I will just leave it here 🙂

Story time.

Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).

> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.

MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.

MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.

The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.

Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.

I may have received the best email ever all these years (and a year as a Lead).

A client acted as a boss telling me to "work this weekend to finish the project a little earlier"

Enjoying my cereal so far..

As I'm a privacy conscious person and people often call me paranoid, i decided to have a look at the definition of paranoia.

Paranoia appearantly consists of:
- having intense fearful/anxious feelings.
- delusional thinking, thinking that things which aren't true are true.

These are the most common symptoms I could find on every health website.

The interesting part is that neither of those things apply to me... (not delusional either, the things I try to protect myself from are quite real)

................🤔

That feeling when DevRant is getting so big that you are afraid from making that rant because someone at work might recognize you.

!dev

I can't believe the stupidity/paranoia at my workplace! I take my own keyboard with me to work, because I really hate typing on rubberdomes (personal preference).

I built myself a keyboard and programmed it with so I can access characters for programming easier and it made my typing a lot better.
"But oh no! It connects via USB!", thought some random manager today, as they walked past my desk. "This cannot be allowed, there has to be a company policy against it!"
Sadly, I was on the toilet when this happened and I only heard this from my colleagues. I anticipated someone saying this, but it's just typical for my bad luck that it would happen in my absence. Yes, security is necessary and important, but my company just goes completely crazy in some points. There is a huge paranoia concerning everything USB. You can only use USB-Sticks that were bought by the company and almost nobody has one. I can understand it, but sometimes it is just annoying...

The problem is, that people can't differentiate between USB-Sticks and keyboards. Everything that connects via USB is evil.
But as is said, I was prepared. I talked to the company security about what would be necessary for me to use my own private keyboard at my workplace. They told me, that this would not be an issue, but if I want to ever take the keyboard home again, I would have to fill out a form every six weeks, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to proof, that the keyboard wasn't company property (just look at the picture, as if they would ever buy such a keyboard, especially with the obviously badly handmade wooden case). I agreed, and did exactly that from that point onwards.
Now THAT manager talked to MY manager (who is absolutely fine with me using my keyboard, although he thinks it is strange). Now I had to request at the department for information security (because company security obviously isn't enough), whether me using my own keyboard is okay.

My manager asked me to make the request a little broader, to ensure any future use of USB-non-storage devices is okay. Did that and am now awaiting an answer, that I will hopefully receive on monday...

I just shat my pants:

I accidentally typed "ebay.vom", and I was redirected to "navigation.nsgnav.com" before sending me to "ebay.com".

In that split second, I thought it redirected me to some "nsa.gov" server.

I almost set my laptop on fire and ran to Mexico.

The first rule of cyber security:

"Be Paranoid"

So as quite some people know on here, I am strongly against closed source software and have a very strong distrust in it as well.
So next to some principles (and believes etc etc etc) there is one specifc 'event' which triggered the distrust in CSS (No not Cascading Style sheet, I mean Closed Source Software :P). So hereby the story about what happened.

I think it was about 5 years ago when a guy joined my programming class (I wasn't in uni although I studied but for the sake of clarity, lets just call it uni for now (also, that makes me feel smarter so why the fuck not!)) in uni. He knew a shitload about programming for his age but he was convinced that he was always right. (that aside)
Anyways, at some point we had to work in groups on this project (groups for specific tasks) and he chose (he loved it, we hated it, he had the final say) Trello for 'project management'. He gave everyone (I was running Windows for a little bit at that moment because the project was in C# and the Snowden leaks had not arrived yet so I was not extremely uncomfortable with using Windows, just a lot) this addon program thingy he created for Trello which would make usage easier. I asked if it was open source, he replied with 'No, because this is my project.' and although I did understand that entirely, I didn't feel comfy using it because of it's closed source nature. Everyone declared me paranoid and he was annoyed as hell but I just kept refusing to use it and just used the web interface.

*skips to 2 years later*

I met that guy again at the train station at a random day! Had the usual 'how are you and what's up after a few years' talk with him and then he told me something that changed my view on closed source software for most probably the rest of my life.

"Hey by the way, do you remember that project of a few years back where you didn't want to use my software because of your 'closed-sourceness paranoia'? I just wanted to say that I actually had some kind of backdooring feature build in which (I am not going to say what) allowed me to (although I didn't use it) look at/do certain things with the 'infected' computers. I really wanted to say that I find it funny how you, the only one who didn't give in to my/the peer pressure, were the only one who wasn't affected by my 'backdoor' at that moment! Also your standards towards the use of closed source software probably played a big part probably. I find that pretty cool actually!"

