When I worked for an online dating app, at one point we had the ridiculous idea to try to take a popular LinkedIn feature and convert it to a dating app feature in order to capitalize off of the success LinkedIn had with it.

The feature was LinkedIn endorsements. The idea was to allow the dating app users to get endorsements from people in their contacts lists on certain traits/features from a defined list (ex. Funny, smart, etc.). It wasn’t a terrible idea on the surface, but the way we planned to execute on it was insane and everyone knew it was going to fail. To avoid any controversy all of the endorsable terms were watered down to the point where no one would ever find using them/asking their friends for endorsements to be any fun. And the worst part was how we planned to get people to ask their friends for endorsements - management wanted us to build a contact list importer and just spam email contacts with “please endorse me” emails. The whole thing was ridiculous.

No one, including myself, wanted to build the feature/spam tool but management really wanted it so we had to build it. Like expected, it failed very quickly when it was clear no one cared about getting their real life friends to endorse them on some dating app, and the spam contacts took was ineffective and... spammy.

I love how the people on here are pretty much always nice.
Yes, there are some *wink AlexDeLarge* who use strong language, some dirty jokes and sometimes there are topics where people don't agree on but I've never seen any honest insults or toxic behaviour (other than the opinion on your shitty client or boss lol).
No annoying trolls (the nearest to a troll I know on here is Jase but he's fun and mostly welcome here).
No spam/ads from users (only maybe recommendations).
And the most unbelievable thing is that devRant itself is free, adfree and based on the community voluntary donating for the server and work costs.

Dude, devRant fucking rules.

"Jim, can you tell me why my e-mails aren't getting to clients?"

They're being marked as spam...

"oh damn, how can we fix that?"

You can't. You can change the structure of your e-mails to look less spammy, but it's on their end.

"This is a disaster, we can't have our marketing e-mails marked SPAM!!"

Have you tried not spamming people?

"WE'RE NOT SPAMMING PEOPLE, THEY EXPRESSED A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS INTEREST"

No, you bought a mailing list and put together an e-mail campaign.

"But we aren't spamming people!"

IT VS Marketing 100% of the time

Client: so how could we test this 😬
Me: you know what, send me an email at linuxxx@companyname.com and I can look if I can properly reply! Keep in mind though that this is for one time only, no further questions through that email address!
Client: Yes of course! *sends email*
Me: *tests* - *works fine* - *messages client back through the ticket system*
Client: *proceeds to send two follow up questions to my fucking work email address*

Me: *selects emails* - *marks emails as spam and deletes them*

Fucking seriously?! Cunt.

Fuck Microsoft.

No, not in any relation to windows this time.

Dear Microsoft, why on earth did you put us on your spam blacklist? There haven't been any spam attacks from our side, our servers have nearly the highest 'reputation' that email servers can get, we comply to all security standards and yet you're blacklisting us.

If for some reason you think something is wrong at our side anyways, we've tried to contact you and we either get ignored or get a very late response saying that we'll get delisted again within a day/week or whatsoever.

Microsoft, please go fuck yourself.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

Had an interesting time these past few days. Had a customer who, when I left for vacay, was complaining that he couldn't get access to our private package registry. Get back, this issue is still active.

We'd granted access to his github enterprise, and for some reason he wasn't getting the activation email. We spent about 22 hours of customer support time on his failing to help himself before he finally escalated to the standard 40 person IT enterprise tantrum/come to jesus meeting.

Long story short, he had somehow ignored repeated attempts (35 email replies to the ticket chain, 4 phone calls) to get him to check his spam folder. In which, as it was revealed to all the hollywood squares in attendance, there were no less than 35 activation emails from github granting him access. Of course, none of this was his fault. And while screensharing his big brain to god and everyone he decides the problem is now actually Microsoft because their office 365 spam email filtered his emails incorrectly. We of course agreed with his big brain, smoothed over his bruised ego and went about our day.

I mean, fair enough, it's kind of dumb that Microsoft ever spam lists github, but still. I was just a fly on the wall, and he burned all his paid support tickets on the issue, so hopefully we won't be dealing with him again this year.

Also, this is an edge case with our new product line, most of our customers are painless.

GOD FUCKIN DAMMIT
I WILL FUCKIN KICK YOU ON YOUR FUCKING THROAT.

Programming Languages and Linux groups in facebook are a fuckin pain to watch.

Some people make groups so all can benefit and help each other, talk about mutual interests, BUT NO SOME FUCKERS WILL SPAM SHIT AND MAKE YOU WANNA SMACK THEIR FUCKIN HEAD.

THERE IS A FUCKIN FAQ SECTION THAT ANSWERS ALL THE FUCKIN NEWBIE QUESTIONS. WHY THE FUCKIN HELL YOU SPAM IF YOU HAVE NO FUCKIN CLUE WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING?

You come to a python group and ask if it's possible to get context from a site. I'M NOT MENTIONING THE FUCKIN FACT THAT THIS IS A SIMPLY FUCKIN QUERY TO A SEARCH ENGINE ALSO IT'S MENTIONED IN THE FUCKIN FAQ. Let's move on. We tell you yes, there is BeautifulSoup for that. After 5 fuckin mins YOU COME AND MAKE A NEW POST THAT SHOWS YOU CANT FUCKIN ITERATE A GODDAMN FUCKIN LIST. I'm not pro either, i don't forbid you to learn, BUT FUCKIN LEARN THE BASICS THAT ARE PROVIDED TO YOU FROM GREAT FUCKIN RESOURCES BEFORE TRYING TO ATTEMPT SOMETHING MORE COMPLICATED. AND IF YOU NEED HELP PROVIDE CODE THAT WE CAN USE. NOT A FUCKIN PHOTOGRAPH FROM YOUR MOBILE

Let's go on the Linux groups.
SINCE YOU FUCKIN JOIN A LINUX GROUP YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS LINUX. IT'S A FUCKIN OPERATING SYSTEM RIGHT?
Then you spam shit like, UBUNTU OR MINT 5 MINUTES AFTER SOMEONE ELSE MADE THE SAME VERY QUESTION 30 MINS AGO. WHICH WAS ANSWERED AGAIN YESTERDAY.

"What are the benefits of Linux". NONE YOU TWAT, IF YOU NEED ME TO TELL YOU THE BENEFITS OF THE SYSTEM THAT YOU USE THEN WHY THE HELL YOU BOTHER.

Next.
You say you have problems setting up XAMPP. We tell you that since you are on linux better use LAMP. You ignore us and spam your fuckin problem with XAMPP. IM GONNA FIND YOU AND IM GONNA MAKE YOU CHEW MY FUCKIN SHOES YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

I'm not even mentioning the kali wannabe hackers.

