use (wont name it for privacy/legal reasons) and I have created a trial account which gives me a limited access to their apis. However the usage is where things are interesting.
The api access is restricted to some 1000 calls per trial account. But also they have a explorer option which lets to have the functionality as a web app like a dashboard and the explorer usage has unlimited access.

Now since I didnt want to exhaust my api limit, I let my service call the explorer apis instead. Is this ethically wrong or it is the fault of the service providers that they have such a big gaping hole in their licensing?

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

sometimes I hate python....

Ive just chased down a bug where a simple string saved in a simple dict sometimes came out as a f*cking tuple(!) when I needed it!

turned out that at some point this dict got updated with values from some other dict. And at some other point, I decided it was a great idea to rewrite that update code into individual setter's instead ... and of course forgot to remove one the trailing comma's, thus creating a perfectly legal tuple .... *sigh*

No errors, no warnings - just plain corrupt data....

A client was talking to me all day asking about my "hacking" experience.

I taught he was going to ask for a pen test for his trampoline website. At the end of the day, he revealed he wanted me to hack the "competition's databases" so he can promote his "very unique trampoline accessory".

Guess what happened? Nothing, cause fuck legal trouble!

#Gitlab is currently doing a Dry Run before actual migration on August 11.

In the linked blog-post I found this note:

NOTE to users in Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria: GitLab.com may not be accessible after the migration to Google. Google has informed us that there are legal restrictions that are imposed for those countries.

Let me tell you how shit flies in Aerospace&Defense companies in certain place in on earth

1. Your dev. PC is isolated from the internet. You can not download any software/library etc directly. "Legal" way takes literally days and you must all effort for it to work. I will not discuss the details of legal way but it is not asking IT team to download it for you, you do it yourself.

2. You use an archaic requirement standard that is somehow used by all other similar companies too. These companies f*ck each other in the arse when they are working on projects together(hiding details from each other which is necessary most of the times etc.) but they were kind to each other when it came to share shitty req. standard.

3. When you try to switch to new requirement standard, you waste weeks only to amend the old one, because everyone is using old one for all projects, so changing it would upset old guards in the company(which are people works in same project for 10 years, no personal development)
4. You came 1 minutes late, you fill the "minutely permission" form.

5. You already work long hours per day and they remove your small breaks during day, because developers use those breaks longer than intended(I wonder what might be the reason...)

6. A technology can not be adopted into current projects even it has objective advantages proven many times in the outer world, because old guards(developers), IT team and configuration management guys(poor man's dev ops role sometimes) can not change their ways.

I hate this shit...

!dev && rant

I just saw this video about car insurance and how they're essentially legal fraud. As I'm looking to get a driver's license and get myself a secondhand car, I looked what the costs actually are for mandatory car insurance that gets people so worked up...

€400 per fucking year?! And many companies that get well into the €1000?!!!! No surprise that people get so worked up about it! The budget of my entire fucking car would be only around €2000!!!!

Guess I'll be looking into building an electric bike then.. money grabbing corporate motherfuckers! And what for.. only because the average driver is a clueless operator of a killing machine?! FUCK THIS SHIT!!! 🤬

I'm disappointed with my boss.

I've always felt that the company I work for was different, I'm a web dev in a foreign country, finding a job as a fresh graduate wasn't easy at all.

before joining this company, all the employers I've met expected so many skills from foreigners like me, while they sat the bar so low for local fresh grad candidates.

Except my current boss, after the second interview he said that he believes in my potential and he wants to take this risk, the risk of hiring a foreign fresh graduate.

After I joined I worked my ass off and after 9 months I became a team lead.

And my boss said to me that the risk he took was completely worth it and I exceeded expectations.

Now I'm involved in assessing candidates applying for web development role at this company, we have 3 candidates 2 local and 1 foreigner.

Ironically the foreigner proved great potential and understanding of web technologies that exceeds a fresh entry role.

The other 2 local were alright, need training but they pass the criteria for an entry level role.

I reviewed this objectively and urged the same man that hired me to consider hiring the foriegner.

He said no, because of Visa costs and because of the lengthy legal process employers need to go through to hire a foreigner, and asked me to move forward with the 2 locals and not lose them to another company.

I felt that, if i were in the foriegner candidate's shoes I would've felt that there's something wrong with me for that no one wants to hire me for my skills and what I've worked hard to achieve was all not enough, it would make me feel like an outcast.

I know that I should do what I'm told, after all he's the employer, but still.. this feeling is bothering me, in a way I feel like I've cheated or I was just lucky and I didn't really earn this job.

!dev

So a colleage of mine died a little more then a month ago. His brother in law who also works at the company, and has known him for 20 something years (as long as he has worked for the company), had a really hard time dealing with that. My colleage was sick/hospitalized and in and out of coma for half a year+ so this was the apex of an emotional rollercoaster. When my colleage died he was not in a state to work. He actually went to a physisian and now he's seeing a shrink.

He took one week of to deal with everything, including his own mental well being, and you know what the human thing was my employers did. Subtract that week from his vacation days without telling him.

WOW, just fucking wow... I mean - yeah it's sort of legal to do that, but seriously

A dickhead boss that wrote a single fucking sql select (SELECT * FROM data WHERE 1) to display all the not normalized and redundant shit in an html 4.0 styled table. He proudly shown that shit to me saying "modify it to make a crud that will become a full management software in the 2.0". Furthermore he wants to scarpe data from websites that ecplicitly say that using that data it's not legal.

Hello devRant,

This is already from a few days ago but I had to process the whole thing myself first.

It was a normal day at work nothing special. Customers came in got their repaired PC's/Laptops and brought some new work in. So I went through some and then I got to the case that is the most well unbelievable and shocking I had in the only 2 years doing this. At first it was a normal HDD bad sector thing and I started copying the old HDD to a new one.

//NOTE: the program we use shows every file it's copying and the sectors it spans //

Suddenly I saw a weird thing happening where it started copying tons of files from a folder called "mature/kids" over to the new HDD.
I noted the path and after it finished we returned the laptop to the customer and he luckily left his old HDD with us. So my boss and I we did some investigation and we'll turns out the dude has a whole library of childpornography.

tl;dr check what you copied and report such cases to the police.

Don't do such stupid shit and stay legal guys.

Which you all a great day/night/morning/evening/whatever

//EDIT: I ofc won't post pictures cause of obvious reasons

I have teens in my classroom who want elite hacker status but complain about doing programming exercises outside of class. >.<

I explain to them that learning to code takes a lot of practice and can be frustrating at first. Some still went to the dean complaining that my class is tough. I work at a private school where open communication is encouraged and social justice is a thing.

So, I'm over here like "How do I reach these kids?"

I'm optimistic and I try different approaches to teaching and learning. Some stuff has worked. A lot haven't.

I figure I'd ask here: Does anyone have a suggestion for any creative programming exercises/projects that are beginner-friendly, legal, and hacker-ish? (I teach intro to Java.)

So my company had a client who was a doctor. He wanted to build an iOS app and will come everyday in the office to scope the project. The company's boss was a greedy guy who always tried to keep his hands in client's pocket. And on some occasions he even went on to scold my colleagues working on the client's project in front of the client. The client was too volatile to freeze the scope which was resulting in us not getting anywhere. One day the boss came onto me in front of the client and showed like he is doing me a favor by giving me salary. The salary day was after 2 days. But I raged out. Next day I departed from home for office but felt so raged that I mailed my resignation to the boss. I wandered in the city aimlessly the whole day, and the boss gave me 5 calls to make up for it and come back. Then he went on to go legal, and I told him to do whatever he could. In the end it was all bluff.
I worked freelance for next few months, those were the best. Got paid quite nice and learned Angular 5 with Node.js. Best decision in my career..

Didn't have the best day at work, to put it mildly. Had a customer threaten me / the company I work for with legal steps because their privacy statement wasn't online "on time" (I put it online this afternoon), and I found out that a couple of colleagues that customers aren't happy with my work, so I have a meeting"to discuss the next couple of months" on Thursday with some influencual people from my company. Totally not up for this. I just about had my private life sorted out, and now this. //I'm out!