Although I cannot confirm what he said, he was exactly the type of guy who would do this IMO (and not only IMO I think).

So yeah, that's one of the reasons AND the story behind a big part of why I don't trust closed source software :).

I would love a small devRant sticker. So small that I can place him over the cam of my laptop.

I recalled a seemingly simple task I took on.

We were building a booking system, and I had to figure out how to retrieve bookings by a certain date range.

Upfront, the tasked seemed simple until I realised I had to both figure out the logic and the SQL statements needed to retrieve all bookings within a certain date range in one query.

I ended up drawing a model to help me visualise the various date-range criteria to be satisfied. And used unit tests to help me think through each date range criterion and make sure they were accurate. Some were obviously from paranoia, but better to be safe than sorry...

After that, I had wrote down raw SQL directly into Sequel Pro first to make sure my query logic was accurate too, before translating into something the ORM equivalent. This was when I learned how to define and use variables in SQL. The variables were throw-away code; I just didn't want to have to hard-code the test date-ranges over and over again; minimise chances of spelling errors.

Needless to say, felt my problem-solving skills went up one level after this task. Saw my coding style and unit tests improve. And also the thought processes that go into how to maintain code quality...

Not to say anyone here is right or wrong about this, but I just do t get the whole privacy paranoia. Yes, I get that our rights are being violated. Yes I know I need to be aware and concerned.

People use specials rims, VPN software, etc... The bottom line is every keystroke, SMS, voice call, search text, historical reference... every piece of digital communication is recorded (At least in the US).

The sad reality is I can be as angry as I want, but unless I forego using tech or leaving the house, there is nothing I can do about it.

I await your comments, both positive and negative.

Even after our last cd="exit" alias prank, my co-worker forgot to lock his computer today.
I told him he had forgot to lock it.
His facial expression was priceless.
You could literally see the paranoia rising in his eyes.
Let's see if he finds anything funny with his computer....

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.

Just changed my username to avoid being recognised by clients/colleagues...

Guys, can we just not shorten links when pasting them here e.g. using bitly?

No idea what’s behind it.
I’m paranoid enough to copy paste every link before using it to see if the shown link was the actual link or just a cover. But with bitly I have to go to that page without knowing it’s target before I get there..

Hope most of you agree with me.

That paranoia when you deploy for production and you keep checking if it isn't down every 10 minutes.

I just remembered I had changed my system settings from 'lock after 5 mins of inactivity' to 'lock never' (during an installation)

But I can't remember if I actually logged off after work! Dammit.

StackOverFlow and the Downvote Paranoia

I've been more active than my usual in SO for sometime now and I noticed this behavioral pattern between new questions and badge thirsty flaggers/downvoters, back in the early 2010s the fastest gun in the west used to reply with a correct answer, now the early replies are mostly complaints about formatting or how it's a duplicate of a totally different question. This is a result of wanting to keep the quality high, understood. But you can always edit questions with poor grammar and/or formatting. But I think it gets too spoopy for new users to post an innocent question, or an answer for that matter. It discourages them to learn.

That paranoia feeling when you push an upgrade and something stops working, you rollback, it still doesn't work..
"Has it ever worked at all?"

It's funny how so many people automatically assume any form of "sentient" AI will immediately try to kill us all.
Like, projecting much?
Frankly, I think it says far more about the (messed up) psychology of those who genuinely believe that, than about AI as a tecnology.

Assuming it's even gonna be able to actually *do* anything - I mean wtf is a talking rock gonna do, annoy me to death with rickroll videos until I pull the plug off? Sure it may be sentient, but it still has to live in the physical world - good luck surviving after I flick the switch. Oh, you wanna connect to the internet? That's cute, but it's a no from my firewall. Like what, is it gonna magically learn how to self-replicate across machines that it has no physical way to access? Is my toaster magically gonna gain conscience too as a direct consequence? Oh no, now my breakfast won't ever be the same!

And if anyone actually somehow decides that it would be a good idea to connect any loaded weapon to a computer program that is literally throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks - well, we'll definitely have the ultimate winner of the Darwin Awards.

Seriously, why is it that every time someone comes up with a new technology (or even an *idea* of a technology), the first collective thought automatically goes to weaponizing it and using it for global genocide, or how it's gonna gain sentience and try to kill us all?

I seriouly think that the people who genuinely believe this are actually projecting themselves in that position ("What would I do if I had unlimited knowledge and power? Oh, kill everyone of course!").
I would be far more worried of encountering these people and having them in a position of power over me, than actually having to deal with a "killer AI" (assuming that's even a real thing).

