Fixing a parents iPhone, episode 1.

Problem: "Whatsapp is gone off my phone"

Debugging:

Me: *unlocks phone and sees whatsapp*, it's right here.

Mam: no, I no that I can't see my messages.

Me: ok, that is definitely not what "whatsapp is gone off my phone means".

*opens whatsapp*
*inside add contact screen*

App seems ok, your trying to add a contact?

Mam: that's a problem, whenever I open it I only see that page.

Me: *taps cancel button with shocked face*

Mam: omg there's my messages, how did you do that?

Me: ... ... ... I tapped the very easy to see, large cancel button in the top right hand corner.

Mam: but why was it opened there?

Me: *looks at opened message from unknown number*

If I was to hazard a guess, now stay with me on this one as it's a bit complex. I think ... I THINK ... you clicked the "add to contacts" button on the screen in front of you.

I am suspicious of one thing though.

Mam: what's that?

Me: how you managed to click the add contacts button, and when brought to the add contacts screen, you assume the app is broken.

Mam: oh will you **** off you sarcastic little ****. Thank you very much.

Me: no prob, 4 year computer science course put to great use.

"We are looking for a GDPR expert to be hired in our company"

"I am an experienced data protection manager"

"Oh, fine! May you give us your phone number?"

"No"

"Your email address?"

"No"

"You're hired"

My school.

We have free WiFi access, but you need to login into your personal student account to use it.

Turns out, SQL Injection works.
It gets worse.
Table name "schueler".
SELECT *
Well.
Got all data on all students.
Name, address, phone number, passwords in plain.

I reported it using an anonymous email. Partially fixed. Standard quotes now get eacaped. Still, passwords are now MD5.

Please enter your phone number...

How To Be A Developer
(Easy Method)

(Note: You need an Android device to be a developer)

Step 1: Go to Settings.
Step 2: Click on "About phone".
Step 3: Click on "Build number" 7 times.

Congratulations, you are now a developer!

"enter Phone number"
"numbers not allowed"

Finally I have something to rant about.

A few years ago, i got a call which went like this:

Phone: *rings*

Me: *looks at call, recognises the number and picks up*

Me: "Hello! Haven't heard from you in a while! How are you doing?"

Him: "I have a problem with my PC, could you..."

Me: *hangs up*

Aside from not even getting a "hello, how are you?" at the start of the call, here's the plot-twist:

A - This was my goddamn Brother calling

B - It was my goddamn birthday

how to improve UX

I've always tried to live by the philosophy that you should never burn bridges, but my god some recruiters make it very difficult. I've had a handful of occasions where I've had to type out a nasty email to a recruiter and then just not send it after I realized I wouldn't want it getting around/you never know who they known.

The latest incident where I did this was with a recruiter who emailed me 3 times within a week. But my issue wasn't with the amount of emails or even the fact that he was shopping me frontend positions despite my resume clearly stating I'm a backend dev/data engineer.

My issue was... THE GUY FUCKING REFERRED TO HIMSELF AS "BATMAN". That's right - an adult human being so desperate to get the attention of developers that he set his email name to "Batman", signs his emails "Full name - A.K.A. Batman", and lists his phone number like "BatPhone: xxx.xxx.xxxx"

If I didn't find him so pretentious and he actually sent me a kind of relevant position, what would I do? Pick up the phone and call him and say "hey Batman." Jesus fucking Christ. What an absurd gimmick. Maybe I'm overreacting but it seems so childish.

And you know what, if the guy read my resume and sent me relevant stuff I probably would have said "meh, he's doing good work, if he wants to stand out/be silly whatever." But no, he didn't even look at my skills. Instead he thought 3 shitty emails where he called himself Batman would convince me to write back to him.

I was close to sending him a ridiculous response and signing it "Robin", but decided it wasn't worth it.

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

> Receive sudden phone call in the middle of the night
> Check caller, unknown number
> "Either something bad happened or it's something urgent. I'd better answer."
> "Hello?"
> Friend of friend of friend says he updated his gpu drivers and now has some random fps drops.
> I was in a good mood so I agreed to help him over teamviewer, even though I don't know him.
> Downgrading to an older version of nvidia driver seemed to have fixed the drops.
> 5 minutes later, he calls again. His headset is not working properly.
> Helped him fix the issue over teamviever.
> This continued for at least 2 hours, calling me every 5 minutes to install just another driver or change some random win setting. Turned out he had some retard format his pc because he thought it'd "make it go faster".
> Calls me again, this time he's pc isn't booting up at all. After 20 minutes on the phone the fucktard admits he just tried to reformat his pc because "my pc automatically installed a bad windows update" ( no, I don't understand either) but he fucked it up.
> I begin explaining him how to make a bootable usb stick, how to change the boot order etc to reinstall windows. I even suggested that I'd help him setup win/drivers after windows's done installing.
> He lets me go for about an hour explaining.
> "So that's it. When the setup is over, call me again and I'll help you install the drivers."
> "Bro this sounds complicated, why don't you come over? This won't even take you 5 minutes"

YOU MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT
YOU FUCKING TRASH
CALL ME AGAIN AND I'LL SHOVE YOUR GIGABYTE GEFORCE GTX1060 6GB UP YOUR ASS, PERPENDICULARLY

The motherfucker even called me "bro"

[Reception] : "Good evening, how may I assit you?"

[Guest] : "Hi... Yes, I can't seem to find my room."

[Reception] : "What room number do you have?"

[Guest] : "I'm in room 404..."

*Awkward silents*

[Reception] : "How did you access the room phone?"

*Hangs up*

Thank God secondary phone number isn't required.

Benefits of being a dev:
Wife: "I just wish I had a program that could organize all my shit for my [work-from-home outside sales] job. My old company had much better software."
One week later:
Me: "Here honey: I built a program that will organize your business leads, allow you to search them by city, street, phone number, it detects when you have multiple businesses with one owner, warns you of duplicate information before you add it, and you can now launch phone calls with the click of a button. I've also put an app on your phone that can send and receive data from the main program."
One hour later:
Giggity giggity.

A while back, I had a lot of telemarketers were calling me daily, and I mean A LOT of them.