Interveiwer: Do you like what you've learnt so far from your course in uni?

Me: sorry, but no the things they taught us were horrible and outdated and I only think of it as a legal requirement.

I'm working for his company for a year and a half now!

Just give me a link to the web font man. Oh, there isn't one? You used a font that we can't legally use? Do you understand how that works? I don't want your 300MB photoshop document. I don't want to comb through your ridiculous stack of insane layers and artboards and deal with the images you didn't bundle into the project or try and make sense out of your arbitrary spacing and random font sizes. You're not an artist, you're just a crappy visual designer handing off an unthoughtful glorified wire-frame - and now I have to sort out all the things that you were paid to do. It's really easy. 1. Pick a color, 2. Pick 2 fonts that are legal and available to use on the web, 3. build a few patterns for font sizes and weights - write them down. 4. Pick your images. Make them double the size you expect them to be on the site + put them in a folder, 5. add readme and list the font patterns and the link to the webfont, 6. quickly scribble the wire-frame out, 7. take a photo of it, 8. put it all in a folder and send it to me.

My boss thinks that DevOps is the developers SSHing into a server as root and typing 'git pull'

If firearms were legal where I live I would have blown my brains out a long time ago.

So... GDPR.
And the deadline.
And I have no idea what to do.

What does it mean for one-man indie projects? Data protection officers? Companies? Controllers? Processors? EU employees? Argh.

Look, please, EU. Not everyone can afford to hire an entire team for this, when their current team is literally one person.

Yes, the GDPR is probably a step in the right direction, but I think I'll just stop collecting the data altogether.

(All data I collect is just user settings stored in a database, nothing more.)

Can someone point me in the right direction?

>Someone opens issue
>Am in school
> Opens Git(Nyan)Hub
>Sees Issue
>"yOuR pRoJeCt hAs a CopYrIghTeD nAmE"
>does not seem to be the case, we're a OSS project and the fact you can't copyright names but trademark them

>Me: "When there's a legal issue, open it up on email than on a issue, and your shit is invalid as well, fuck you."

> Closes and Locks issue

Welp, that's a wasted 2 minutes right there homes

Keep in mind I even asked a lawyers' statement from the company that this concerns them. Fucking FUD tactics again by some random

Let's add the fact there was NO DMCA from the mentioned plaintiff. Wow. just fucking wow dude.

Fuck Apple sideways! (Wait for it, the original part begins)

HOW can a company that keeps on boasting about UX, to the point that last WDC they took more time speaking about a fucking kaleidoscope animation for their watch then about the whole changes to their MacBook's hardware, even consider putting that turd of a remote on market.

If you have an Apple Store in reach, I invite you to get up, flush, and go there. Try that atrocity that is the AppleTV, and laugh at how incredibly bad it is. Then do your best to refrain from burning the place down in your inevitable rage, that might cause you legal issues.

The previous AppleTV was fine, it was practically useless, but usable. But for some reason they decided a touchpad with low precision and no gestures was a good idea to put on a remote to a thing that will, due to its target audience, most likely be plugged into a fancy TV that has a 300ms lag due to fancy image processing. That thing gives no feedback, appart from visual, has so little precision that in a movie, the smallest step I've achieved was 5 fucking minutes, while being really fucking careful not to spoil the movie.

Dear fanboys (and probably past and I hope not future me),

Just because I use alternative product doesn’t mean you can attack me personally. And because you use some service/product doesn’t mean it’s automatically fitting for all people or it’s perfect and doesn’t have any cons.
Just because you use X thing and you’re happy with it (which is perfectly OK), doesn’t mean I can’t be perfectly happy with Y thing.
Imagine if only legal haircut was yours favorite. Wouldn’t be that boring if everyone wore exact same haircut? That’s like some 1984 shit.
I’m not saying that criticizing things is bad - it’s great actually, but in civilized way.
Don’t attack a person using something and automatically assume that they are an idiots, but rather point out why that something is bad.

And please, be different. If you’re happy with that phone which you use, don’t go buy a new one just because someone told you that your current one is bad without pointing out why.

Sincerely,
Athlon

No one is gonna care anyways...

You fucking son of a bitch!

First you make me do a project in two fucking months, and that's a fucking job-load for only one dev to deliver a SPA with payments and whatsoever.

Then you pushed me to accelerate deployment date and there I am, getting tired and using time I don't have.

But oh no, you prick, that wasn't enough, you had to do just one thing. YOU HAD TO DO ONE FUCKING THING!

What's that? Oh, sorry, I thought I overheard that you wanted to accept online payments but YOU'RE NOT FUCKING SIGNED UP, YOUR BUSSINESS IS NOT LEGAL UNTIL YOU REGISTER IT.

Motherfucker, I can't do anything, you better fucking register your bussiness if you want this to work the way it's supposed to do.

[God creating manager]
God: Take a blood sucking Dracula
Angel: okay
God: Wrap in a human costume
Angel: wait, is that legal?
God: Now make it dumb
Angel: -_-
God: Throw it between intelligent people
Angel: Is everything alright at your home?

OCR (The exam board for my course) are fucking thick in the head when it comes to anything computing.

- I get a mark or two for saying open source software is worse than thier propritary counterparts
- ALL open source software forks must also be make open source. They spend so much time going over the legal stuff BUT HAVE NEVER HEARD OF OPEN SOURCE LICENCING!
- One exam paper had a not gate picture with 2 inputs...
- I have to differentiate between portable and handheld! YOU MEAN HANDHELD DEVICES ARE NOT PORTABLE!?!!?!?
- In level 2 education, OCR say 1 MB = 1024 KB - In level 3, they say 1 MB = 1000 KB, and 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, and expect you to differentiate. Why do you expect the wrong answer in level 2!?
- INFORMATION FORMATS AND STYLES ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS! If you look up synonyms for "style", "form" is there, and if you look up synonyms for "format", "style" is there.
- When asked for storage devices, I have to say "smartphone", "tablet", "desktop PC" - I mean yeah they store data but when you ask me for storage devices I will say "hard disk drive", "solid state drive", "SD card", etc. >.>

I could probably go on an on about this...
I sure do love being asked to copy-paste existing HTML/JS/CSS and being asked to just tweak it here and there, and then wait for other people's incompetence in copy-pasting... I sure do love being stuck with this sort of "education" ._.

Is it even legal to code with accents on your variables? 🤔

Nice, apparently Kingston isn't just selling storage anymore.. and it turns out that it's even legal as long as the 2 brands don't enter the same market and the brand name is a generic English word (not sure if Kingston is one of those though). Who knew?

Also, cheers!

The fact that this week's rant topic exists is the exact reason I never do freelance work. It always ends in horror.

I don't believe good fullstack devs exist. A good junior will assess their talents/passions and specialize to become a senior. They'll keep checking the rest of the market from the corners of their eyes and start moving when necessary. But eventually, focus and specialization is a must.

If that's true for the field of development... why would I invest time in marketing, support, sales, PR, legal?

Maybe you can earn a bit more gross income in freelance work — but I see my employer as a service provider, I "hire" them so I don't have to manage phone calls, lose sleep over court cases, play product owner or worry about getting paid.

Just wanted to share what I got for Christmas. It's a Ruger 10/22 Limited Edition TALO. :3

Also got a 15 round magazine to replace the California legal 10 round, because fuck California! :3

There are legal companies in my home country who make a living by selling pirated games and software for only 2$ each...

The fucking moment you have to give up on your cool project or slow it down due to fucking legal reasons.

Government i will just say one sentence to you:
"Fuck YOU !!!!!!!!"

You limit the fucking use of tech to the point that we cant do really cool shit. If it wasnt for some laws then we could do some really fucking cool shit. I mean really cool. People would be suprised whats possible but oh well they will never see it because laws dont allow us to do it without paying for license that is fucking expensive.

Everybody says they want the tech to go forward but we cant with those laws. They dont allow us to do it. Well they do but you need to pay for license for each device and that puts it too expensive for normal consumer.