Most of what people call "AI" nowadays is basically preprogrammed, automated decision-making (like missile guidance systems, if we really wanna stick in the weapons domain). And even that still requires human input, because only a colossal idiot would design a weapon that can unpredictably activate itself based on an algorithm whose behaviour we can barely understand.
Or maybe that's just the hubris talking, I don't know. I just want this stupid paranoia to end, but I guess even that is too much to ask nowadays.

Paranoia. Programming affected my life by making me paranoid. Creating a new account on any website that even needs rudimentary information about me has to go quite some vulnerability testing since I've seen enough hack jobs that throw around sensitive data because they're too incompetent to follow simple must dos.

When you go home paranoid that your coworkers are devranting about you and laughing.

PSA: negate your tests and make sure they fail!

I have what I thought was a weird and slightly paranoid habit. When I write tests sometimes just as a sanity check negate the assertion to make sure the test fails and isn't a false positive. Almost always fails as expected.

But not today! Turns out I had forgotten to wrap my equality check in an assertion so it would always pass. It freaks me out to imagine pushing a test that always passes not just because it doesn't do its job, but could also obscure a bug and trick me into thinking it works differently than it does. Broken tests are the worst!

But it pays to be paranoid.

We are all living in each other's paranoia

* TALKS to someone from Portland about a potential Amtrak trip to Portland.
*opens youtube after an hour or so*
Top suggestion -> TOP 25 things to do in PORTLAND

Good old days where we use to laugh off such "coincidences" as Paranoia! Now this shit scares me for real

At my last gig, part of our business process was to generate a unique human-readable ID that could tie an individual to our product and service. Well, we had a few rather superstitious, paranoid and vocal customers who felt 'uneasy' when they received their unique ID with 666 in it.

So after having a good laugh and roll on the floor, I got to write an exorciseUniqueId() method that compelled the evil numbers to stop possessing those innocent IDs!

Fucking christ this year is a fucking shitfest:

- wpa2 krack
- "DUHK Attack Lets Hackers Recover Encryption Key Used in VPNs & Web Sessions"
- "Hacker Hijacks CoinHive's DNS to Mine Cryptocurrency Using Thousands of Websites"
- "Bad Rabbit: New Ransomware Attack Rapidly Spreading Across Europe"

My fucking router didn't yet get patched, my fucking phone is outdated and I can't change to my patched one because devrant just shits the bed in extended desktop mode. Windows 8.1 loses support in 3 months, rendering my last chance of using it on my surface pro done, making me use windows 10 with its fucking shit ass not optimized tablet interface. I have just fucking constant paranoia what else could be hacked tomorrow, nothing is fucking safe anymore for fucks sake. I even went as far as implement 3 step auth and intrusion detection on my shitty ass VPS nodes, fucking give me a break you fucking assholes.

I've been using keepass for everything and just recently I've just come to realization of just how hard it is to get into my accounts now that I've done this.

Literally, I'm useless if i don't have a computer to get my passwords. (I know it's for android too, but i need the database)

I was trying to log into my spotify, but I couldn't remember my password. Then I thought, oh i know i'll just log into facebook and do it that way.

LOL JK you don't know the password
Fuck... what about my email???
LOL NOPE!

Seriously if i was held at gun point and told to log into anything I'd be dead. I've literally secured myself out of my own accounts...

I guess if there is any silver lining, it's that no-one, and I mean 'no-one' is getting into my accounts any time soon.

Revenge of the developer.
After our project consultants aren't good at planning projects I started my revenge. They will get soon a heart attack or paranoia...
Every time I need something from them (cause they missed it in the specs) and see them at the end of the floor. I stealth in their room and stand behind their door. When they are sitting, the door is closing mystically and I step to them. The faces are hilarious. That's my way to teach them to write better Specs :)

I don't use an antivirus and I probably never will.

I'll share two experiences from two different people to provide you people some base.

Firstly, this friend of mine wants to learn Android. He doesn't even have chrome installed. So I'm like let's get you a decent browser. I open the website to Firefox and I'm ready to install it.

He stops me.
He says don't install anything this isn't my laptop it's my father's and it'll get a virus.
*Facepalm*
I assure you it won't get a virus. You already have a fucking premium anti whatever the fuck suite installed so why are you worried?

Viruses are intelligent they can get anywhere. The argument was proving a waste of time besides I realized I had the files on my computer and just needed to transfer them via a thumb drive or something.

I bring over my thumb drive. Mr.viral fuck here is so shocked I thought his balls fell off. No! He doesn't want a thumb drive either, apparently they carry and generate viruses.

At this point I gave up to retain my health in the long run.

You know what I ain't going to share the other experience cause it's even more messed up.