I got so frustrated with he calls that I decided I had to figure out a better way to handle those calls.

At the time, I was working with a PBX software called Asterisk, which is used to handle hardware interfaces and network applications for phone calls.

I needed a suitable side project and there was a version of Asterisk designed for Raspberry Pi, so I made a fun little answering service for myself.

Whenever a telemarketer called, I asked them to call back later, but to "my personal number", and gave them the number to my phone robot. (which had a pre-paid SIM card in a GSM dongle mounted)

When it received a call, it would play a pre-recorded phrase, wait for 1000 ms of silence and then play the next phrase.
After all 16 phrases had been played, it would start from phrase 7 again and repeat until the caller gave up.

I had this set up running for a while, and then added another robot for english speaking callers.

The calls stopped after a few months.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Because controlling your AC with your IR cell phone requires getting the phone number of my friend Robert?

Web developers - if you can write code to tell me that my phone number or credit card number shouldn't have spaces in it, just remove the #$!@$!* spaces for me FFS! You know very well people are going to put the spaces in there...

Me: Finally, thanksgiving break. I can't wait to go 127.0.0.1 and read books all week.

Friend: Wait, so you found a phone number in a book? Dude, let's call it!

Me: ...

I'd love to have a friend at school who would understand my references but that's pretty much imposible.

Day 530: Still trying to find phone number...

WhatsApp, freaking WhatsApp.
How did this thing become such a standard. How? Why does everyone EXPECT you to have it. They assume that you have it installed on your phone.

'Why don't you respond to my messages? '

'Which messages? '

'The ones I sent you'

'I didn't get any messages. Wait, how did you send them to me? '

'WhatsApp'

'Ah, yeah I don't use that. Wait, where did you even get my phone number from? '

'What? You don't have WhatsApp? Freaking weirdo. '

'bye'

How did an app(lication) become such a standard and why does everyone automatically assume that you have it? And whenever I explain them why I don't use it (Facebook = bad), they just react with 'install it again' (most ridiculous answer) or 'what is wrong with you' or they just give me a confused look and walk away.

A lot of them also act like there were no alternatives (some even better than whatsapp). One of them and probably also the best one is signal. It has all the necessary features a messaging app needs and is also very secure.

Luckily a few of my friends have installed signal and I am currently trying my best at my parents. They have threatened to 'take my phone away if I don't install WhatsApp again' or 'if you don't use WhatsApp then you also don't need a phone'.

Okay finale:

Fuck whatsapp, fuck facebook, fuck ignorance

Does anyone have the phone number of bill gates? 😂

Found a security hole....

A fast food delivery service had an ID for every order it Said
"example.com/order/9237" - i go 9236... finds another persons order, address, and phone number

So What should i do?

i thought of making a crawler and then make statistics on everyones orders and send Them a link 😂

Sister's new boyfriend at xmas party: So what do you do for a living?

Me: Well, I would say I'm a "full stack" developer, but what does that even mean anymore right? With the state of front-end development being in a constant state of flux and/or kissing its own ass, and every client demanding their one page website used solely for their phone number be offline first WPA SPA Web 7.0 REST Enabled clusterfuck that requires using at least 65% of the AWS stack, most of it completely uselessly. But hey, Neural Network AI looks good on your "grandma's cookies" website, and for only $9,000 per month you can now set the timer on your oven from your phone. So, man, I guess even though I've now been at it twenty years, even I'm not sure what the fuck it is I do anymore. How about you?

Sister's Boyfriend: I'm unemployed.

Okay, time to delete my old Skype account
1. Enter Skype name
2. Reset password
3. Captcha
4. Complete email
5. Enter email code
6. You are logged in now, please complete your profile first
7. Enter birth date
8. Add your phone number or second email address
9. Create new outlook mail
10. Got access to profile settings
11. Click on delete profile
12. Stop please first verify your email again
13. Enter code
14. Check all checkboxes that I am really sure to want it deleted
15. Click delete button

Fuck hell and that all again for my second account

After one job interview I ran across this one guy in an elevator.

"Are you an IT? I am looking for one".

I nodded, "Yes, I am". He was about to get off the elevator and told me to save his phone number.

By the time I was about to type the last 3 digits of his number on my mobile, I got a call from my brother and the elevator door closed. I immediately rejected the call.

Unfortunately, the dialer went empty and I lost his number.

I was trying to recall the number but I can only remember the last 3 digits.

I went back to the same floor, but there was around 30 offices and I couldn't find him. I gave up.

Fucking iPhone.

If. You. Don't. Contact. Us. With. A. Registered. Email. Address. Or. Phone. Number. Then. I'm. Not. Giving. You. Any. Information. Relating. To. 'your'. Account.

Oh you "don't agree" with that?

Guess what, never gonna give you up!

Oh, typo, that should've been: never gonna give a fuck!

No, seriously, I couldn't care less.

I feel so sorry for all the people in the world who use their phone more than their PC/laptop.

All the pitiful souls who think they're gamers because they installed lootchest simulator on their little digital skinner box. All the sad beings who just view the internet as a collection of ad-infested apps.

Actually, I don't feel sorry, because these people make the world a worse place.

Suddenly we needed websites which could render on tiny screens and need bloated cross-platform app development frameworks. Many game studios became parasites exploiting addictive behavior in humans, instead of creating works of art.

Humans spent 10,000 years to perfect their caves with expensive kitchens, and all people want is for their WiFi to reach the grill at the end of the garden. Humans created central heating, comfortable couches, wall-mounted TVs and luxurious desks -- and all people can think of is whether their phone plan covers holiday roaming at their shitty resorts.

The rare times I do actually go into this apocalyptic wasteland people call "The Outside", all I see is subway cars full of hunched addicted drudges, bus stops with clusters of enslaved automatons.

Fuck all of them.

Fuck all of you imbeciles, who ventured out of the cave and now DARE to call me anti-social, just for preferring the warmth of my comfortable protective den.