So yeah. ALLOW US TO DO COOL SHIT FOR PEOPLE OR GO FUCK YOURSELVES !!!!

How difficult is it to do things and do them properly? Clearly in 2019, very difficult. And why on Earth would you do things properly, when there's get rich quick schemes, shortcuts to be found and taken, and that filthy filthy legal tender. If the shitty implementation makes a profit, why do it properly? Makes no sense.

Except it fucking does. And you know why? Because of the guy that comes after you, that works with your fucking bullshit implementation and probably curses you to the moon and beyond in the process. Just like you probably did with the guy that came before you, with that bullshit you got tasked to work with. Don't be that guy. And don't be that guy to the next guy.

Still with me? Good. Here's the thing. You can do [insert job here] quick and dirty. But you're guaranteed to be checking back on it and fixing the crap later on. Or worse yet, someone else will be cursing you to the moon and beyond while they are fixing / working around your crap. So why not do it right in the first place? Is this why we can't have nice things?

A close friend of mine is in his third term in university studying software engineering, asked me how did I land my first job so quickly after graduation.

His question made me stop for few seconds and ask myself, how would my life would've been without Coursera , Udacity, codeacademy and css-tricks.

I literally spent 2 years wasting time in uni then I discovered these sites and started learning while studying just enough to pass subjects that really has no benefit for the future whatsoever.

Even with subjects like data structures and AI, which should be interesting, it was 40℅ theory and the practical part was to complement the theory part, it was never for real world examples.

Kinda feel bad for my friend because he'll end up feeling the same frustration I went through at university.

Even now a year after graduating I feel that the only benefit of my degree was legal.

When would this silly system change ? If university courses can be specialized like online courses wouldn't it bring better talent to the market? And why governments don't take action towards this?

Last year at the the Xmas party CEO slips in that he wants the app done by end of February, I freak because I thought he meant both iOS and Android (only dev working on both :/), anyways he wanted specifics for locking out specific people that haven't paid for some in-house training (like in app persons just not in the app lol) it required web development which I'm horrible at, I spend a whole week and managed to scrape together the right functions to do a user lock out, pretty all things considering.

A couple weeks before deadline I'm done :D, I've done a lot of testing, some in-house user testing, changes made all bugs visually possible are fixed.

Now I've been sitting here waiting, it's an iOS app that is currently completed aside from some legal work, which I kept going to boss "hey, we need that disclaimer and privacy policy", he becomes busy for the next few weeks, pester him more, pester another co-worker, only a week ago did they contact a lawyer...

I'm here stuck waiting at a roadblock, developing the Android app sure but for their iOS app that they want released first, I'm stuck on hold, so annoyed, it's not like I can just put on a lawyer hat and just right some shit that says don't use x unless you agree and such.

So annoying, for about 2 weeks I just played games on my phone, I was not expecting to waste that much time lol, I was really expecting the legal stuff to be ready.

Just a side note co-worker and boss that needed to get this legal stuff knew I needed to get this done, since I mentioned it leading up to my completion.

I don't think it'd take too long with Apple when it comes to the review, it's just an update but I wouldn't put my faith in that as an answer. Just hate that I'm on hold, was wanting to finish this app and apply for a new job (nothing against the company more so because I want to go a company where I could get a but of mentoring). But I sit here waiting, working on the Android app, it'd be sad if finish the Android app before their lawyers get back to me with the legal stuff, though Android is a lot easier for me (I did iOS after completing majority of the features they wanted on Android because I was more comfortable working on it).

:/ What a drag

Cadavers? Illegal.
Skeletons? Sure, $6000.

you can just buy a real skeleton for $6k and it's legal in 47 states.

We have to use this tool in work for classifying new and existing projects for GDPR. Long story short you have to fill out a REALLY long questionnaire, then it gets reviewed by someone in legal. The tool will also assign you tasks and suggest actions to common issues (e.g. suggesting a banner to explain cookie policy if you tick a certain box).

I have spent about an hour trying to re-assign the assessment I started, as i'm due to leave the company in a few days, to the guy taking over from me.

1. There is a “generate shareable URL” button, with the ability to click a button that says “replace me with the logged in user who opens this”. All it does is duplicate the name and description fields and send a new copy to that person, with no access to any of my other content or answers.

2. I did find a re-assign button eventually, again all it does it create a duplicate, and throws and error saying names must be unique when I try to save it.

3. While I couldn’t find a way to do that, I did find another button to at least assign the reviewer. It told me i’m forbidden to change the reviewer on assessments i’ve created.

This is THE WORST piece of nonsensical shit on earth. The entire application is absolute garbage and sssssssooooooo slow.

When you first create an assessment it brings you to a page that has all the questions, makes sense right? Wrong. All the questions are in read-only mode, and they are simply there as a "this is what you can expect to see later on", telling you whether or not they will be freeform, multiple choice etc.

The way to actually answer the questions is to click the "start survey" button hidden in the "status" dropdown.

I don't have much advice to anyone around GDPR, but please stay the hell away from TrustArc.

I'm officially becoming legal and losing my FBI license in less than 24 hours :/

I miss being 17 and below now

I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:

Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business

So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...

Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...

I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!

Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.

This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...

And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true

BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture

2 days until I leave my job and I am assigned a large, legal requirement task to complete, with no time to plan or opportunity to hand over the work. No way it will be done in time, and no teamwork, so no one else will be up to speed on it when I leave, and I daresay I'll be blamed for it not working to their 2 sentence specification! Yup, that's why I'm leaving folks!

Ticket from legal department: implement GDPR recommendation, log customer consent, separate checkboxes to opt-in to T&C and newsletter

Ticket from marketing department: small print T&C on sign-up, remove "conversion killer" checkbox

This is why we need a product owner

I know what i am going to do with all of the physics i am forced to study in a computer engineering and science degree.

How legal is it to build a death ray ! ?

Alcohol - passively ruining people close to me. Best legal drug, 10/10

I just had to give my self a written copyright permission to publish an android app for related to my own website as it was violating googles impersonation policy without it.

And the best part about all this, is it took google 3 days to respond to my initial complaint just to find out the reason why they suspended my app and than another 2 days to resolve it all, after I provided all the "legal" documents

Seriously, HOW GOOD IS COFFEE THO

The high I get off caffeine is *incredible*

It's like, so good. AAAAND it's totally legal, safe, not frowned upon etc

Then there's the productivity boost.

I feel immortal.

In my country, almost every college student is expected to finish their degree and apply for an internship, with some universities forcing them to do it and making it a requirement to finish their studies.

Now, this wouldn't be so bad if almost every internship employer in the country didn't expect you to work for free. Seriously, I can estimate 80% of the internships pay you NOTHING. WTF.

Fortunately this is not the case for CS, but every time I tell somebody I recently started an internship, they will ask me: "Oh, but they don't pay you anything, do they?". Of course they pay me! I wouldn't be going to an office every day for 4 hours to do someone else's work if they didn't!!

Why the fuck is it even legal to employ somebody and not pay them a cent, just because "it will look good on your resume"?? And why do people still accept this shit??

Is is like that on other countries as well?

At work we have a lawyer lady who we pay a LOT of money and she suppose to handle our tech related legal stuff. We ask her to look at some stuff we shared with her via shared google docs. After being visibly uncomfortable for a while she called her tech guy at her firm and asked to get Google Docs installed.

And now they are threatening us... Brilliant!

- they refuse to sign a legal agreement with us [for our services]
- they only gave us a verbal promise they will pay for our services
- they revoke lots of our accesses
- another company is taking over their product we were hired to look after before. Now they demand us do things for them for free
- a few integrations are malfunctioning with premature EOF [while reading a response]. I had escalated this with the most throughout case analysis I have done in my entire life. Three times over the last 2 years. Explaining every single detail that needs to be done, how, by whom and how to interpret the results. Escalations went to their high level mgmt. And directly had been rerouted to /dev/null...
- now they asked us to fix this whole shit. For free ofc, they have no money to pay us..
- they begged
- when that didn't work - they started threatening to route all their customers' complaints to us and flood us with them

at first I was proud to work on their project. I didn't want to leave it when my manager asked me to. A national level project, making a difference for my own country. But now.....

that's gov, my friends. That's politics and power games.