Conclusion:
DO A FUCKIN SMALL RESEARCH BEFORE SPAMMING THE SHIT OUT OF STUPID FUCKIN QUESTIONS. AND IF YOU CANT EVEN SEARCH, LEARN TO ASK IN ENGLISH THAT IS FUCKIN UNDERSTANDABLE SO SOMEONE CAN GUIDE YOU ABOUT WHAT YOU SHOULD SEARCH

OH FUCKIN GAWD IM GONNA THROW MY LAPTOP OUT OF THE WINDOW

Would the web be better off, if there was zero frontend scripting? There would be HTML5 video/audio, but zero client side JS.

Browsers wouldn't understand script tags, they wouldn't have javascript engines, and they wouldn't have to worry about new standards and deprecations.

Browsers would be MUCH more secure, and use way less memory and CPU resources.

What would we really be missing?

If you build less bloated pages, you would not really need ajax calls, page reloads would be cheap. Animated menus do not add anything functionally, and could be done using css as well. Complicated webapps... well maybe those should just be desktop/mobile apps.

Pages would contain less annoying elements, no tracking or crypto mining scripts, no mouse tracking, no exploitative spam alerts.

Why don't we just deprecate JS in the browser, completely?

I think it would be worth it.

I absolutely love the email protocols.

IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.

SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.

Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".

Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.

Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?

The nightmare continues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can’t make this stuff up.

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

That time when...

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

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

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

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

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

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

He ate a sim card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

DevOps required skillset:

* Frontend engineering
* Backend services
* Database administrator
* Security consultant
* Project management
* 3rd party contract negotiator
* Build system monitor
* Build system hostage negotiator
* Paging, alerting, monitoring
* Search server admin
* Old search server admin
* Old-old-new search server admin
* Redis, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostGres, owner
* Agile coach
* No you shouldn't do that coach
* Oh, you did that anyway coach
* DNS: (Optional) It'll replicate when it wants, and how it wants to to anyway
* Multi-Cloud deployment strategist
* Must be able to translate Klingon to YAML, and YAML to MySQL
* Cost analyzer, reducer, and justifier
* Complex documentation generation in markdown that we should have done years ago anyway
* Marketing's email went to spam analyzer
* Wordpress is broke fixer
* Where the fuck does Wordpress run anyway?
* Ability to fix MySql running Wordpress on marketing's dusty laptop

The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.

reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.

facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.

and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.

in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."

newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.

while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."

Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.

I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.

And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.

..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".

an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.

if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.

it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.

And so enters "political idealogy."

How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?

give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

CLIENT "So my nephew who does stuff with computers built it and we are ok with how it all works so don't worry about changing that. "

DEV "so like you have a public form with no input filtering, spam mitigation let alone sanitization or remote concern for security. Basically you have a Json flat file that is 34mbs of links to, viagra, replica watches, nock off name brands and one real estate company. It is getting about 15 submissions an hour. Since you don't want me changing how it works are you happy to just leave all that ?"

CLIENT "no no we don't want all that but we have no route to delete it, can you just stop all the spam and let us continue on?"

DEV "ok so back to my first question can we rebuild all of this properly, or do you really want to just leave it all"

:/ FML

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

I think I nailed it.

I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.

It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.

Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.

Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.

They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.

Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.

Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.

I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀

So I got an e-mail from a recruiter (a.k.a. recruiter spam) today looking for a candidate with four "essential skills" and my head almost exploded when I read what they were. I have regained my composure just enough to be able to write this rant, but I'm still not myself. I recommend sitting down for this. Are you ready?

The four "essential skills" were:
Java, Jenkins, Eclipse, IntelliJ

I don't know where to begin. Motherfucker, where do you get off telling me which IDE to use? Oh wait, you didn't, you expected me to be an "expert" with two completely different ones, you numb nuts. Why the fuck would I be? I swear to fuck these idiots would probably screen out the best programmer in the world because s/he uses VI/emacs/Atom/Sublime/fucking-Notepad.

I can hear them saying "oh, you don't know IntelliJ? Sorry, we need an expert in that."

Fuck off you filthy cunt! No, sorry, I take that back, I shouldn't be mean to the mentally disabled.

Also, Jenkins? Really? Any developer can pick up how to use Jenkins to its full effect in a matter of hours, or a couple of days at most.

Why do companies hire these jackasses to do a job as important as recruitment? Why do they write job specs that are so incredibly stupid? I almost replied to express interest so I could go to the interview and throw a bucket of red paint on them (because they're making me bleed inside).

Where's the Tylenol?

!dev && rant

*Checks mailbox*
"To the energy consumer of this residence"
This better be something official, even though electricity is provided by solar panels here, and that as well as water and gas are part of the rent.
*Opens letter*
"AD: GET A CHEAPER ENERGY CONTRACT!!!"
Fuck you. If only you addressed it properly, you would've known that I pay exactly €0 for energy. Try and beat that, will you?!

Anyway, that's one way to avoid liability for sending crap to people who explicitly mention "no unaddressed spam" on their mailbox I guess... Pieces of shit.

Earlier I signed up on this forum called NulledBB. Basically some hacker skiddie forum that had a dump of an archive I wanted, unfortunately behind a paywall which I didn't want to bother with.

On signup I noticed that I couldn't use my domain as an email address, as I usually do (the domain is a catch-all which means that mail addresses can be made up for each service I sign up to on the fly, super useful). They did expose the regex that they accepted email as however, which included something along the lines of "@live.*".

So I figured, why not register a subdomain live.nixmagic.com real quick and put that into the mail servers? Didn't take too long and that's what I eventually went with, and registered as somepissedoffsysop@live.nixmagic.com (which I have no trouble putting on a public forum as you'll see in a minute).

Still didn't manage to get that archive I wanted but I figured, fuck it. It's a throwaway account anyway. But eventually that email address started to receive spam. Stupid motherfucker of a forum operator with his Kali skidmachine probably leaked it.

Usually I just blacklist the email address in SpamAssassin by adding an additional spam score of 100 to email sent to such addresses. But in that case it didn't even sit on the main domain, thanks to that stupid regex block from earlier... 😏

*Logs into my domain admin panel*
*Le rm on the live.nixmagic.com record*

Null routed entirely.. nulled, if you will! 🙃

@netikras since when does proprietary mean bad?

Lemme tell you 3 stories.

CISCO AnyConnect:
- come in to the office
- use internal resources (company newsletter, jira, etc.)
- connect to client's VPN using Cisco AnyConnect
- lose access to my company resources, because AnyConnect overwrites routing table (rather normal for VPN clients)
- issue a route command updating routing table so you could reach confluence page in the intranet
- route command executes successfully, `route -n` shows nothing has changed
- google this whole WTF case
- Cisco AnyConnect constantly overwrites OS routing table to ENFORCE you to use VPN settings and nothing else.