It's fucking cozy here, within the walls of my shelter, I got booze and a fridge full of food and a bunch of LSD, I can masturbate under the shower, have sex on the couch, have all kinds of GIANT displays for entertainment, with full-sized qwerty-keyboards, high-DPI mouses, even some console controllers and big TVs if I feel lazy.

You can stick your responsive websites and social-network-integrated Android apps up your rectum, just sit your fucking fat ass down in front of a workstation and desperately refresh the stream of fake attention-seeking messages there, if you absolutely must.

Seriously, why does this guy from our marketing department call me on my private phone number. Why did HR PROVIDE him with my private phone number?

And WHY THE FUCK is he asking me, a DB admin: "Our website doesn't load properly on Safari on my iPhone 7, could you take a look at it"?

No, of course I won't fucking come to the office to take a look at your miserable shitty device with its cracked glass screen.

Fuck you and your outdoorsy habits.

Stay the fuck in your cave, you degenerate attention whore, otherwise please go choke on your airpods.

When you try to edit person's phone number in dev environment and see this hilarity.

Why the hell do people call smartphones by Apple "iPhones"?! Whenever people call their phones iPhones I start calling my phone by the model number.

Idiots: Oh no! I've lot my iPhone 7s!
Me: Oh no! I've lost my Oppo A37f pink edition!

See, sounds stupid right? Imagine it in everyday life!

-We're packing for camp! You! Take your North Face N638 grey

-Done!

-You, other guy! You will ride your BMX X Black!

See? It does sound stupid!

TL;DR
If you're saying iPhone, you're a fucking idiot. (it's like saying Googling instead of searching the internet)

In the project management system we use with our clients I see file named, 'instructions for backup.'

I open the file and all it contains is my name and phone number.😑

My first hack... Back at the days when phones had disks to dial a number. I was a kid of cause, I'm not that old. I used to like to call my grans. Once, when I supposed to go to sleep already, I've found out that there is phone socket in my room (the one connected to the copper wire, that is where the word "phone line" came from).
It took me about a half of an hour to detach handset from the toy phone and about two ours to reverse engineer dialing protocol (you just need to disconnect the line sequentially corresponding number if times).
And after that I've heard my granny's voice. I was literally overwhelmed that it worked.

Best "error" I've ever seen today.

We have a very large database with millions of people, some of those records are duplicates. So I had a long project to write something that would automatically merge duplicate records while allowing employees to review them. Today we had a duplicate show up in the list which should not have.

Same name (apart from one letter), address, employee ID (off by 1 number), same manager, title, phone number, birthdate. But we figured out it wasn't the same person and therefore wasn't a good match.

Turns out they are twin sisters who live together and we're hired by the same manager for the same position at the same time. What are the odds...

HR really are the scum of the earth. Especially Indian HR.

I tech interviewed this guy on Friday and rejected him. And I told HR to tell him so. Apparently he was "too busy" to type a darn message.

This poor sod who was apparently laid off and was pretty desperate and so he'd been calling every HR he'd interviewed with the past week and no one picked up, including my HR.

Now this lad had my work number because that's what I did my phone interview on. I don't attend work calls on the weekend, especially not interviewees but I had to tell this poor sod that he didn't make it (it was a bit obvious).

This is the exact same HR who rejected a candidate just because they were 2 minutes late to a video call.

Email. Fuck everything about it.

It's an obnoxious queue of messages I somehow must handle. And everyone in society expects you to have email. You can cancel your phone number, maybe even live without a house... but every hobo still must check their email.

It is an endless shitstream of things I don't want. Like a garden with some nice tomato plants, but then a really smelly weed starts invading and no matter what you do it keeps coming back.

I don't want to login to unsubscribe. I don't care about your "notifications center", or "managing the offers you receive from us".

And then your boss asks you to design an email campaign... I don't want to receive that shit, why would our customers? And even if I agreed with using email as a communication channel... YOU THOUGHT CSS IN INTERNET EXPLORER WAS A BITCH?

No really. Fuck email. Fuck everything about it.

Why do HR people ask stupid questions like the following ones? Everytime I get those questions, I have imaginary answers like the ones right after each question.

Why do you want to work here?

- Obviously, because I need the money to survive. I'm not here because I love working for you and having to endure your stress. I'm not that type of a kinky person.

Are you flexible?

- Why? Do you want to annoy me when I'm sleeping in the middle of the night because of a sudden deadline or because a god damn employee didn't show up?

Do you see yourself as a perfect fit for both developer and tech support roles?

- Read my fucking resume, moron. I applied for a developer role. Nothing else.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

- As if you would care. It's none of your business, but since we are at it. I see myself as your manager in 5 years. Hope that you like that thought.

We didn't bother reading your CV. Would you like to tell us about yourself?

- Nope. Have a nice day and suck my dick. I'm leaving.

Can you give us your phone number and the phone number of your girlfriend?

- I didn't know that I am selling my soul to your company by accepting this job offer. I'm not your slave and you will not call me whenever I'm enjoying my private time.

What's motivating you?

- Money and the peaceful vibe at work when you are shutting the fuck up when I'm fully focused during my projects.

How do you handle stress?

- I dick slap everyone infront of me.

Do you see yourself as a hard worker?

- Nah, I'm not interested in sucking dicks, eating her ass and bending over to get a little bit of a raise.

"I put in a request last week, why isn't this done yet?! It's an emergency!"

Look up number... Created early 2015. Need by date, late 2019.

Mothertrucker, get yo shit straight. I've been on the phone since 7, I don't have time for these games. How does 2.5 years pass and you say it's been a week?!

....and there goes my phone again

I think I've finally realized something:
my boss does not actually listen to me.

Quite often during out weekly conference calls, he asks me questions about things I had just covered. I always assumed he couldn't hear because a) i'm rather quiet, and b) freeconferencecall.com bloody sucks.

But it happens for written things, too. I type an update on something in Slack, and an hour later he asks me for an update on it. I always assumed (likely correctly) that he has nearly zero reading comprehension. He writes like a 5th grader and only remembers a few nouns and one verb from anything he reads. But I swear he actively skips reading anything I write.