Wtf! I have to listen to a commercial from the phone company before going to the call. I'm in Peru.

Is there a way to skip this? I'm not even sure why this is f*cking legal.

Why the fuck did you guys change my vps to read only file system.

WHAT IS FUCKING WRONG WITH YOU, THIS IS LIKE THE 6TH TIME.

What do you expect to tell my clients?

I should look into if I have legal rights to migrate everything to a more stable provider.

Sick and tired of having issues because other people fck up. It's a shame I have been using this provider for 5 years without any problems. And now servers left and right start having problems.

I wonder if it's legal to intercept and redirect a drone hovering around your private property..

Talk about data protection, I am fucking furious!! A hotel i stayed in recently has sent an email with a scan of my passport and credit card. Do I have any legal rights to fuck them up the arse? The hotel is in france.

Okay.. Serious question.

I have a game. And a license that i have to provide a name for.

..I'm transgender, and have get to get a legal name change...

Do I /have/ to claim it under my birth name? (I don't own a company, so i assume the answer is yes.)

Yea, I'm sure Zuka-duche is gonna get right on that. 😂😂

I am calling this a premonition rant, of more rants to come.
I have a feeling in my bones.
We have a newly acquired fat cat customer with bucks to blow who we have done some digital work for already and swag bag of marketing perkiness.
I will call the CEO of this whale "The Porcupine"
The Porcupine has a business degree and industry experience, nothing to do with websites or applications.
It claims to be a visual perfectionist yet never delivers an overall coherent review.
It likes to fixate on minor brand style differences in websites and apps we have built.
The Porcupine seems to be always busy with policy and legal and other things rather than participating in their own projects.
Procrastination on feedback or reviews until the day before release is common.
Many overtime hours worked, not a sliver of thanks. The haughty attitude indicative of somebody who thinks web development is like desktop publishing.

"It's just code" in response to a crash production server change they were warned was a risk that borked all of our responsive templates and took 3 hours to fix.
Their entire brand is shades of pea green, grey and lime. No serif fonts because they are suck. Arial and Helvetica are boss.
One of my devs missed a CSS style on privacy policy hyperlink text that went times new roman and I had various account directors and our CEO on phone telling me how embarrassing it was for us to let this happen.
Anyway. They pay on time and the cost estimates for all the upcoming work are juicy.
We have shitloads going on for an upcoming hard date conference and everything is already compressing.
Therefore I can already smell doom and feel those porcupine quill getting closer to my ass as I beg their AD today if we have any feedback on the 10 or so project reviews yet?
Nope.

Get an email from a client, who has been stringing me along for about 6 months, but ringing me up for advice on tonnes of different shit for free. Basically did his original website but his business model has changed to make his existing site irrelevant. Suggested months back doing a simple one pager as a stop gap with key messages. The bastard said no to that "just take it down for now and redirect to my LinkedIn page". He keeps saying we are getting stuff together and we hope to get together in September. However, yesterday he sends an email "we are getting a student in over the summer (not a Dev or designer or anything). Could you recommend any "web builders" so we can get on with the website in August. By that he means those drag and drop fucking pieces of shit website templates full of wysiwyg editors for creating shit typography. I give them free help and guidance and they think that I'm not going to want to smash him in his fucking face for his last email. The cunt.
I have an idea for 'having the last laugh' but I am open to suggestions from some devRanters, all legal of course.
P.S. I post quite a bit here about shitty clients, but I do have a number of really good clients who value my work and experience and have been with me for many years. It's just some that treat the profession with disdain and that they can easily do it themselves if only they had the time. These fuckers then wonder why their businesses fail.

Is it legal and ethical if I make closed source software using open source tools ?

Me and my developer friend worked with my ex-colleague with this fitness directory website because he promised to give us {{ thisAmount }} upon the {{ completionDate }}.

He was my friend and I trusted him.

It took me weeks of sleepless nights building the project. I had a full-time job that time, and I worked on the project during evenings. All went well, and as we reach the {{ completionDate }}, the demo site is already up and running.

A week before the {{ completionDate }}, he hired his new wife as the COO of the startup. It was cool, she keep noticing things on the site which shouldn't be there, and keeps on suggesting sections that has to be there. I was okay with it, until I realized that we are already a month late with the deadline.

Every single hour, I get a message from them like, "it's not working", "when can you finish this feature?", blah blah blah.. and so on.

I got frustrated.

"I want my fucking life back", I told them. No one cared about the {{ completionDate }}, the sleepless zombies they are working with and our payment. They keep on coming up with this "amazing" ass features, and now they are not paying because they said "it's not complete".

Idiot enough to trust a friend. I was unprotected, there was no legal-binding document that states their obligation to pay.

My dev friend and I handed over the project to this web development company which they prefer, and kept a backdoor on the application.

I kind of moved on with the payment issue after a month. But without their knowledge, I kept an eye on the progress and made sure that I still have the access to their server, DNS, etc..

BUT when they announced the official launch on social media, I realized that I was on the wrong train the whole time.

They switched to a different server.

They thanked all the people involved with the project via social media, EXCEPT me and my coding partner who originally built the site from ground up. A little "thank you" note from them will make us feel a little better. But, never happened.

I checked up the site and it was rewritten from originally Laravel 5 to CodeIgniter 1. That is like shifting from a luxury yacht where you can bang some hot chicks, to a row boat where your left hand is holding the paddle whilst your right hand is wanking yourself.

I almost ran out of bullets.

Luckily, CodeIgniter 1 was prone to SQLi by default.

I was able to get the administrator password in plain text and fucked with their data. But that didn't make me feel better because other people's info are involved.

So, I looked for something else to screw with. What I found? A message with the credit card details.

Finally, a chance to do something good for humanity. I just donated a few thousand dollars to different charity websites.

So last time I said I'm gonna look for a new job.

I just had a discussion with the boss and he is very apologetic and understands my situation and frustration very well. He agreed that they are having a technical dept, so at least he knows what's up and wants to get it finally forever fixed.

Since I wanted to go self employed anyways, we've come up that I only work for them, if there is a reason and real work to do. No more useless backend work for me *pew*.

We will also split my weekly hours from 40 to 20h and increase my hourly wage.

I'm gonna hear back by Monday for the details and legal paperwork.

Wish me luck, feeling positive about this!

This is a joke. This isn't even wifi in my room 4 rooms across from the router. This is LAN. 1und1 at their finest. (No bad weather, no sister uploading photos or brother downloading.. you know)

The thing is, we are switching to QuiX. And the ****ers from 1&1 want to keep us as their customers for another 13,5 months! Is this even legal?! WTF

Integrated Stripe for the first time tonight, I'm amazed how ridiculously easy it was. Dunno what I was worried about! Spent the last few days sweating about the legal side and planning every little detail, no wonder everyone and their mother takes payments online.

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.

I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.

But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?

I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).

Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.

I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.

Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.

Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)

Just learned my company says it owns everything I think or build, whether I am on the clock or not. It was in the handbook, not the paperwork I signed, but it says I agree to it if I keep working for them. It even says I cannot show interest in something without their approval. FUCK!

Spend the last year helping to rescue a company from the brink of collapse. Literally live and breathe the company for no extra pay or reward, supporting and improving all aspects from IT and development, HR, Legal, Procurement, business day to day running and Accounts.

Create a business plan and forecast for 2019 with the General Manager over the weekend (unpaid) to grow the business and start to make lots of profit, hand it over to the director and he makes me redundant the next day.

Furious doesn't even cover what I'm feeling at the moment.

The great epic continues!

I just want to start off by saying a MASSIVE thank you to everyone who commented on my last post about this situation. You were all incredibly helpful. I fucking love you guys!

JoshBent, Bitwise, Michelle, FrodoSwaggins and PerfectAsshole I will tag you glorious humans so you know I love you.