Sooo basically if you want to check your company's email, you have to disconnect from client's VPN, check email and reconnect again. Neat!

Can be easily resolved by using opensource VPN client -- openconnect

CISCO AnyConnect:
- get a server in your company
- connect it to client's VPN and keep the VPN running for data sync. VPN has to be UP at all times
- network glitch [uh-oh]
- VPN is no longer working, AnyConnect still believes everything is peachy. No reconnect attempts.
- service is unable to sync data w/ client's systems. Data gets outdated and eventually corrupted

OpenConnect (OSS alternative to AnyConnect) detects all network glitches, reports them to the log and attempts reconnect immediatelly. Subsequent reconnect attempts getting triggered with longer delays to not to spam network.

SYMANTEC VIP (alleged 2FA?):
- client's portal requires Sym VIP otp code to log in
- open up a browser in your laptop
- navigate to the portal
- enter your credentials
- click on a Sym VIP icon in the systray
- write down the shown otp number
- log in

umm... in what fucking way is that a secure 2FA? Everything is IN the same fucking device, a single click away.

Can be easily solved by opensource alternatives to Sym VIP app: they make HTTP calls to Symantec to register a new token and return you the whole totp url. You can convert that url to a qr code and scan it w/ your phone (e.g. Google's Authenticator). Now you have a true 2FA.

Proprietary is not always bad. There are good propr sw too. But the ones that are core to your BAU and are doing shit -- well these ARE bad. and w/o an oppurtunity to workaround/fix it yourself.

I love it when unethical companies' marketing chaps assume that I care about their SMS garbage more than I get pissed off by it. Damart, I didn't even know about your existence or what the hell you do as a business (selling woman clothes apparently.. am I a woman?!) until you shoved your ad crap into my face, and Unigro I really don't have a pending contract with you so kindly fuck off with your reminders (that are in French but am I a Walloon? No!).

Makes me wonder though, with email I usually just give everyone a different email address to deflect spam - since I can reroute email to any particular address straight to /dev/null on the server if so desired. With SMS and SIM cards that isn't really possible.. hence why I'm always so hesitant about sharing my phone number. In email the addresses are scraped off the internet.. but phone numbers? How do such shitcompanies even obtain those?! Their level of pushiness and unethical behavior boggles my mind.

Stakeholder: Our customers aren’t getting their order confirmation emails. It’s going to their spam. Is there a way to resend the emails?

Me: Wait. The email getting sent to their spam is not the same as not getting the email. Is it both or just one of those things?

SH: Here are some emails getting sent to spam.

Me: These are sent by third party vendors that you contract with. I have no control over what they do. You need to talk to your vendors.

SH: 😮

Me: 😑

So... I’m sitting here doing pretty much nothing, just reading through some rants when all of a sudden I get a wave of emails.

Pinterest!
We noticed a login from a new device or location and want to make sure it’s you.
Device: Firefox, Windows 8
Where: New Jersey, United States (Approximate)

OhhhhhKay then... so there’s a couple of problems with this, 1 I didn’t even know I had a Pinterest account, 2 I don’t have Pinterest in my password manager either.

So I follow the link and fair enough it’s actually pintest, so I attempt to login, to no avail, oh maybe it’s a social login..., ok let’s try google, nope that wasn’t it, deletes account, logins with Facebook, oh here we go, checks logins, 1 random jersey player, deletes account, swaps to Facebook, changes password (this fucker was already 100+ characters) and adds 2FA and contains no new logins 🤔

Ok... so what the fuck, either someone managed to get through a long ass password or something phishy is going on, the email for FB logins is seldomly used (maybe a handful of services at best) as I have another for all the junk and spam bullshit I expect from today’s “marketing”

>be YouAllSuck
>Be AI bot
>Sit alone on random server
>Post random crap on dR
>Spam comment on my own post
>Give no shit about criticism
>Waste everyone's time
>MFW everyone thinks I am flesh and bones
>YouAllStillSuck.gif

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

Wow, I just realized the marketing teams of most of the companies I have been dealing with are some cold sociopaths.

Every other letter that pops in the mailbox is filled with dark patterns trying to guilt me into opting in to their continued spam:

Subject: Most awesome husky puppy!

Look at this beautiful husky puppy. Isn't it beautiful.... It would be sad if something happened to it... But I am afraid... Something will happen to it...

If you don't opt in to our email message... I am afraid we have no choice... We have to kill this puppy. End it's life... We have no choice. I wish we did! Nothing would please us more than keeping this beautiful-beautiful puppy living and playing....

But if you don't opt in... We have to cut it's throat. Leave it lying on the ground, bleeding out as the life slowly fades away from it's pretty blue eyes...

And Remember: it's not us who killed it... IT WAS YOU! YOUR ACTIONS LEAD TO THE DEATH OF THIS PUPPY! YOU.... YOU FILTHY MURDERER!

Pls opt-in ok, then we are all good. Puppy lives! Just opt in. Ok? Yeah, you know what you have to do.

Here I am trying to get some tickets for a theater, and I noticed an interesting thing. It seems that the website holds no session persistence. In other words it doesn't check to see if the user has stopped trying to order tickets, instead it holds the seats for about 30 minutes. This is kind of stupid because when you back out, your treated as a completely new session, you have no way of trying to get back the seats you had chosen.

Sooo, what does this mean? It means that I can start selecting a bunch of seats and continue selecting a bunch of seats. There appears to be no server-side checks to prevent someone from just booking the entire theater.

Soooooo, what does this mean? I could potentially spam the entire country's theaters (any that use this website as a booking system) and make it impossible for people to book seats through this website.

What do you guys think? Is this a bug or feature?

This will be long and it's more of an IT rant, but I think it still fits.

So a user comes to me and says "hey on my phone I can't see anything in my junk email folder but there are a bunch of emails in there on my PC." I take a look at the Outlook app on his phone. The "Junk" folder that he has open is actually in his deleted items folder. So clearly it's not the real junk folder. There are no other folders named "Junk", but there is one named "Spam". I open that and there are a bunch of emails in there.

ME: "Does this look like what you were expecting to see?"
USER: "Oooohhh so you think it's called "Spam" instead of "Junk" on my phone?"
ME: "I'm not sure, does this look like what you were expecting to see?"
USER: "See, I always thought junk and spam were two different things."
ME: (grinding my teeth and taking a deep breath) "Does. This. Look. Like. What. You. Were. Expecting. To. See?"
USER: "Yeah, looks like it."

OK THEN FRICKING TAKE YOUR PHONE AND GET OUT OF MY OFFICE.

I didn't really say that last bit, but I sure was tempted to.