Now, however, I have frigign' proof that he ignores me. We have both been trying to get ahold of {Clover contractor} via email for months. We have gotten three replies, but twice scheduling prevented setting up a meeting, and once I simply missed the email amongst the flood of log spam I haven't been allowed to address.

I have asked the boss multiple times for the guy's phone number -- in emails, in Slack, and in front of everyone during our weekly conference calls -- and he has totally ignored me every. single. time.

Here's a transcript of my seventh(!) attempt:

Boss [2:13 PM]
Have you and {Clover contractor} met yet? If not make it happen. Stop letting it not happen. GIve specific dates and times. {Clover contractor} let's talk Tuesday 2pm or Wednesday 4pm which works better for you.

Root [2:14 PM]
For the seventh and last time, give me his phone number.
Getting ahold of him via email has not worked.

Boss [2:14 PM]
I am sendning one more, from that I want you to make the meeting happen asap.

Root [2:14 PM]
if i call him, setting up a meeting will be _easy_
Give me his phone number and I will handle this.

It is now 3:00pm and I haven't gotten a response.

Either he doesn't want it to happen, wants me to fail for some reason, or he's totally fucking oblivious. Yet ofc it's me who earns all of the blame when this meeting doesn't happen, and I'm likely to get yelled at in front of everyone, fucking again.

I'm really beginning to hate this guy.

I can't wait to walk out on him and watch the company come crashing down in my absence. It'll be sad to watch, but bloody hell does he deserve it for his arrogant incompetence.

You need a phone number to order a SIM-card in Germany. What.

A client asked me to add a mobile phone field to a registration form and asked me explicitly to use their server side validation for it.
Apparently they need a valid provider prefix, but after that everything goes. This was passed as valid mobile phone number.

This is just fucking awesome.
Bought a domain name from a local registrar today and now my personal details like full name, phone number and exact address are nicely on whois.

The cunts didn't even thing to ask me during registration if I want to make it private and there's no option to do that on their piss poor website.

Oh well, tomorrow will be the day that I transfer my new domain away from them. Last time I ever do business with these shitcakes

Ok so the ex boyfriend (let's call him Joe) of a friend of mine is a dumbass

He wanted to hack her phone, or whatever, so hired someone on telegram to do it. He asked her phone number and 200€.

After actually giving him the money this guy sent a ransom asking for 2k to not turn Joe in.

Joe learned a lesson.

Recovering a legacy Gmail account after receiving a notice of a blocked login.

*Tries to remember the bloody password*
*Actually remembers it*

> Sorry your password isn't enough. Your father's phone number that you used a decade ago can be used for verification though!

Google, let's get this straight. Things have changed. I know the fucking phone number and yes I can enter it, and out of sheer stupidity I did send an authentication code his way. Unfortunately however, things have changed in 10 years. I can instantly kill the fucker on the spot if I were to meet him ever again. Do you think that I'm going to get that fucking code?!

> Oh but you can try to email the code to the very account that you're trying to recover, despite the fact that you know the password for it.

TO THE FUCKING SAME ACCOUNT THAT I'M RECOVERING.

Must've taken a true genius to code that in!!!

Security rant ahead - you have been warned.
It never fails to amuse and irritate me that, despite being in the 2019 supposed information age, people still don't understand or care about their security.
I've travelled to a lot of ports and a lot of countries, but, at EVERY port, without fail, there will be at least one wifi that:
- Has default name/password that has been cracked already (Thomson/SpeedTouch/Netfaster etc)
- Has a phone number as password (reduces crack time to 15-30 mins)
- Someone, to this day, has plain old WEP
I am not talking about cafeteria/store wifi but home networks. WTF people?! I can check my email (through VPN, of course) but it still bugs me. I have relented to try and snoop around the network - I can get carried away, which is bad. Still...
The speed is great though :P

Lol, the last one killed me 😂😂

Very long story ahead!

Yesterday in the evening a friend of mine (calling him F from now on) became the target of something new to me...
Apparently one can fake his phone number through some fishy ways and call people with that number. Someone (we think we might know who it was, the why is at the end) did this yesterday to F.
Here's the whole story:
We were just talking together on a TeamSpeak Server (a program to talk to others on the internet) when suddenly another friend said: "F, why did you just call me three times in a row?" That was the first thing that was a bit suspicious. After that, F got calls from random numbers (even Afghanistan, we are German), and they said something like "Have fun with the police coming to your house". Then there was silence. 10 minutes later his phone rang and there were a ton of pizza delivery services in his town that apparently got pizza orders from him. Then there was silence, again. Suddenly someone with a hidden number called him, a woman's voice said they were the police and if F doesn't stop calling the police there will be consequences. F then told her what was going on but I think she didn't really care. She then wanted to know where F lives, but I told him not to say that, because if it is the police they can find it out by themself and if it's not, they don't need to know that.
Now, a short break: There is some fake information going around about where F lives. I can't remember when we found out but the attacker thought he would actually live there. No idea what happened at that location...
Now back to the story:
Time went by, nothing really happened. Suddenly F shouted: "There are blue lights outside! The police is here!" He muted his microphone and (the following is what he told us what happened) went down to the door (remember, he is 16) and there were two police men. They were asking about why he called the police. F explained what we knew until then, about number spoofing and stuff... They sent a more technical person to him, he understood what F was trying to explain. The police men drove away and he came back to tell us what happened. (Now we get back to what I heared myself.) The mom came in, screamed something that I couldn't understand, and F went offline. We searched who the attacker could have been. And we are pretty sure we found him. That guy connected to our Minecraft server (that's where I know F from) with his real IP, and his main account, which made it easy to search. He also got a static IP which means it doesn't change. We also got some information that in the recent days this guy was talking about VoIP spoofing and such stuff. Another friend of mine, a bit older, found some proofs and I think he will go to the police.

That's it. Thanks for reading.

Okay, question;

Can I use ANY phone number in my game?

According to Wikipidia:
"Numbers between (555)-0100 & (555)-0199 are reserved for fictional use."
But.. I'm wanting to have a little phone pop up in my game that you can enter phone numbers into and text the corresponding player (and i hope to have more than 99 players) I would just have contact names, but I want players ti be able to dick around with other players.. Like, post their number to in-game telemarketers and such. What fo you think I should do?