Anyway, the saga continues. It turns out, there was a second contract alluded to within my initial contract that only became valid once I was a "senior member" which I became after the previous senior abandoned ship.

I am stuck until January, legally. I can be sued for damages if I leave before the contract with the client ends and I can be held personally responsible for anything that occurs due to my leaving before completion of said contract.

So basically, I'm fucked. That's the gist of it. Thankfully the company I was supposed to be leaving for have been really amazing about it all and have said that they'll wait until I am officially, legally able to leave. They offered legal advice as well.

My current boss hasn't paid me for last month yet, he basically refuses to talk about the incident, the other managers are angry at everything and want to talk but don't want to leave and two people have already quit on the spot this week.

I'm in a very confused mindset currently where I'm happy that I know where I stand, I'm angry that I'm basically a prisoner and I'm confused as to what I should be doing. I feel like I should be doing substandard work but it goes against so much of me.

I'm sure I've left a lot out but I just want to keep those interested updated and to vent a little.

TURTLEDICK

I need to know WHY THE FUCK one decides that the Esc button should TERMINATE APPLICATION WITHOUT ANY FUCKING WARNING...

Ive been playing Pokémon on a GameBoy Advance Emulator. Ive gotten used to saving every now and then, but out of habit i press Esc and not TAB to go back, and thats when I GET MANHANDLED WITHOUT CONSENT ITS NOT LEGAL FOR FUCK SAKE

Would there EVER be a case where this shit would be good to have?

Employer uses IBM Software, which forces me to use Eclipse. I hate eclipse. Hate is a hard word. I'd never say, I really 'hate' a person. But eclipse, eclipse is what I hate. I can look at my smartwatch and see my heartrate rising, just thinking of how the fuck any developer on this crappy planet would ship that bullshit IDE. That saying, I'm totally fine with some bugs, using windows and so on, but eclipse... Is this a get-more-contributors strategy? Holy moly it really kills me. Hey, let's just open that maven Proj.. Oh, crash. Hey, let's install that "bug-free" version of the maven-integratio... Oh, crash. Let's do a global search over my worksp.. Oh, freezed. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! How can this be legal? I mean, seriously, most junoir devs I know, just use Eclipse, because they don't know of any other "better" IDE (VIM would be better, even notepad). Is there anyone sucking professors cocks / vaginas to get them introduce that crap IDE to students?

April fools day should be changed to purge day (all crimes will be legal, you can murder anyone without going to jail)

Let's talk about the cargo cult of N-factor authentication. It's not some magic security dust you can just sprinkle onto your app "for security purposes".

I once had a client who had a client who I did server maintenance for. Every month I was scheduled to go to the site, stick my fingerprint in their scanner, which would then display my recorded face prominently on their screens, have my name and purpose verified by the contact person, and only then would the guards let me in.

HAHA no of course not. On top of all of that, they ask for a company ID and will not let me in without one.

Because after all, I can easily forge my face, fingerprints, on-site client contact, appointment, and approval. But printing out and laminating a company ID is impossible.

---

With apologies to my "first best friend" in High School, I've forgotten which of the dozens of canonicalisations of which of your nicknames I've put in as my answer to your security question. I've also forgotten if I actually listed you as my first best friend, or my dog - which would actually be more accurate - and actually which dog, as there are times in my High School life that there were more tails than humans in the house.

I have not forgotten these out of spite, but simply because I have also forgotten which of the dozen services of this prominent bullshit computer company I actually signed up for way back in college, which itself has been more than a decade ago. That I actually apparently already signed up for the service before actually eludes me, because in fact, I have no love for their myriad products.

What I have NOT forgotten is my "end of the universe"-grade password, or email, or full legal name and the ability to demonstrate a clear line of continuity of my identity from wherever that was to now.

Because of previous security screwups in the past, this prominent bullshit company has forced its users to activate its second, third, and Nth factors. A possibly decade-old security question; a phone number long lost; whatever - before you can use your account.

Note: not "view sensitive data" about the account, like full name, billing address, and contact info. Not "change settings" of the account, such as changing account info, email, etc. Apparently all those are the lowest tier of security meant to be protected by mere "end of the universe"-grade passwords and a second factor such as email, which itself is likely to be sold by a company that also cargo cults N-factor auth. For REAL hard info, let's ask the guy who we just showed the address to "What street he lived in" and a couple others.

Explaining this to the company's support hotline is an exercise in...

"It's for your security."

"It's not. You're just locking me out of my account. I can show you a government ID corroborating all the other account info."

"But we can't, for security."

"It's not security. Get me your boss."

...

"It's for security."

A medical doctor, a lawyer and a programmer debate whether it's best to have a wife or a girlfriend.

"Easy", the lawyer starts, "a girlfriend comes without any legal obligation, you can have a lot of fun together but when you get enough of her, you can just leave her without any trouble"

The physician objects: "That can only come from a man who never truly loved a woman. Your wife is not just someone who you have fun with, she is you bastion of calm, your ever-loyal partner, the completition yourself. Clearly, having a wife is better"

Both now look at the programmer who remained silent throughout the debate.

He cleans his throat and than says: "Both. You need both. You can tell you wife you're with your girlfriend and you can tell your girlfriend you are with your wife. And then, you can finally code in peace.

I'm quite a vengeful person, I'm sure I get the wrong end of the stick sometimes to.

In the last few years of my life I've been trying to not act and "be mature" about the situation.

There's still times I fall of the wagon but generally I have shrugged it off...

But do you know how I feel like now!? That I've been walked all over people are taking me for granted. People think they can get away with lying and messing me about.

Quite honestly I don't know how to act your always meant to rise above the situation. When all I can think of is how I could fuck up the thing they did.

And people go well just protect yourself but that means I'm not open and honest myself and that's what I fucking hate to begin with!

Today I'm feeling vengeful because a client didn't pay until the last second. They wanted the website for next to nothing. And took a year to pay. Now they have gone and paid a tonne on a new site ! Because they went well what you did was shit "effectively"

Granted it was but you don't spend a few hundred quid and expect to get everything. I gave them what they paid for.

Everyone is expecting something for nothing 🙄 I get that's just the life of companies directors

But it pisses me off I try to do everything truthfully on the up an up and they would prefer a group of liars

Oh front page of Google yes we can do that for free

Oh yes the greatest animation look!

😤 And I'm meant to sit here and be like yeah that's cool. I mean at this point what reason do I have to be open and honest if shit stains like that exist!

What pisses me off more is that I'm trying to rise above. I don't think I should I think I should ruin their fucking day and be done with it. I have the capabilities.... But I know "it ain't legal"

Then people go on about well if you don't like the rules help them get changed ...

I've tried the political route they are all far worse 😐 they are ignorant cunts. That's the truth! I can't stand to be around half of them 🙄

So here I am ranting to not fuck up someone's day , trying to rise above 😔

Client contacts our company that his site is down, we do some investigating and the only way we can access the site is on a mobile phone. From the office computers the site never loads and times out. Since we don't host the site and I've never logged into it before I don't have a lot of details so I suggest they contact whoever hosts their site. This is where things get weird.

Client tells me that the site is hosted on someone's home server. I tell him that this is quite strange in 2018 and rather unlikely and ask if he was ever given access to the site to log in or if he has access to his domain registration, GoDaddy.

He says he doesn't understand any of this and would rather I just contact his current developer and figure it out with him. We agree that he needs to get access to his site so we are going to migrate it once I get access to it.

I email his current developer letting him know the client has put me in contact with him to troubleshoot the issues with the site. I ask him some standard questions like: where is the site hosted? Can you access it from a computer? Do you have some security measures in place to block certain IP ranges? Can you give me from access to get the files? Will you send me a backup of the site for me to load up on my server?

*2days pass*

Other dev: Tell me the account number and I'll transfer the domain.

Me: I'll have to get back to you on that once I talk to the client and set up his GoDaddy account since we believe the business owner should own their domain, not their developers. In the meantime you didn't answer any of the questions I asked. Transferring the domain won't get the site on my server so I still need the files.