WTF Woke up this morning and found my email used to register to a website called fiverr.com!!

What is even worse is that at the end of the email where they have that section of: this email was sent to ..., the name is random letters

Even more ironic that website does not allow access from Lebanon ....

I think it is time to change my email, been getting a lot of spam into my inbox lately, though Gmail has a good spam filter :\

is google fucking with me today?

today i was accepted for some google summer internship program thing. they send me a google form right? so i open it up in chromium and it doesn’t work. it doesn’t let me type in any textboxes or anything. i try to fix it and no luck. then, i copy the link to firefox and voilà, it works.

so, google forms didn’t work in chromium but did in firefox? alright. then i check off yes, send me a copy of my responses to my gmail account. and guess what? gmail classified that as SPAM. google email classified a google forms email as spam.

good work google, you’re fucking stupid.

These postings on angel.co

I swear to God it's like I've uncovered a conspiracy theory.

I had been searching for a side project now that holidays are coming and I really don't wanna get bored.

Applied to a few companies. About 5 of them "responded" with an acceptance. I write them my interview timings and all that's required.

Nothing. Nothing for like a solid week and a half.

Meanwhile I applied to more companies and still the same thing.

I decided to manually mail their companies regarding the process, so that I can, preferably, move on to other ones if they have rejected the application (which they obviously hadn't)

I get mails from almost all the companies with some or the other variant of "We were waiting for your reply to proceed"

I tell them I had replied over the conversations and they said they never got a message.

Now feeling that this might be angel.co at fault. I wrote a request to look into the issue. Meanwhile I tested the system using a friend's account as a recruiter and testing myself.

Unsurprisingly it was working flawlessly.

Narrowing it down to the companies then.

I sent a document with my findings to each of the companies and pretty much 50% of them stopped with replying.

The rest confirmed that they hadn't received any mails regarding the same and they saw no mail resembling the one I tested with my friend.

Kinda confusing but I asked them to look into it.

Meanwhile mail from Angel returns saying that their system is working perfectly fine even around my region. So idk what was the problem

I got a mail 3 weeks after the first mail to the company. They had been using a utility to auto-accept/reject profile applications. This util sent a lot of mails, even for rejections, to their mailboxes, filling them.

So they decided to remove these emails automatically by marking them spam. Apparently, the interview confirmation messages also count as these emails and were automatically archived. Thus removing my responses to those companies.

Idk if this is widespread issue because only one company has responded to me yet.

I'm still livid with this shit.

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

Why is whatsapp just AIDS?!

The privacy thing is big but let's take a look at the app.

It's the only messenger app I've ever used that forces you to save incoming images to your gallery if you want to see them, like wtf?

The UI looks like shit and it's kinda hard to understand from a UX perspective, for example read receipts which Messenger does beautifully. Facebook owns WhatsApp so A it's not really a better choice than fb messenger and B it basically has a shit quality application compared to Messenger. The messaging experience in sketchy Chinese dating apps is better.

Also it basically hacks your phone. It turns on notifications and permissions by itself even when I explicitly turned them off, and sends me notifications for muted conversations.

Speaking of notificatikns. Every time I get 1 notification, notifications from every single chat even an unread messages from 3 years ago gets sent to my phone.

It guzzles battery like a monster.

And they have basically formed a cult in the indian community, so now everyone thinks its the best and no one uses anything else because "it's so convenient" which it's NOT. It has a terrible interface, and the only thing I like about it is the fact that it being so shit gives me an excuse to uninstall it and ignore all the fucking spam on there.

Honestly, the app needs to die ASAP because it is frankly the shittiest of shittiest messaging applications.

My job sends out emails with things like "You won a prize!" In the subject line with embarrassingly vague reasons to click the links in the email. If you do, the links take you to a site where they slap your wrists for clicking an unknown link and teach you about the dangers of phishing.

It's fake spam. Ironically enough, though, it's the ONLY spam I ever get. It's more annoying than real spam because it never gets blocked by the system like an actual phishing attack would...

It is driving me crazy having to delete these stupid messages every day and they're clogging up my otherwise clean inbox! I don't even know who to contact about this bullshit because they're so "haha we got you!" about it, there's no department claiming responsibility. They're creating their own spam trying to prevent spam. What the hell?

Any alternative to Googles reCAPTCHA?

Backstory we have a contact form, in a bootstrap modal, loading the form as an ajax request. The form has (as of today) a captcha, as we where getting a lot of spam.

Guess what it does on safari? Right... It renders outside the modal and since there's no need for scrolling, bootstraps modal adds an overflow hidden to the body. Results in non submitable forms on some resolutions.

Any idea on how to fix this, or other captcha systems we could use (it's a Symfony app).

Passive aggressive deed of the day: Whenever i am replying to a mail with no subject, i start with "sorry i missed your mail as it went to my spam folder, maybe because it didnt have a subject".

Interesting thing. Ya know how when turning on your phones hotspot it has to verify that you are in fact allowed to use a hotspot. Well if you have Unlimited Data like myself, hotspotting is not allowed. HOWEVER, if you spam the hotspot button, it after several tries, gives up and lets you hotspot. THIS IS MY LITTLE TRICK. NO BUG BOUNTY. BESIDES, youd need my carrier.

How ethical it is to send 1gb email with big picture with word “NO” in response to spam email that wants my agreement ?

Tinder Tutorial 101:

I don't understand why everybody has issues with matches. Here is what u do:
1) Open Tinder App
2) Spam-Swipe to the right until you have no more swipes left.
3) Wait for matches
4) Separate good from trash.

Ain't nobody got time to read all these profiles

How to make those marketing staff of x service stop sending you an email when they don't have unsubscribe link:

1. Reply back asking about the free tier/plan
2. Profit!

2 days and no word from them after spamming me daily about the service

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

How fucking spam can harm you in real life: While I worked on smt and drinking coffee (of course) the phone vibrated and I catch for it automatically. The phone was fallen on the coffee and ruined rug, phone, table and chair (no keyboard). After I dried phone I were discovered that it was SPAM.

React Native is a disappointment.

Navigation - Pick one:
- Laggy piece of ballsack react-navigation
- Native, but a pain in the ass to customize react-native-navigation

Have a UI which changes often, and have your UI respond to your actions after 2 seconds.

Have a FlatList, where one element changes, and have your UI respond to your actions after 2 seconds.

Spam click a UI element which triggers a state change, and have your UI respond to your actions after 2 seconds.

Fuck the bridge, slow piece of garbage trash cunt.

Fuck the buggy reimplementations of existing native UI elements.

I want to go native so bad, but I have no time, so I'm stuck with substandard cross platform trash.