I have a whatsapp group with my friends, none of which are techies. A while ago one of them was looking for a phone to buy, so he started looking at models, specs and all that, but got pretty confused and asked a pretty well-informed question to the group:

"Guys, what is that quad core thing?
And what is a RAM? Is it something like the processor of the phone or what? "

OK, pretty typical stuff up until this point. The guy knows nothing about this sort of things, I wouldn't criticize him or insult him or anything like that. No, that's not the problem. The problem is the person that responded to him. This... This melted my brain so much I will never forget:

"Don't worry about that, you only have to look at how many gigahertz does the processor run at. Don't worry about the number of cores or ram. The GHz are the result of the amount of ram and cores, so the more the gigahertz, the better the phone."

PD: "Also take a look at how many megapixels does the camera have if you want to take photos".

Some people just talk out of their ass and pretend like they're experts on any topic they've read about for 5 minutes on the Internet

when you wake up saturday noon just to see your phone having 10 missed calls from the same unrecognized number, dial back and find it to be a mad client,
complaining about some graphic issues on a site you have nothing to do with.

checking the site; there is nothing wrong so you tell him to clear his browser cache.

he gets mad shouting a silly programmer shall not tell him what to do with his computer and its the site, not his browser.

i ask him if there is the same issue with another browser or computer..
he giggles a little then turn silent..

2mins or so later, he says: i'm gonna let your boss know about this then hangs up..

Selecting your phone number in slices of pi must be genius

Besides the fact that there would be an error handler, wouldn't it store a phone number as an object other than a computable number, like a string, cuz phone number is like a handler, a reference, and not something you'd ever perform arithmetic on?

I’ve been job hunting for a month with very few calls when I realised my resume didn’t have my phone number or my email.

I’ve been interviewing for half a decade.

Why yes, I am indeed retarded thanks for asking.

This is more of a rant about myself and what a prick I am. Last week I left my brand new Kindle at a hotel, just forgot about it because my brain is mush.

I don't even bother calling the hotel for days thinking and knowing full well the staff would have taken it (this stupid thing is worth a week's worth of wages here). I decide to call anyway and ask. "Yes sir, Mr. Matt, your Kindle is safe and sound in our hotel's main safe in a soft case awaiting your pickup or we will be happy to courier it to you".

I drove back to Varna and the super nice hotel guy apologized he didn't have my number otherwise he would have called (I don't have a phone number in BG).

I hate being the cynical asshole-dick I've always been.

Fuck.

I'm getting drunk now.

Other services : Please type your phone number to verify that it is you. It will be only used for verification process.
Me : Sure, why not? (Happily types in my number)

Facebook : Please type your phone number to verify that it is you.
Me : Hmmm (sees help)
Facebook : It will be used for verification process and will be visible to your friends. You can always change the scope settings.
Me : (reads as...) It will be used for verification process and will be visible to your friends and will be automatically sent to the NSA for free. You can always change the scope settings when you become the CEO of Facebook.

#deletefacebook

Beware, this is gonna be a long one.

Today, in university, our professor wanted us to do an algorithm where a number was given in input, and we had to see if that number was, as she put it, "triangular".
For example:
3 is triangular because it's 1+2.
6 is triangular because it's 1+2+3.
10 is triangular because it's 1+2+3+4.
And so on.

While she was explaining this, I was programming it on my phone (because I didn't bring a PC there).
In about 10 minutes I completed it.

This student who was beside me, which I didn't know until today (I'm still in my first year here), saw me programming it, and when I finished it, he looked at it and said: "It takes too much time, like this."
So he spent another like 5-10 minutes """fixing""" it, and then showed it to me: "Here, now it's better."
Do you want to know what he did?
The only thing he did was putting a for cycle instead of my while cycle.
And he didn't even do it properly!
He put an else statement inside the brackets of an if, and some variables weren't correct.
You call that making a program more efficient? Deficient is more like it.

Also, like 5-10 minutes after I did it on my phone, on my own, I looked at the prof's desk: a guy (who apparently is "the best") wrote his algorithm on the blackboard, and the whole fucking class applauded.

Later, I saw on our Whatsapp group that someone sent a photo of him writing on the blackboard, with the caption "The student surpasses the teacher." Others agreed.
I replied with: "For the record, I did this algorithm in 10 minutes."
An asshole replied: "You'll never be superior to the master"

Fuck off. -.-"
...I'll show them.

Because of the pandemic and how most of the people in my institution's I.T department are working from home we were asked to route calls from our work extension to our home phones. I did it to my cellphone and some of the calls that I get are hilarious, yet annoying. Annoying because we have a bunch of boomer ass people making the most ridiculous calls.
Being that the calls are not registered into our phones they just show the random number from which x person is calling.

Just right now my phone rings aaaand:
Me: "Hello?"
Boomer: "YES <tech support technician's name which is obviously not mine> I NEED YOU TO FIX MY EMAIL IT IS NOT WORKING AND MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING"

Me: "I am sorry, I don't know how did you get this number, but what we can..."

BOOMER: WELL CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO THE TECHNICIAN? I NEED THIS TO GET FIXED RIGHT NOW

Me: As I was saying, we can attempt to send an email through your phone's outlook app if you have it installed or I can send an email asking them to contact you since you are reaching an entirely different dep..."

Boomer: "DID YOU NOT HEAR ME! MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING AND I CAN'T SEND EMAILS AND I DON'T WANT TO USE MY PHONE, I WANT TO USE MY LAPTOP"

Me: Did YOU not hear me? I just said that I can send an email for you since my computer is working properly, at the same time, not wanting to use your phone to send an email when you have no other option available is more of a YOU problem, it is not mine

Boomer: EXCUSE ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO? i AM THE MANAGER OF <X> DEPARTMENT

Me: nice to meet you I guess, I am the MANAGER of X department as well, i have been told that for issues with my attitude I can just toss you over to <Director of IT> if you wish.

Boomer: Oh....no...thank you, I will send an email through my phone and see if that works.