*3 days pass*

OD: You are trying the wrong domain. The correct domain is [redacted].com I'll have my daughter send you the files when she gets in town. We will transfer the domain to you, the client will forget to pay and the site will go down and it'll be your fault.

Me: I appreciate your advice, but the client will own their domain. I'm trying to get the site online and you have no answered any of my questions. It's been a week now and you have not transferred the domain, you have not provided a copy of the site, you have not told me where the site is hosted. The client and I are both getting impatient at this point when will we receive a backup of the site and the transfer of the domain?

OD: Go fuck yourself, tell the client they can sue me.

If the client is that terrible, wouldn't you want to hand them off to anyone willing to take them? I have never understood why developers and agencies try to hold clients hostage by keeping their domain or website and refusing access. From what I can tell this is a freelance developer without a real company so a legal battle likely isn't going to go well since the domain is worthless to him as the copyright to the name is owned by the client. This isn't the first time we've had to help clients through this sort of thing.

I've been reading devRant at work for the past 6 months and it kept me sane through a few moments. Thanks. :)

And now I finally started to feel that maybe even I could have some horror stories to share. (I've been in the company for more than 4 years)

(Sorry for long post.
TL;DR: break time laws suck in my country.)

One example would probably be how our company decided to cut 5 minutes from our lunch time (down to 25 minutes) and add 3 minutes to our 5 minute coffee break(*"gifted" by our CEO) in the afternoon.

You're probably asking yourself, "What happened to the remaining 2 minutes?".

*Well, it's simple. In my country it's somehow still legal to have only 30 minutes of break time for the whole day if working hours don't exceed 10 hours. It's actually written in the law that you CAN divide that lunch break time to be placed at different times. To me that sound like fucking nuts...

Thankfully nobody's taking that time change quite literally and most people still use the full 30 minutes. But some people here have been fired for much less, so I don't play around. I just pretend to work while reading devRant. 😎

!Rant
The new bill passed the house for ISP to be able to sell data. This get me ticked off. I already ausme that ISP did it under the table. Doesn't make it right. Now it legal for them to breach our privacy. At what leave do i need to run my own internet just to feel safe. VPN can sell the data, ISP can sell data about you. I spend my life teaching how to protect people online and now I can't even say they are safe at home from someone with wrong intention. A quote​ comes to mind.
"Dear lord I need to see some change, because the man in the mirror is wearing a mask"
I shouldn't have to feel every time. I boot my PC, that I need to remind my self that what I'm doing now is being sold so someone can lable me. When will the common man learn to protect their privacy online; And where is the line in the sand?

It not all bad, this event has given me the itch to code. Just to spin some heads I'm going to make a script to make random Google query across the widest array of topics, so my profile is full of contradiction.

The few who read this have a nice day!

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

Ugh, I hate this stupid F*!

There's this new guy who's much older and thinks he's a such a f'ing hotshot that he undermines everything I worked on to drop in some a** backwards BS. Luckily I don't have to work with him often, only one day a week - else I would go nuts! He constantly name drops this same company, with little disregard for others younger than him.
Bitch, I'm close to 20 years younger than you and yet I've worked for a much longer list of much more respected companies. I've worked with legal teams on intellectual property, ran my own business, and have multiple patents. Did you ask me once my background? No, because your a selfish prick and an asshole. That's why you're likely in a mid life crisis, single, and alone. Fuck you!

Me: I'm going to a hackathon this weekend.

Parents : are you sure it's legal and you won't get into trouble? You know, it seems to involve hacking

Took some time to explain the concept of hackathons. Same happened with a lot my friends. Many of them actually go to hackathons now.

11/13 questions..

If I create a product, lets say a new toaster.

Naturally I have a .com website for that..

So far so good..

Next I create a support forum for the site.

From my limited understanding, no one would be allowed to do the following:

Post a URL to say, a website about a competitors toaster with a picture of said toaster.

Upload a picture of a competing brand of toaster from another site.

Say anything that was copyrighted such as, a christmas poem, or a famous quote from history.

Upload quotes from posted content anywhere else on the internet, or from a book, newspaper, written diary..

But forum users could do the the following ?

They would be allowed to upload a picture of themselves holding a competitors toaster..

Or upload their own words.

So, some questions:

How do you check uploaded content against the zillion TB of copyright data out there ?

Will every message/picture have to be moderator approved before being allowed to be posted ?

Possible loopholes...

Could you have your forum hosted in another country without that law, or would you still be liable ?

I guess one could just do telephone support like the shit companies do already..

"New computer game out"
*support only available via phone between the hours of 1pm and 2pm on a Tuesday..*

But if I put my support forums on say, a site like Facebook, then its entirely their problem to deal with ?

Or will the moderator of a group have any legal responsibility ?

Does this only apply to open public groups that anyone can join, or will this also effect private member only clubs ? (eg. closed non-public viewing forums.)

Suddenly I feel less and less like making and trying to sell anything if I can't support my customers easily and cheaply. (Read affordable..)

Remember how I gushed about one note?

Well I purchased a new laptop today.

Load it up, log in to fucking windows 10.

What do I find in one note?

All my notes from my previous PC.

What did I explicitly fucking disable on my other PC?

Sharing and syncing.

What has obviously been shared and synced anyway, completely ignoring my settings?

My fucking notes in onenote, including some very personal notes on my health and life.

Can anyone else confirm they had the same problem?

I'm interested in pursuing legal action for this bullshit.

We have 100% access to Unreal Engine 4 Code, but it is not Open Source. so is it legal if we fork it, heavily modify it and re-brand it ?

Salespeople telling clients "Your site doesn't need a privacy policy/cookie policy since you don't actually sell anything on your site."

Wrong wrong wrong WRONGITY WRONG WROOONNGGGG!!!!!

Client to PM to me: "Well Jim said we don't need those on this site."

Me: "Well Jim is misinformed, since we use Google analytics, Facebook Pixel, and contact forms, you need to have both a privacy and cookie policy."

PM to client: "We'll find you a template you can use to get started, it'll cover most of what you need."

Me to PM: "we will do no such thing, we can send them a few links explaining why they need these, but they should consult a legal professional and cover their asses for their own business practices. I can provide any technical details they may need like what data the cookies collect if necessary."

PM to me: "well I'll just find something for them then."

*In my head* please just go crawl in a hole and die.

Busy trying to rewrite company website, I'm a desktop developer. I'm ashamed to say I used the following

<div class="hidden-xs hidden-sm>
<br><br>
</div>

To get a spacing right, I don't think that's legal.

Is it legal to destroy other company's site or app. because they didn't pay your money in the past?
and also app they created is not secure.
The company is in another country.
.
.
.
If "No"
I'll still do that. I don't care.

A colleague keeps saying UTF timezone!!! Is it legal to punch him in the face?

Me: Wrote and unit testing code for a user story.

Day of a Merge
PO: We need to back out the code you wrote. We have not gotten approval from legal.

Me: Uhhh well it's not going live for 4 weeks still and not harming anything but if you insist, ok.....

2 Days Later
PO: Ok legal approved the changes can you put that back in?

Me: 😡🖕🏻

Working with LEGAL is the worst!

They say yes to all reviews and once it's in prod they want to completely change the whole thing cause they think every user reads the Terms & Condition!

To be honest I deployed 5 times. I have not read that shit once!

So... Here we go again.
For the ones who doesn't know I'm a cnc worker / future .nc programmer ...
Today because my machine broke I finaly whent to the (cam) programmers den to learn, even was lucky because my usual programmer was starting a new piece from scratch...
But my fuking boss must really not like me... I'm the most promising programmer between the noobs but everyone else is already programming (talking about the ones that learned in the last months)
Today because I was learning, got fucked again, was expelled and ordered to do the work of a rookie while he (who has half of my company time) would program the work for me...