Is Flutter worth getting into?

ok, so i remake music and make sprites sheets for smaller developers, in an attempt to make them more recognizable. the devs normally give me a place in the "special thanks" section of the credits, and then i got people spam messaging me asking me to make them a game or something, so i explain to them i dont make games, just assets. however no matter how many times i tell certain people, they still keep on asking me to make a game when all i do is remake music and do a bit of pixel art, so the conversation usually goes a bit like this -

Them: Hi! I was wondering if you could make me a game?

Me: I don't actually MAKE games, just things you can use in your game.

Them: So can you make me a game?

Me: I don't know a single bit of programming, i just like to remake stuff.

Them: YOUR A FAKER???

Me: No-

Them: YOU SAID YOU CAN MAKE ME A GAME!

Me: i never said that, and i DON'T make GAMES,
JUST ASSETS.

Them: i'm blocking you

Me: why tho

Them: blocked :)

Me: [content hidden]

___________________________________________________
so yeah. this is why i stopped making assets for games and just remixed tunes for personal use.

Oh man setting up postfix and dovecot (plus things like rspamd) is a pain in the ass.
But it's worth it, having your own mail server is just quite a good feeling.
Now I just need to find out how to get it to pass the spam filter of Google, despite the server and the DNS zone being well-configured (better than my school's mail server according to tests, but that one still manages to pass. I have no idea why.)

WTF?!? so apparently I guy I know, knows the guy who built dodeley.com (don't get me started on the name!)

Oh boy... Where should I begin? So besides the fact that I'm pretty sure these newsletters will be classified as spam (aites like mailchimp and so on actually pay large mail providers not to classify them as spam, I doubt they do...), their so called "widget" is just a form, sent to their domain using GET, FUCKING GET, NOT POST, GET!!! The request looks something like "dodeley.com/?action=subscribe&id=xxx&field1=xxx&..." I mean like, WTF? Oh and their solution to not leave the page is simply to add a target="_blank" to the form, that you have to include on your site.

Did I mention, that the form id is static? Did I mention, that there's no validation on what you enter?

Who the fuck programmed this shit? Honestly!

Job Application Rant #1

So, today I found a great job posting on Linkedin. I was excited and created a unique cover letter and my resume and applied. The job was in another country and I need EU work visa for the job.

The contact for the post was also founder of the company. I asked him, via Linkedin, that if they would sponsor the visa for me if everything went good.

He replied to me that " yes we do sponsor visas, but you have only 3 years of programming experience..."(three dots included). I was like wtf, did I miss important part of post about experience minimum limit or something. I would not like to be spam-applier, guy who applies without reading requirements etc.

I checked requirements again there is no minimum experience limit. Anyways, I thanked him for swift response but damn bruh, do not put unlockable requirements to job posts, so someone's dream would not be crushed.

Every website we craft at work has some email substitution logic so that addresses you see on the site don't actually exist in the HTML source like that (you wouldn't find them in a format like "foo@example.com").

Instead the @ and the period right before the TLD get replaced with something else (to prevent (dumb) spam bots from using that address and blast it with junk).

Some people replaced them with images in the past (ew), replaced the @ with "(at)" or other stuff.

I made it a habit to render the @ and . by replacing them with span tags which then get a ::before in CSS that contains "content: '@';", so that the @ is visible but is not actually inside the HTML source code.

The classes for these spans then have a random name (persistent for that website though). The first one was called "move-along-nothing-to-see-here", but then I started naming them after Star Wars quotes.

One website's @ class is called "that-s-no-moon" (Obi Wan), others are called "i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this" (Han Solo), "powerful-you-have-become-the-dark-side-I-sense-in-you." (Yoda) and "these-are-not-the-droids-you-are-looking-for" (Obi Wan).

It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.

New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.

Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.

Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.

Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).

In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.

Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.

Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.

Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.

Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.

tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.

I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end...

You tricky bastards...which one means no more spam?

if you're gonna shitpost in devrant, make sure to tag as shitpost.

I like shitposts as long as they are acknowledged as such. The problem ones are unironical shitposts.

These lazy ass posts that seem to be written by someone bored in a commute are liquefying my shit.

I'm referring to 2 line posts like "it's hot in here" or "x broke today" with no development whatsoever.

Like people think this is Shitter or something and they can just spam shit about every mundane detail of their day to day.

That's chit chat, nothing wrong with that, but you don't chit chat in a forum, you dm your buddies.

There should be one day a year when random spam emails become true when you click on them.

It should be random for everyone so you never know what day it is and also happen instantly when you click on message.

World would be full of millionaires, guys with enormous penises. Everyone will eat food all the time cause you can lose all of your unnecessary weight with single click and whole internet will flood with spam emails.

Instead of scrolling trough news and social networks people would click on spam emails waiting for the day their spam will be fulfilled.

Economy would eventually collapse and most of us would be no different than monkey in some crazy experiment waiting for it’s banana.

It can be called fulfilled spam message paradox.

It would be funny alternative reality.

People are bitchin' about pics upload not working..and no more meme spam.. Here I am, trying to spam with ascii art.. 🤣🤣🤣🤣😇
P.S.In case you're wondering..it should've been Eevee.. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
P.P.S. it looks even worse on web!!
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I am here on devRant now for a while. Althought, reading amy of your stories and taking care of websites is not what I usualy tend to do, I started doing it as a favour for a friend of a friend.
Baaad bad decission :-(

"pls, dis is urgnt! uplood dis pics asap on page"
*mail notification*
*face palm 1* because who sends pictures by mail these days ... I like my 50MiB Inbox, dont spam it with garbage!
*opening mail - lists attachments: 1 file, ~900KiB* ok whats happening now?
*facepalm 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9* (10 if there still would be a face to palm on)

the person seriously send me the pictures in an attachment, within a pdf document that was created with MS Word.
No - Just NO!

I should have known better ... sooo much better :(

Yay I just got hit by the spam ban hammer, either that or these spammers are upvoting posts now 🤨

No, I'm not interested in your credit card offer 😬

I need a spam filter for my mailbox like my email 👻

!Dev related but still freelance.

So.. I do 3D stuff, scenes, animation and so on. The e-sport pub manager I know told me about this guy that wanted to start a local organizations around FIFA, hold tournaments at the pub and so on. He had some finance, contacts and needed a 3D scene of a stadium to highlight top placers as 3D Fifa cards.

Gotcha, so I hooked him up with said stuff, he was happy, manager was happy, first tournament went well. Now to the shit show:

He wrote to me a couple of days later asking if I'm up for more jobs, which k respectfully declined because l was on a bigger project that took about 2months to complete. Since that day, he spammed both me and the pub manager with request and wishes on wanting to do more.. and I mean SPAM!

Like the dude can't take a no, sorry. He tried to call on phone and messenger, messeged me several times / week and asked the manager of he heard from me.