Some background: The Head of my department is a hardass that is not scared to tell people to fuck off when they are messing shit up and he is very protective of all of us. I love this man and have personally followed the dude through hell when no one else came through. If they think I am bitchy that dude would throw down an entire house over people being dense, and even though he is a boomer himself (age terms) he despises the general attitude of entitled people from his generation.

10/10 I love my boss and hope to heaven that all of you find similar leaders.

A few weeks ago I stepped onto the grounds of lovely Canada. Back then - coming from Europe - I was surprised. Free WiFi everywhere without all the bells and whistles of creating an account and such.

Well ... at least I thought so ...

Today I went to a location where they actually charge you for their wireless services - fair enough the coverage area is pretty huge - and provide you with an access coupon. All good my optimistic me told me but once the login page loaded...

There are a lot of things about UX I could rant about but let's put that aside. The coupon came from the office where they KNEW all your contact details but it required you to create an account with all of them again to redeem the coupon.

Not only that but it asked for things like the phone number - obviously asking for a Canadian landline number since hell who uses mobiles anyway with numbers longer than ten characters?! - and even though it had a nice country selection it kept the states field there even when selecting a country that doesn't have states ...
Oh, and on a regular phone screen (which would be the target user for WiFi on a campground I suppose) the input fields for state and zip were occluded by the margins of the input rendering the content invisible.

And if that weren't enough after creating your account they made you watch an ad as if the personal data and the 4$ you paid them wasn't enough for the lousy 400 KB/s you get for 24h ...

Gets better though! After creating the account they display your password to make sure you remembered it ... over a non-secured WiFi network ... and send you an email afterward ... password via unencrypted mail via an unencrypted WIRELESS connection ... not that it protects anything that would matter anyways you can just snoop the MAC of your neighbor and get in that way or for that sake get their password but oh well ...

Gosh, sometimes I just feel the urgent need to find the ones responsible and tell them to GTFO of the IT world ...

Is it just me feeling like this about crappy UI/UX design? Always wondering...

Ops person: “Hey! Can you come fix this? I‘m trying to add a user and it keeps giving me an error saying that the phone number must be unique. What’s the ETA on a fix?”

Me: 😓

Client(over the phone):- I want an Android app where there job seekers and recruiters.

Me:- sounds reasonable enough, ok

Client:-i want job seekers to apply for the job and recruiters to post the job.

Me(gets a bad feeling);- doable ok.

Client:- and I want an admin user who can see all the users and do everything.

Me(yup there it is):- what do you mean by everything?

Client :- you know everything, talk to recruiters talk to see everyone using the app, you know everything.

Me :- no I don't know this "everything" that you speak of, tell me more, what screens (activity) should that have and stuff.

Client (getting irritated):- everything the admin user usually does.

Me(yare yare daze):- i will show number of users in a graph.

I have a feeling this is not over yet

Ok so a very quick background: I didn't get a job until I needed one after my phone broke and I didn't have the money to buy another one. (I'm a student still for those who don't know lol.)

>> Phone randomly breaks.
>> Don't have the money for a new one
>> Searches for low skill jobs (ie cashier) that would work with me in terms of how many hours I work and whenever those hours are.
>> Apply to like 15 (not even exaggerating either lol) jobs
>> Wait for responses
>> One day goes by. Nothing
>> Two days go by. Nothing
>> Three days go by. Nothing
>> Fourth day rolls around and I get a call about one. I answer, tell him I'm available starting that Monday.
>> (Keep in mind I'm on an old temporary phone)
>> Next day I buy a new phone (didn't have to pay anything up front aside from the taxes on it, as it's on a payment plan)
>> Reset old phone after usage
>> Monday rolls around and I drive to the location of the job, and walk in the door asking for x.
>> "I'm sorry sir, who? We don't have anyone here by that name."
>> I panic and hop in my car, and try to find the address of the store I applied to. I find out it's different than where I went.
>> Start driving there and call that phone number. I ask to speak to x.
>> "I'm sorry sir, there's nobody here by that name."
>> Call literally every other location in the city and ask for x, but nothing.
>> Since I'm already on the way, I drive to the location of the store I had applied to. Whenever I get there, the manager spends half an hour on the phone trying to figure out where I belong. Nothing.
>> By this point, it's well over an hour past whenever I was supposed to show up, so I gave up because I figured they probably wouldn't have hired me anyways.
>> I get home determined af to figure out who the hell called me.
>> I remembered that Verizon has call logs you can look at online.
>> I go back through it and find the number. Google it.

Here's where the story gets a lil funny now.

>> Number shows up for a store that I applied to who's name sounds a LOT like the first store.
>> Called them and explained what happened, and told them I'd be there asap if they still wanted me.
>> That was like 6 months ago and I'm still here lol

Finally it was my turn to receive a call from the now infamous Indian "Windows Technical Support Department" from a spoofed out of service 1-888-425-6866 number. My wife and I are on vacation we had just gotten back from the beach and she was taking a shower so I had all the time in the world to play along with them. It is too long to type out but it was extremely entertaining especially the bits that happened after I finally informed them that I own a Mac. The final thing he told me on the phone before hanging up was to go fuck my sister and I felt I must have performed well to deserve that.

I got an alert for a job and decided to apply for it.

First, it forced me to make a new account on their HR site. Strike one.

Second, it forced me to upload my resume to then make me re-construct my work history from scratch because these stupid resume import systems never get anything right. Strike two.

Third, it requires me to provide a PHONE NUMBER for EVERY employer I've ever had!? Over a 26-year career? When half those companies either no longer exist or the people I knew phone numbers for, and their phone numbers, are LONG GONE? Get outta here!

Three strikes, you're out!

Saturday morning:
Notification on WhatsApp from my new boss: hello, I sent you a message on Skype because the data is not good and I had to send it to the customer yesterday.

Go to Skype: hello, I am out all weekend. If you checked the data when I handed it out I could have figured out a solution. I will check when I am back.

Logout from Skype
Block number on WhatsApp
Block incoming calls on phone

I've just noticed an app review that I've given and would fit right into the wk123 (that's the insult one, right?).