So... I always do overtime because others don't (and someone /me must stay till the last coworker lives)
Cant learn how to program... Because shit. while others are taking time from the old ones, while I can learn only by watching...
Have a burn out (it's getting worst) because of the time I only slept 3 /4 hours to do overtime while I was finishing my course...
Oh and flunked two times because I had to chose between overwork or getting fired (my boss didn't want me to finish the course, don't know why)

Didn't make a complaint because I would get lots of people fired (basicly there are legal and security violations behing committed, if I made a complaint most of the tools we use, chains, magnets to lift cargo and such would have to be thrown away... Plus lots of other tools that don't obay regulation... And there would be a heavy fine for every worker that does overtime... That means that half the staff would have to be fired because the company would stop for months)

So... I'm stuck... Must wait till I burn out, fire myself or call the authorities and fuck such a good company...
Only because two bosses have problems with me... (my dad works in the company and there is lots of envy towards him, probably because he came after and got a place they would never get ...)

Head of legal: email me details of the customer information you hold/access

Me (in head): I'm a full stack developer! I access everything!! Should I tell the truth, or "the TRUTH"

Week80: Not my family or friend, but last time I used my notebook in a bus to school when I had to finish my homework (because as always, literally evrything is more interesting than programming class homework) random woman came to me, nocked on my shoulder and asked when I had terminal open when compiling "Sir do you know that this is not legal?" pointing at my screen. 😂

My familly thinks that I am a magican that can fix their printer and recover their desktop icons "because I did something wrong with it" after not touching their PC for months. I wonder who deleted those icons (*pointing finger at my father*)

My friends think that I am some magican nerd who can build websites for them all for every single stupid "teen business idea" they have and I can hack all their ex's FB. 😂😂

I fucking hate that ISPs just decide to block certain websites!

Sky for example blocks a bunch of things related to Tor. You can't go to the website, and can't even install stuff like tor browser from AUR, because it has tor in the download url. The connections simply time out.

Yes, I can use a VPN to install Tor, I'll probably have to do that. But fuck!!! Many VPN providers' websites are also blocked.

This seems to be common practive. In my previous flat we had Virgin. They blocked the website of all VPN providers they could find, and even kept me from establishing a connection to some of those providers. In that case I could donwload Tor (surprisingly) and then tried a bunch of clients until one of them worked.

It's fucking pretentious, and I don't think I'll find anything about blocking perfectly legal resources in any of their T&Cs.

Some people may remember me posting about our rabbits a while ago.

Sadly they both passed away a few weeks back.

They were both a little over a year old and died within 4 days of each other, one on Wednesday morning and then one on the Saturday morning.

After about 1200 in emergency vets fees and another 500 for a post mortem on Spencer (who died on Saturday) we found out the vets had fucked up their vaccinations.

In the U.K. it is recommended that rabbits are vaccinated against 3 viruses Myxomatosis (Myxo), Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease Variant 1 (RHD1), and Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease Variant 2 (RHD2).

They got their vaccinations for Myxo and RHD1 in January, and went back two weeks later for their RHD2 vaccination.

Now it turns out, when they went back for the second vaccination they were incorrectly given the Myxo and RHD1 vaccinations again.

The lab results showed Spencer had RHD, but not which variant and it is safe to assume Frank also has RHD.

The vets were going to get another lab to test for the variant but decided not too (funny that they don’t want to confirm whether it was their fuck up that killed two otherwise perfectly healthy rabbits).

The wife and I are considering getting legal advise.

What fucks me off so much is that it wasn’t a situation where there were two possible courses of treatment, or they didn’t respond to treatment, it was just a human fucking up.

The practice manager also like to keep mentioning that vaccines aren’t 100% effective, and because they won’t test for the variant of RHD we will never know 100% whether their fuck up killed our rabbits.

I’m contemplating trying to get in touch with the lab and paying for the extra tests myself.

Due to the nature of the virus it also means we can’t get anymore rabbits for 3-4 months.

Word is spreading that CNN, which is owned by Time Warner, got a reddit users IP from their mods, and with their relation to Time Warner, got his identity.

Then extorted him to apologize or be revealed.

This is huge, and we don't even know its the only time it has happened.

VPNs may not even truly protect you if the ISP can connect the dots over time, with time stamps.

Holy shit, CNN just weaponized ipv4

So, I just got approached by a guy to work from home on a project. I already work in a company as a full stack developer and he is okay with it. He says it'll be kind of like a contract basis work. Basically freelancing. But I have never done freelancing.
So, what are the things I need to know legally ?
Like if I mess up the project or if someone hacks the app I make or if data gets lost, will I be responsible? Also, what if I can't finish the project in time?

"Hey guys we originally set the demo date to August 5th and thus far I have not seen any previews before that, what's going on here?"

Ok see, that is the kind of thing that I would take to me own lil broken heart IF:
1 It was coming from a product manager at where I work

2 He would never get any sort of updates or would just plain not know about us

3 He would be I dunno....fucking paying us?

This is the thing, a friend offered the chance to help him build a product for a business man somewhere down in the land of tacos. Being in a "fuck it" mood and not wanting to say no since it sounded interesting enough I said yes. The "owner" said that he would not be able to pay since he already had hired a team of developers before that did not deliver and as such he was instead offering a part of the company.....sounds familiar?

Not wanting to let my friend down, I told the owner that I would help just as long I get complete CTO power over the product and not crying about the stack being used or ME NOT GIVING THE PRODUCT MY FULL ATTENTION BECAUSE HE WAS NOT FUCKING PAYING.

He said ok.

Of course he did not like it, but he said ok.

He has been asking for the code, the platform, demos and a bunch of other shit which I continue to refuse since he has not offered me or my boy a copy of the legal documents that we require.

Him: "You will get them soon enough, I still need to see the product just to make sure everything is ok"

Me: "You wouldn't even know where to begin looking unless you have a third party that could verify the code, last time I checked I was to be the only one good for this"

Him: "Yeah and you and <friend> are, but I just need to see the product"

Me: "I send you videos and demos, sorry dude, but no binding document == no code. I know you think I am young, give me some fucking credit because this is not my first rodeo"

Him: "I am not trying to play you or anything, you can trust me"

Me: "No, not really. Talk to me about this when you get the documents"

Him: "Well its cuz this is taking too long...."

Me: "Tssss I know!!! It sucks right? Want a good product, built with all the bells and whistles and YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY? guess what dude, I do have a full time job, your product gets my minimal attention, right there at the bottom next to taking a shit, meaning that I will give your product the same time and attention as I would going to the throne. Aye don't feel that bad, I normally take about 1 hour on the shitter, you get that for fucking free."

To be fair ladies and gents I normally don't just explode on people like this. But I just can't fathom not paying someone for a rather large software product, with only a promise that "it will sell" and then telling them to hurry up.

Far as I am concerned this product will flop, but he seems to think it is the next big thing(of course).

He can go choke on some chode.

Fucking prick.

Needed money for my company, not enough clients to support business on SaaS alone. Took on a 5k / month job building a platform that competes with my SaaS (more niche, less generic). Also sign up new client who that company's owner is part owner onto my current SaaS. Win / Win?

I do a lot of custom work to my platform to fulfill their needs, which is why I ran out of time for the 5k / mo project. I did these customization for free. Losing money to keep client, but also improving my system.

Work gets busy, I need to drop the 5k project. Client is upset I am working more on his other company (he is not majority owner). I return 1 month of funds to the owner and say I cannot continue.

Owner threatens to make other company that he is part owner stop working with my software if I do not complete project. Blacklisting...great. I agree to work with an overseas developer to do it and PM it for 3 months at least. Making nearly nothing from it (now 1k / month for PM), working nights to deal with India, losing sleep...

Other company suddenly folds due to conflict of egos with that SAME owner. Users drop from 16 to 1. I drop the project, no more strong arming me. Everything is a loss, all effort and money lost for nothing. Bad bet..however...

Owner becomes 100% owner of the other company, and of the software company. I transition him to PM his own project, he still uses my software because It doesn't, nor will it, ever do what the one he is building does. Also, partners from previous company break off and use my software again. New Client. #profit.