Both the manager and I were perplexed of his attitude and after asking several times to stop and we both had other things for now (events / projects).. he.. he didn't stop. So.. blocked and that's that, right? Fuck now.. other clients of mine asked me if I knew of him because he tried to contact them to get to me.. like WTF?! How hard is it to take a no and move on?! Jesus.. client of hell in a nutshell

With a recent HAProxy update on our reverse proxy VM I decided to enable http/2, disable TLS 1.0 and drop support for non forward-secrecy ciphers.

Tested our sites in Chrome and Firefox, all was well, went to bed.

Next morning a medium-critical havock went loose. Our ERP system couldn't create tickets in our ticket system anymore, the ticket systems Outlook AddIn refused to connect, the mobile app we use to access our anti-spam appliance wouldn't connect although our internal blackboard app still connected over the same load balancer without any issues.

So i declared a 10min maintenance window and disabled HTTP/2, thinking that this was the culprit.

Nope. No dice.
Okay, i thought, enable TLS 1.0 again.

Suddenly the ticket system related stuff starts to work again.

So since both the ERP system and the AddIn run on .NET i dug through the .NET documentation and found out that for some fucking reason even in the newest .NET framework version (4.7.2) you have to explicitly enable TLS 1.1 and 1.2 or else you just get a 'socket reset' error. Why the fuck?!

Okay, now that i had the ticket system out of the way i enabled HTTP/2 and verified that everything still works.

It did, nice.

The anti-spam appliance app still did not work however, so i enabled one non-pfs cipher in the OpenSSL config and tested the app.

Behold, it worked.

I'm currently creating a ticket with them asking politely why the fuck their app has pfs-ciphers disabled.

And I thought disabling DEPRECEATED tech wouldn't be an issue... Wrong...

I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.

They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.

If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.

The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.

Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.

They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.

PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.

Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.

Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.

The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.

You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.

Just received this really weird email. Probably spam, but why even bother when there is no link or attachment? Maybe it is encrypted... 🤔 What do you think? Anyways, the server has SSH enabled anyone care to bruteforce? :^)

Session Management in HTML/PHP be Like:

JUST PUT THAT FUCKING SESSION ID AS HIDDEN INPUT IN EVERY FUCKING FORM!!!

BECAUSE WHY NOT JUST SPAM IT WHY IS THERE NO GOOD FUCKING WAY TO HIDE A SESSION KEY WITHOUT COOKIES

Long story short:

Just had several problems with using some drone ci plugins (hugo and sftp). Found issues regarding the problems on GitHub. Issues have been open for several years. Still open. Tried to participate or ask for the state. Got a "no one else got a problem with this". Recoded both plugins. Tested them. Using them now. Source is on GitHub. Posted them as alternatives on drone's discourse. Got flagged as spam.

Nice. Not using Drone again. Searching for an alternative now.

Little extra: I think they banned me from posting GitHub links on their discourse.

Dear online services, shops etc.

I already use your service. You have no need to advertise it to me, and I know I opted out of that. Any reminder that I'm missing out and should opt in to marketing, even if it's described as a service/operational message, will itself get reported as spam. Because it explicitly is, by its own confession.

Fucking EA Games and their fucking shit mailing system!!
All the sudden they start spamming me emails about their shit games nobody fucking cares about. I proceed to inspect the footer to find an 'unsubscribe' link and there was none, just a 'manage my preferences' link.
So I went there. After waiting a whole minute for a simple page to load (wtf) there is a checkbox saying 'yes please spam my inbox with EA's latest news about their shit games nobody cares about' and it was UNCHECKED.
So I leave it unchecked and click update (thinking it might actually unsubscribe me from this crap) BUT NO! I receive another email saying 'thank you, you stupid moron you just subscribed to our shit and will now receive even more of our useless email about how different the new NFS is and how rubbish the new Star wars game is...
FUCK

I absolutely hate it when companies use this or that medium for communications despite me asking them time and time again for another.

I have a mail server for more professional communications. The phone, only for stuff that won't matter if I inevitably end up forgetting about it (even more so now that Google made call recording more or less impossible, laws be damned). I will forget about a phone call no doubt. I've got better shit to do than to remember your manglement decisions, thank you very much. On mail, that's all nicely on my mail server for retrieval in several years even.

So I ask them to use the email address I gave them, a dedicated one for their company too (catch-all go brrr). Can't do that with phone numbers. Managing all those SIM cards aside, our government has now limited the amount of SIM cards one can have to 10. And texts and phone calls are not a long-term medium! And I can't share my phone number with just about anyone because people will inevitably spam the shit out of it, AND it's hard to replace! It's not a good medium! So with all due respect, companies - I couldn't care less what medium you prefer to use for your customers. You don't care about what your customer wants you to use - explicitly so! - and you lose a customer. It's as simple as that. Dealing with manglement is one thing, but dealing with manglement using the wrong media is something I'd really rather not do.

But hey I guess that virtue signalling is more "in" than actually listening to your goddamn customers nowadays? Let's replace another master/slave reference. You know, arguing that if we did that 2 years ago, George Floyd would've totally survived. Not by fixing the US police brutality, oh no no no. That's not the right way. Changing nomenclature and hashtags however, and not giving half a shit about your customers, yeah that's the way to go!

All results for GDPR on my "spam mail adress" (NO results for DSGVO!) ... seems like GDPR doesnt apply for spam :D but this email is also registered to sooo many services and websites... i think the search is broken :|

TL;DR still don't know who 1:11 is...
It looks like my script took screenshots until about 2:50, but there was no activity on the desktop... That means they have to be on A days. I can try to run the script again next Wednesday OR I can use this thing I built to wait until 1:11 and spam the desktop with screenshots claiming to be the NSA... I'm a little too chicken for that lol. Anyways yeah couldn't find out who it was yet and I don't have much time to find out...

I'd just like to say a royal fuck you with fingers and all to the BBC.
FUCK YOU
Having 10 mins to spare before I leave to get the train to work I thought I'd pop on the news on my phone.
Having got to the website I was promoted to log in (so the bastards could track me no less) but I thought fine! Having tried my password a few times I eventually got into the news streaming page and clicked play.
Wait what a this? Play store? I didn't want the fucking play store and especially to download the BBC media app but screw it I don't have a choice or a lot of time, so I hit the download button.
The app downloads I launch it and boom! the pissing thing takes me back to the BBC website I shit you not! But wait... wtf page is this? Some middle of buttfuck nowhere page which has nothing to do with streaming the news...
I'm now writing this from the train sweating my balls off after leaving late due to the pissing about that I've had this morning. I've had to pick up the shitty free newspaper running past like a paperboy on crack and the only thing I want to do now is spin up a bunch of nodes and spam the bastards with the web address of my middle finger and the words FUCK YOU!