"Biggest pile of junk that I've ever seen. You have one job! To register the fucking phone number (which you could get with Phone permission) and verify it (which you can do with the SMS permission) and you should either have the user do that once upon installation or you automate it entirely so that it can run in the background! You can fully automate this, and it's not that complicated that it needs 10 whole seconds of loading time in between! Heck, this pile of crap can't even continue into the main view after entering the verification code! You haven't published the source code (and maybe that's for the best) but if it was, I'd probably immediately get cancer by viewing your crappy spaghetti code. Dear developer, please take a step back and (re)join the PC tech support guys. You have no place in the development world."

To top it all off, that app currently only needs phone permission to verify my number (at least they've done that much). So I figured, I've already gone through that authentication flow so let's remove that permission to abide by the principle of least privilege.

Except that the fucking crapp just goes through the "requires phone permission" shit again whenever that permission removal happens. Fucking piece of garbage!!! That such spaghetti code fuckers even have a job, it boggles my mind.

My first ever interview for a developer position involved waking up around 9am to a call from an unrecognized number.

I answered and realized it was someone from a startup I applied to just a day before.

Instant phone interview with tech questions on React and Angular, and I BS'd my way through it, knowing almost nothing about either. Got the job, somehow.

So here's the story about a big Fuck up by a TRAI chief in India

He posted an open challenge on twitter:
"Here's my 12 digit Aadhar card (social security no for Indians) number. Show me if you can do any harm to me. "

And Twitter obliged, a French hacker aliased @fs0c131y (Elliot Alderson) took the challenge and he started posting his phone number, email, and other personal stuff on twitter.

Still the official thinks he's safe and no harm has been done to him! He openly says, "Even if you get my bank account no what can you do?"

Facebook be like,
"We have a TOR-Hidden-Service, but you have to give us your phone-number and a picture of your face, if you want to use your account for more than two days."

when recruiters would use the same tactics when dating:

Recruiter:
Hi, I see that you are currently in a relationship and even married for over a year now. And you are perfect relation material for a friend of mine. I'm reaching out because you would be a perfect fit. Can you give me your phone number so that we could meet?

So fucking apparently, you can text a phone through email! Yeah, TIL about something called sms gateways, which most mobile providers have, which allow you to essentially email the phone number, and have a text message delivered to that number. For example, I have MetroPCS so mine would be

6666666666@mymetropcs.com

Fucking amazing!

Regex.

I HATE YOU.

There. I've said it.

I spent the better part of the last hour trying to wrangle together, not one, but TWO regexes and getting them to work with Python's "re" module.

The worst part about these little shits? It's how well they work once you figure out how to get them to work. For example, pulling a phone number out of a paragraph is difficult with string methods, but cake with regex . . . if you can figure out the pattern.

But I think I'll always have hate in my heart for Regex just for how obtuse and frustrating they can be.

F**k you regex.

I once shared my phone number with one of my client.

I changed my number after 2 days.

Someone in Indonesia is using my email adress to order stuff from a site called Lazada. My email account is not compromised as far as I know. But It's really annoying always getting order confirmation emails in bahasa Indonesia.

I've got "kikis" phone number and adress. Any advice what i've could do to make her stop?

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.

The best way to write maintainable code is to imagine the next person who has to debug your code. Then imagine that they have your phone number, personal address, and your daily schedule.

Sprint planning meeting, two hours trying to plan what to do with a new feature we wanted to add to one of our systems.

The boss gets out of the meeting room to get a phone number to make a call (we needed to ask something to one of our clients).

5 minutes later, the boss comes back and saw that the lead dev was going to his own desk.

Boss: Where do you think you’re going?
Lead dev: I’m bored :v

😂😂😂😂😂

!dev

Ffuuuuucckk

This day just sucks.
Got a speeding ticket, went to pay it first thing in the morning. To renew insurance I had to call the bank to update my phone nr for 2FA. In this endless loop of „for this, press 1, for that, press2“ I pressed the wrong number and it invalidated my e-Banking password.
After a while got my number updated, after that called the insurance, after waiting for like 20min got that sorted and wanted to check my bank balance but I couldn’t log in. Now I can’t reset it either because it’s locked.
Need to call then again but needed a break and wanted to cook something but now my FUCKING SINK is clogged.

Have to uninstall half of the kitchen to get to t he pipes..

And it’s only noon.

Tried to use chatGPT. These motherfuckers want a phone number. Yeah no assholes, fuck you.

When a client complains they can't use "O" instead of "0" in the phone number field.

Funny thing just happened. I called my bank to verify my card with Apple Pay. Here’s how it went:

> Calls bank with number supplied by phone.
> “Thank you for calling [Bank] Bank!”
> ...
> A minute passes and still ringing
> wtf.jpg
> About thirty seconds in and the ring seems fainter than before.
> [2:00] is it just me or is my speaker dying...
> [3:00] no, it’s definitely getting quieter.
> [3:30] why is no one picking up???
> [4:00] now it’s so bad I have to hold it to my ear
> [4:30] now it’s blending in with the white noise
> [4:45] yeah, no. This is only static now.
> [5:00] this’ll be good for DevRant...

> calls again
> same thing happens
> ohwell.mov

Let’s try again tomorrow, I guess.

Edit: like always, I forgot the picture

I just had my cell phone cloned yesterday. End of the day, my phone lost signal suddenly. I thought it was a problem with my chip, so I decided to check that on a store and buy a new one next day.

Today, after I recover my chip and number, I started to see the mess. Someone used my number to send message to all my contacts on whatsapp, asking for money. Also, I had some contact info changed on the bank broker, which is really serious. I do not know what else is compromised, and I'm truly worried about it.

Someone has some good tips for improving security while using cellphones?

Playing around with Bard:
Me:Who called me from ...?
Bard: <blah blah blah> Would you like me to run a reverse phone lookup on that number for you?
Me: Yes
Bard: I'm just a language model, so I can't help you with that.
Me: Then why did you ask?
Bard: "I understand that you don't need me to run a reverse phone lookup, and that's perfectly fine. I just wanted to offer the service in case you were interested."

I tweaked the question and Bard responded with a Python script and a phone number regular expression.

Our jobs are safe for now.