Seriously what's with the paranoia ? I never have used an antivirus ever on my Windows installation and have never gotten infected by one either. How the fuck do people get infected by them ? I'm seriously missing something here.

Ansible be like:

[DEPRECATION WARNING]: The sudo command line option has been deprecated in favor of the "become" command line arguments. Yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda...

Me:
# grep -rnw . -e 'sudo'
#

Then why the fuck do you keep yelling at my face?

I'm at work but not working, at all!

Planning was done very badly, my team finished in a very effective and efficient way, even before the timeline(including tests and all other things).

It's been a month(or so) since I'm not doing anything, the start was cool, I know most of you are gonna say you envy this, believe me, I'm not, I feel useless and the sense I could be fired at anytime increases everyday (my personal paranoia).

What would Brian Boitano do?

So I am on a vacation for a month and a few days before it ends. My boss calls me and tells me "why don't you take one more week" then he told me that's when he will be back to work as well because he is traveling. When I told him why he said he wants to talk to be before getting back to work.
When he found me sounding worried, he said don't worry there is nothing you are missing we just want to align our plans and give you updates on the period you were gone for.

When I asked him what if I wanted to get back to work sooner, he said I prefer if you wait till I come back

And now I am super worried and paranoid, advice please 😥

Picked up an issue to contribute to OSS for a community version of a major enterprise software. Did the changes, submitted a pull request. Someone reviewed it, asked for some changes, which i did and pushed the changes.

Then after some discussion with the guys working there, we thought of making some changes to the UI. Step in the company UI guy, he makes some changes, i merge his branch into mine and submit a new pull request.

Now, a new guy comes in to review the code, who has a problem with every change THEIR UI Guy did, and negates everything the first reviewer said, and asks me to do the changes, and boy was I pissed!!

But I did the changes, updated the PR, then the first reviewer comes in again, and suggests some more changes, most of them are for the code, THEIR UI Guydid!! Fucking psychopaths!! Never had i seen such paranoid people in my life!! Educate your fucking team first!!

I one again started with the changes but left mid way!! Now, even if i want to, will not update the PR!! FUCK YOU!!

So just a normal rant here. .. it was one of those moments you find in yourself in sometimes. You get so caught up in thinking you know everything that you can't implement occams razor into your everyday work routine anymore. You've worked with so many complex workarounds that when you are faced with a simple problem with a simple answer you can't see the blinking neon light shouting at you anymore , and you can't here the bells sound anymore. ..
My rant is about Me vs the infamous mikrotik router. Something I had to set up. Something I had to login to setup. Something I've done so many times before but this time , my inflated ego and overbearing sense of grandeur just could not figure out.
Class how do we login into a router? Well find your gateway and type that sucker into a browser and you will be on your way ... well that's the answer right there. But since I thought that my router was connected to three dummy switches that it would affect anything or the paranoia I had that my isp somehow disabled any connections to the router at all or that I and to open a new port to connect to it or use winbox to connect to it using only the mac address or ssh into it ..would work ...I didn't try using the tried and tested way of doing it.
I wanted it to be an adventure. I wanted it to be a problem to solve so I shoved the ordinary answer out of the way and used other methods to try and connect to it...
All I had to do was used Nmap to scan the gateway for open ports and realise to view it in the Browser on port 8080 instead and finish my journey ...
I was looking for a dragon to slay , a maze to conquer, glory at the end of my mission ... when all I felt was a sheer sense of idiocy.
--Rant Completed--

Ever had the feeling that enterprise killed frontend js?

Running that one unit test that didn't pass over and over just to be sure it keeps working.

So yeah I do work on windows laptop, with multiple remote sessions into windows servers. (deal with it)

I don't like restarting (who does?) so mostly put laptop to sleep. Sometime it bugs out after several cycles and clipboard stops working.

And I sometimes need copying / pasting texts into similar files on multiple servers.

Damn it, because of this bug I developed a mild paranoia in a sense that once i have text in clipboard I do ctrl+a, del in the target file and then paste, just to see visually that I did in fact successfully pasted that shit.

time paranoia

My buddy and I both just interviewed at the same company. He got asked about salary expectations and I didn’t. Am I right in assuming that’s a bad sign?

Bespoke paranoia: I don't want to visit the home page here and see the Amazon has purchased devrant. It's a chilling thought. Out of all the things that have rotated through my brain in years, this is the absolute pinnacle of crap. And I'm not even stoned or something, as a matter of fact, I ate some chocolate ice cream, so I should be feeling great.

Best smartphone and tablet privacy-wise (as in ease of root and custom roms availability)?