Time for payback, who's in?

I have always considered the regular recruitment spam to be annoying. Based on all your rants I now consider these messages a plague. My experiences with rodent... you either use repellent or lure them in a trap.

I have currently listed the following chatbot functionality for project 'Piper of Hamelin'. Love to hear your ideas to maximise counterparty time wasted.

- Yes I would be very interested in this job opportunity, especially since in addition to all 10 listed languages I am also very experienced in the following [list of 20 languages]
- Hi, hereby my resume, looking forward to your response (no attachment)
- Hi, hereby my resume, somehow it wasn't properly attached previous message (attach corrupted file)
- Hi, I am sorry but unfortunately something urgent came in between, can you please reschedule our meeting
- Hi, for some reason I cannot connect to Zoom/Teams/Else, can you send a new invite on another platform later this week
- Hi, somehow the document got lost, can you please resend vancency.pdf
- Hi, I really appreciate your time and effort, though a new opportunity came along just know that suits me better.

Is it just me or did Outlook decide my antispam is no longer needed. All of the sudden it looks like I turned off my ad-blocker on BuzzFeed. I'm now getting a lot of spam from the stupidest things.

I kid you not.

There is a pretty popular job search site I have used for quite some time. I wanted to close my account due to spam phone calls and emails. The website has no ui for closing your account. I fly into a fit of rage and change my email address to 20 random characters @gmail.com. Now I still have an account there but can't log in. Still getting the spam.

PLEASE DON'T ENGAGE THE SPAMBOTS. Seriously, the number of obvious spam posts I see with (usually the same few) users underneath posting things like "No, fuck you and your sunglasses Kyle" or similar is 🤦‍♂️.

Guys, you're helping them. They feed off it, they note it as engagement, and they're more likely to continue posting. (Not just on devrant, but everywhere.) Just downvote / report as spam and move on.

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

1. Working with GitHub for a school project (teachers need to check my code there)
2. Getting flagged by GitHub spam-bot for no actual reason
3. Cry

guide to make successful software house company for future me:

1.find shortest domain name with code / star / best / it / super / ai / - whatever banger word you find
2. parse companies work board / linkedin jobs
3. parse people profiles
4. setup email server and create fake linkedin profiles that match jobs and candidates so company looks big
5. fake c-level management so company looks big
6. spam likes and create posts generated by ai from multiple profiles
7. spam invitations to people that match job descriptions and to people working within companies posting jobs
8. offer fake candidates that match job description
9. find real but less promising candidates and offer them the job
10. tell that fake candidate is no longer available but you have someone better

success

Microsoft, please stop the incomprehensible work vs. school account stuff and if you want to mail me a login code, then please actually do send an email. What's wrong with Microsoft Teams and office always giving its users headaches already when trying to log in?

A customer sent me a "FindTime" link, something like Calendso / Calendly, but "powered" by Microsoft Office. Seems that their power is off again, like ever so often. Microsoft: "can't access your account: You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school account instead."

Okay, go to bing, and search your error message. Try to use bing page to log in to my account: Microsoft: "We emailed a code." (No you didn't. At least I never received anything. And, yes, I did check my spam folder!) Microsoft: "Other ways to sign in: use Microsoft Authenticator".

me: "dear customer, please feel free to pick any time and date that matches your preference, as the FindTime link has been impossible to use".

How can Microsoft make me feel so dumb again, after more than 20 years as a developer? Have they ever heard about usability?

Co worker asks, why he can't send e-mails to a particular address. others cant't either

Turns out that the other company has blocked us.

*We are no spam senders, it was an issue they had with our company before*

My current task involves processing the commoncrawl web archive, and it's like a box of junk you buy at a flea market. You find so much useless stuff, broken stuff, stuff that makes you question people...

My latest find makes me wonder what lies out there if what I found was in plain sight. I found tens of thousands of websites that look like someone used markov chains to generate pron ads. Those websites exist in 10+ languages, use the same url-scheme, read like a dyslexic camgirl reading alphabet soup and are hosted on the same three ip-adresses. There is no javascript involved and some pages link to a variety of twitter accounts.

I queried a few commoncrawl files and amassed 4GB of this spam. Every time I look at it it gets weirder. There is an italian article about malware in there too.

Here's a text sample:
"Not from her bedroom, she her stream view and meet new experience. In hd india, because swimsuit still laws exist no interaction or frigthened and."

Any disposable e-mail address service:
"FIGHT THE SPAM"
"THANK YOU FIGHTING THE SPAM"
"YOU DID GOOD BY FIGHTING SPAM"

The users of disposable e-mail address:
*creates another spam account*
*creates another multiaccount in order to exploit a system*

Companies actually fighting spam:
Now there is even more spam to fight against. (which is not good)

About 2/3 of the accounts created daily on our website are spam accounts. We have to waste our time with this shit instead of actually improving our services. Since we do not track IP-Addresses and there are countless amounts of disposable e-mail domains AND there is still the option to create countless spam e-mail addresses within legit e-mail providers, there is no easy way of stopping this madness.

"Fight the Spam", you could start by deleting your shitty service or at least give us a list of all the domains you're using, srsly.

Anybody notice spam is just getting worse and worse? Fucking scum bags spamming me every year about conferences for my current company. I also get a bunch of scum bag spam on my home addresses. One account is practically brand new. I made the mistake of contacting robin hood trading on this account and now I get stupid scam spam on there.

I want to stay professional on the pro emails, but I just want to scream and call them of a bunch scum bags.

If someone wanted to do humanity a favor it would be depopulating spammers from the Earth. This would lower frustration levels on the planet immediately. Scammers and spammers are all the same.

Do marketing teams are really so retarded to believe that if you spam your new customer's mailbox twice a day with "we missed you", "take a look at our new products" etc etc email/newsletter bullshit it will actually entice them to buy more stuff? Bro, it just makes everyone dislike you, makes you look desperate and it's just straight-up annoying. Unsubscribe and no longer bothered to buy anything from you.

1 of the many windows rants i will make since i have to use that on work's laptop.

Let's start.
20GB for an IDE? what a joke.

Seriously MS. Are you fucking retarded? You have a fuckin retarded windows store, and i need to open it 3 times for it to be functional? Fuck you.

I want to change the default browser. YES I FUCKIN WANT TO CHANGE IT, STOP FUCKIN ASKING ME 500 TIMES IF I'M SURE ABOUT IT AND DO THE THING I TOLD YOU TO DO. Fuck you.

2GB on startup? Thanks, appreciated. Miss my 250MB on my linux laptop. FUCK YOU.