But holy hell was it stressful in the interim. People's business tactics are disgusting. Stay calm, play it neutral. Win. Sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do in order to succeed...at least for a little bit.

I was so scared that how he screwed his partners he would screw me over as well if I built one of the modules I have planned for my System, but haven't done yet.

If I did it for him first and then built my own (totally diff codebase) I really didn't want to run into any legal issues considering the schematics he has now are mine, but I didn't finish that part of the system for him. He is obivously highly competitive. Even though he wanted me to, and still does, want me to run his company for him.

Who knows, maybe in the future. To be CTO / COO of two SaaS CRM's in the same space may make sense. But I will never sell my software to him or partner with him. Too much drama. Avoid the drama. Be careful out there fellas.

If you are a creator, people will take advantage of you in every way imaginable. Read the fine print, read the people, document everything. Don't put yourself at risk.

So, against like 90% of all odds, we (I) managed to submit the application to Apple for review at the ripe old time of 21.27 last night.
Events of the day included:
- fighting with appstoreconnect (turns out they just return a 500 if you haven't paid your Apple developer membership)
- legal being over an hour later than our absolute deadline for getting the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy
- said T&C's and Privacy Policy being delivered in Word, and having to manually format those for our app (thanks guys, please don't use tables again)
- removing FAQs altogether because "it would have taken too long to make those today" (ticket in Jira for this for ~4 months)
- our app was targeting both iPad and iPhone, so we had to rebuild the app for iPhone only because "we don't have app store images for iPad".

On the bright side, that leaves 3 days next week to get the rest of the backend finished for actual go live on Monday 16th, so long as Apple don't reject the app.

Side note: adding the target-device preference affected the android build somehow? despite the preference being iOS only, and wrapped in a platform="iOS" section.

So I've identified a key demographic that's excluded from social networks, by their very definition.

Misanthropes.

Misanthropic individuals need their own little area of the internet too.

I propose "MySpaceNowFuckOff.com" although this would probably result in a protracted legal battle. I'm open to name changes.

It would be a site for socialising with others like you, who don't actually want to socialize, where you don't get "likes" you get "disinterested acknowledgement", there isn't a share button but a "shame this idiot" button. And you don't have friends but a list of "people who haven't pissed me off... yet".

Reminder, include legal language in next project that says if we're using JIRA then we're using JIRA and not a thousand emails with requirements embedded in spreadsheets and PowerPoints.

Today something pretty bad happened (as always at school)
and I'm gonna rant about it to
1) get your expertly opinion on it
2) relieve from it

SOOOOO
today I entered class to paretake in the writing of the much anticipated class test (kappa).

The teacher gives everybody a sheet with the exercises - let alone me.

I tell him to give me a sheet too.

"Put a book between you and xy"

so I do. I ask him again to give me the exam paper. No response.

Again, and he looks at me with a disrespectful look. I look back. And get thrown out of the room - not getting a chance to paretake in the writing of the test yet getting the worst grade one could possibly get in the modest german education system (=> 6)

Now I'm going to pursue any possible legal action against him (I dont care about him. After the lesson I wanted to talk with him; yet he declined my offer for reconsiliation, then he called my parents, even though he had time to think about what he did {any sane person would agree that what he did was wrong <yet my classmates dont agree>}. Also, he is that type of teacher who gives unusually unnessecary homework - which I personally see as punition, since I already know 97% of the stuff thought in [english] classes)

See why I am despising school so much?

It drains my last bit of energy until I am an empty shell with the sole goal to finish education asap in order to be able to fucking work.

BTW: I tried using my best english in this rant to demonstrate my abilities in order for you to be able to see that I honestly dont those "basic" english lessons.

Maybe you already know it and I’m just retarded.. but if not, try out kodi + Exodus add-on👌

Most comfortable streaming I’ve ever experienced.

(Here in my country streaming is completely legal so no hate please:))

So just now I googled my name and found this website locatefamily.com that contains my full name, my fucking address and even my phone number - what the fuck, how this shit is even legal?

What are the legal ramifications of reverse engineering a competing software and its respective workflow?🤔

Another theoretical situation will be if you all wrote the code and derived the algorithm in house.

Me: Ok, this sounds like a good idea, however we need to consult the Act to ensure we're not breaking any laws by requesting this new information and making it mandatory.

Boss: I am trying to ensure good database management and data design principles, why can't you just agree with me?

Me:... I agree with you... But changing up the process like this may put us in hot water, let's just check to ensure we're good on the legal front --

Boss: The law is just a guide. My primary concern and your concern should be the design of this database and ensuring we stick to good data management principles!

Me and other technical staff: 👀

"We've got a new opportunity for you."
I'm a fucking rookie. I didn't know the meaning of this sentence. Suddenly, I become the "IP PBX expert" of the society.
"-Okay, it's some networking shit, I thing I'm good at networking shit. Piece of cake.
-Okay great, you have one month to learn how this thing works, because we WILL provide this kind of service."
Damn.
I spent one month learning this shit on my free time, printing RFCs and living in the fucking MATRIX to not fuck up on the very first day doing that, just in case something on the customers' network fucks with the PABX or something like that.
Oh yeah, I forgot: I'm paid 80% of the minimum wage because I am actually not qualified to do my job and I'm spending one week a month to learn how to IT (some french weirdness I think, if not, maybe it's the germans' fault. Also yes, 100% legal).
Today, they announced me that they "changed their mind".
I'm pissed.

I have lost now another device to planned obscolence (how is that still legal), my g3 officially took its last breath two days ago, first it was its battery dying (thousands of devices broke that way [exactly two years after buying it] and at that time there was no batteries to replace it with) - whoever was brave enough to hold onto his device for longer than the battery failure - he then faced the simcard reader breaking and that was my case now too.

I asked many colleagues for help and even found a guy that does repairs for the oldest phones (got too excited), but even he couldnt find the issue, besides a guess that its the main chip that partially died on purpose or it got somewhere desoldered by the always and poorly managed overheating issue, which would cost almost the same to replace as just getting a new phone in the end and even then, theres probably a third switch they planned, to give you the final bullet.

I got a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 now and really gotta say they have an amazing near vanilla android experience and their "two phone" isolated spaces are quite handy to seperate work and private notifications, apps and files.

It was even compatible with lineageOS and has a simple website to unlock the bootloader (a first for me, never saw any company making it that easy), but after trying their version of it, I don't even have to switch.

I will still miss the vibration motor of the g3, the feedback of it when typing is still to this day the best one I ever tried.

My latest project is going quite well, I think some of guys might like it! Basically it is a entirely new Fallout game with multiplayer aspects made in Unreal. Now most of you are saying "dude make textures is going to take years!" However I can extract models and textures from Fallout itself, saving time. The next question will be the legal stuff however Zenimax gave me permission as long as I don't restrict access, money or otherwise. If you want to check it out or think you can help go to the sub Reddit and click the discord link!

Reddit.com/r/FalloutMP

Thanks,
Patryk Grzelak

Once I had to integrate an analytics mechanism into a product my company was selling. Due to EU laws we had to put an opt-out checkbox into the installer. Took me a while to hack my way around various technical and legal impediments, but I got it done.

Long story short, product rolled out and we got data from about 0.1% our customers. Almost everybody opted out :/

!rant
EULA proposition for broke developers with no legal knowledge whatsoever (like me): “By installing/using this software you agree not to sue me.”

??? git good

People, finally back with a rant😌

You definitely have heard about the new privacy policies in the EU. What do you guys think about this BS?

Who the actual fuck has come up with such trash? Politicians can be such dumbfucks sometimes wtf..😐🤔

Imagine an online, public service, that allows you to communicate with others (for example a simple chat, game, whatever ).
The users connect to each others via p2p. Based on this, you can easily get the ip address of any user directly connected to you. P2p is used to reduce server load, but information is still verified (for example using RACS), so let's assume the data is always safe.

(please remember, this is just a imagined Szenario)

Now the question: AFAIK, the IP address is a sensitive information. Would p2p in this scenario still be 'legal' in the EU given the latest changes in the laws?