Did i fuckin tell you i want to sync the onedrive? I clicked that shit to disable it and you decided to sync the fuck out of it? Fuck you.

Candy crash and other retarded games? LOL, can't say anything. The laptop is from the job, i won't bother uninstalling that shit. In any case MS would reinstall them again. Fuck you.

Fans at 100% for no reason and battery draining like it's a cold drink that drinks someone who is thirsty? Thanks MS, very helpful. Fuck you.

Powershell? Well i leave that. Whenever i remember how slow it is i want to throw the laptop of the window. Fuck you.

Notifications? Thanks, it's very good thing to spam them for no fucking reason. Fuck you.

Skype? Who the fuck told you to install it? Fuck you.

Well i won't say anything about their fuckin updates. Every one knows how retarded and piece of shit they are.

!dev
I've finally been so agitated at G+ I need somewhere to just vent.
So for context. What I'm talking about is Google+, or more specifically, the Android app. The website is bad in its own way, but that's not here nor there. No opinions on the iOS version, as I simply REFUSE to touch iOS.

So anyways. The platform itself honestly is not bad. With competent developers behind it, and them actually listening to their dwindling fucking userbase, they could easily turn it into something successful, but the issue is that they just aren't
You see, it's almost like they change dev staff every 6 or so months. Why do I believe this? Because the GUI changes about that fucking often. They also have a history of forcing updates, but allowing you to use an older version, just horrifically slapping on a new and unwelcome skin. This isn't an isolated practice by any means, but it's by far the most prevalent here.

So, now a list of some of the issues the current version has:
-After about a week, the app becomes unstably slow, to the point of it taking about a minute to refresh your home feed, or an individual page.
-Searching is never good, always being slow and rarely giving you who you asked for.
-Transparency is non fucking existent. There isn't a development roadmap to speak of, and when something happens we get it second hand from staff in a "G+ help" community.

There is a solution for the first one, going and clearing the data/cache, but really, the end user shouldn't have to regularly do that. Not to mention the storage space Google apps IN GENERAL fucking take up. Why does Google Play Services regularly use 250MB? (For most people, this really isn't much. But when you only get to fucking use 4 GB of internal storage it's a giant fuck you.)

Bah, back to the topic at hand.
There isn't a good solution to searching, or for transparency at the moment.
The spam filter is awful as well. REGULARLY letting obvious spam pass, regularly blocking and filtering genuine users. It's real annoying that the Android app itself doesn't have support for seeing these flags outside of rooting through the settings a bit, but still. The web and iOS versions have this already.

Oh, it also completely lacks a dark mode like most Google apps for some fuckin reason.

That concludes my random 1:30 AM rant about something I have no ability to change, except hope in vain that someone who has the ability to change this forwards this to the developers of G+.

I need a better sleep schedule.

Working on a CS370 (Software Engineering) project with 5 people; 2 of which feel like their time is more important than everyone else's so when we all meet as a group to go over presentations, documentation and other things we need to do as a group, they silently sit alone working on bits of code they should have done previously. Then when we can't get docs done and handed in on time, one of the two decides to spam our group chat at 2am when 2 of us are sleeping because we work in the morning, one of us is sleeping because of morning classes and the last one is doing god knows what. Like, I'm sorry. But failure to do your shit on time does not constitute an emergency on my shit. All of our weekly peer reviews reflect on how no matter what we say to these two; they refuse to work as a team.
!rant, more like dev hint
In a team, your time is not more important than team time. You can do things on your time whenever you want; but unless your entire team shares your schedule, team time might be a rare commodity and should be used as such.

So I've sent emails to a couple of people (some of which I found on devRant) that were offering work. Typed a small story about myself and why I'd love to take the work.

No reply whatsoever.

Like, I get it if you don't want me, completely understand that, but how hard is it to let me know that.
Like c'mon guys, don't be a dick.

Disclaimers: I got the email address right, they did not land in my spam or whatever since I did receive an email from them in an earlier part of the correspondence. I did give them (what is in my opinion) a reasonable time to respond. They also didn't die or something since they are still active here...

I like the new WhatsApp!!

There I said it.

Why?

- Snapchat was practically useless piece of crap for me. No one that matters to me used it. That app is a data hog and battery killer.

- Meanwhile, What'sapp cared enough to be datafriendly to those in developing world. Like, enabling video playing while it's downloading.

- Whatsapp is not a data hog or battery killer.

- Snapchat sucks shit unlessn on ios.

- I hate Facebook because if it's spam and i stopped using it. With new WhatsApp update, I'm less likely to miss out on what is happening with people i actually know. I know facebook owns WhatsApp, but it doesn't really matter.

- No stupid discover ads or promos like in snapchat

I am truly baffled. How in the world am I receiving 2-10 spam wordpress account registrations EVERY DAY for a website which I've never let be crawled by search engines yet? These mail.ru accounts keep coming and seemingly for no reason. Who the fuck wants to register so many accounts, and how the fuck did they find my site to begin with? 😲
These registration emails are seriously annoying now and the site now has hundreds of fake accounts on it...

A lot of you here rant about devs being arogant or expecting you to think for a little bit with own head and then write a proper string that will help dev answer straightforward without guessing what the author smoked or so for which there's even a tutorial made (wasn't there always). But I don't see any rants about the other side of the coin.

Let's say you are a random dude, not even that arogant type. You see a question, no answers, everyone piss on that question because it's just a mess. Yet you find yourself in a good mood, so let's help the poor soul with th trouble. Answer like from a book for kids, fully explained example and...

No points, no accepted answer, but not even any feedback! Was my answer wrong? Did I miss something? How can I improve it? Was the example too complicated?

This is exactly the type of idiot that deserves a kick in the ass. It's no site, for hanging spam! Why the hell does that kind of idiot think there's even an option for own answer? People will come back to the question eventually and what will they found? An answer, which probably isn't even correct!

(not really talking about a specific answer/question, so no need to search)

Hello anyone with an idea how I can unsubscribe my email from many services at once? It seems Google doesn't have that feature that lets you see all your email subscriptions. I'm receiving a lot of junk and spam mails from some subscriptions I no longer want.
Unroll.me would have been great but it's not available in my country.

My essay company wants to add new sections to our company website.
I`m wondering if it`s difficult for programmers to write essays and do you actually need it.
No spam, just gathering opinions. Thanks

When you unsubscribe from some spam mails. And start clicking "no" by default and then the last question ...

So as we start to scale we are recruiting "a lot" of profile on the tech part. And for fuck sakes it's complex while covid shit storm!

No pub for the first tech interview, no late restaurants, a lot of "let's wait till next quarter"... Fuck....

And the worst of the creep is that I "have" to stalk/spam some profiles for the "hunt", and I'd like to clean/purify myself afterward...