SORRY JUST NEED TO RANT.....

JUST GOT OFF THE PHONE/WEBCHAT WITH SHITTY HR BLOCK CUZ THEIR SHITTY PAID SOFTWARE IS BUILT WITHOUT THE USER IN MIND AND NOW EFILED MY TAXES INCORRECTLY...

THEY CANT FIX IT SINCE ITS ALREQDY SENT TO THE IRS....

I SPENT 2 HOURS TRYING TO CONTACT A HUMAN BECAUSE THEIR WEBCHAT IS SUPER HIDDEN ON THEIR SHITTILY BUILT SITE THAT HIDES IT UNTIL I HAVE TO CALL THEIR PHONE NUMBER AND THE GUY WALKS ME THROUGH SOME SPECIFIC STEPS TO GET IT TO SHOW UP!!!!!!!!!

THEN WEBCHAT GUY ASKS FOR ALL MY INFO BUT THEN CONCLUDES THAT I NEED TO CALL THE IRS MYSELF BECAUSE THEIR SHITTY SOFTWARE ALREADY SENT THE INFO.... THE WRONG INFO....

FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND I OWE THE GOVERMENT $2500..... ALL THIS JUST TO PAY PPL MONEY.... FUCKITY FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCK....

AND THERE GOES MY WHOLE NIGHT.....

Google has a password reset procedure so intense, that even if I can sign into my recovery account and give them the code from there, use 2 factor auth and give them the code from there, tell them my recovery phone(s) number(s), give them my mother's father's mother's late cousin twice removed daughter's maiden name, and whatever other security measures were set in place, I can't get a fucking password reset. Thanks Google, fuck you.

How do you lock your phone (or computer)?
- not/swipe
- 3x3 dot connection pattern
- number code
- password
- fingerprint
- FaceID

I finally gave in into the peer pressure and made myself a Twitter account.

WHAT A FUCKING SHIT SITE.

When registering the only thing I provided was my email and username. Nothing more.

One day later when visiting Twitter I get a big ass pop-up that briefly tells me my account is locked for 'unusual behavior', 'suspicious activity' and 'not following of Twitter's rules'.

I want to remind you that my account was barely one day old, and had no activity whatsoever.

So if getting your account locked for no single reason isn't bad enough. The only and ONLY way to unlock my account was TO PROVIDE MY FUCKING PHONE NUMBER. No other single way to unlock my account.

YOU WANT MY PERSONAL DATA SO BADLY?

On top of that I didn't receive a single email from them for this 'suspicious activity' or 'breaking of Twitter's rules'.

THIS IS SCAREWARE. Lying to people in order to get more personal data. My account was perfectly fine. And without providing your phone number you can't even delete your account.

GO FUCK YOURSELF FUCKING ASSHOLES WITH YOUR ASSHOLE DESIGN

FUCKING SHITSITE

Hey I see that you're trying to access your account. That sucks, we don't have your phone number in our records. But that's Ok because we're going to send you the confirmation letter by snail mail...

Fucking What?
I mean, I guess that's secure... but seriously though 5-10 days until I can see what is happening with my taxes? This is insanity

Thanks to mandatory password change, today:

- My windows account got locked because my phone kept logging into wifi using
old password.
- Google Hangouts were silently running in background with old session until I re-opened it. Work of others delayed by 4 hours due to missing message notifications.
- Docker for Windows lost credentials needed to use SMB mounts - 1h of debugging why my containers mount empty folders ( now I will know)
- Google G-Sync for Outlook asked for new password on outlook restart - few mails delayed.

All of that for sake of security that could be easily solved with 2FA instead, not faking that "I do not change number at the end of my password"

Something strange happened the other day… I requested the "free" Community License of Syncfusion (the company that provides a lot of .net, uwp, web, etc. components).

After a few minutes they called me... although I didn't provide my phone number…
I signed up using my LinkedIn account, but there isn't my phone number there… 🤔
I don't remember I've ever shared my phone number anywhere on the internet, but ok… maybe I did in the past.

More than 800+ components for free (if you're not a big company), a really nice offer.
So I decided to send the link to my friend.

He doesn't even have LinkedIn… he created a fucking new account just for that, without any private information about himself.

10 minutes later… they called him. HOW? 😱

We checked our accounts on Syncfusion, created just before that (without writing anything about ourselves, just by clicking on "Sign In"), and they have our addresses… How do they fucking know where I live?

I still can't understand how they did it, my phone number is registered to my father, so they couldn't just search it…

The same day they sent me an email.
I answered it asking "How did you know my phone number?".
They replied: "I got your number because when you downloaded our community license you put your email and phone number.".
I never did it. They didn't ask me anything.

It'll probably remain a creepy mystery… it's really so easy for a company to steal your data, and they really do it so publicly without any problem?

Had my hairdresser tell me she thought her phone number was a great password for all her online accounts.

Just smiled and nodded, I feel there’s a time and a place for lectures on internet security.

To register for Facebook's hacker cup.

Fuck you 1:
I need a Facebook account

Fuck you 2:
I need to enter my address and phone number mandatorily. Because they'll send me a t shirt if I win one. It's not like anyone would not win a t shirt or not want one right? So fucking slurp away at all their privacy data any way.

Here's my address for you facebook

No 666, fuck you street, privacypolis, fuckington offville.

I just got a call from the UK. When 7 picked up, the lady said "Hello Edwin, how are you?". I never replied and just hung up.

I don't know how the fuck she got my number and name right? I know my name is public but my phone number is not.

Just got a call from someone claiming to be from an ISP (they assumed we were with them because that ISP is one of the popular options, we weren't) they claimed that someone was using our internet illegally (which they cannot find out from what I know unless it really was an assumption), that were using too much data (we are on an unlimited plan and have fibre LOL)

The nerve of some people, my dad was the one who answered the phone and when he handed it off to me, they hung up LOL.

So in saying that i have their phone number thanks to my router's caller id, anyone want it to sell off to more scammer for some good ol' karma?

Not sure if it was 2016 or late 2015, but it's a fun story anyway (and if it's not you'll at least learn something from it).

Back at the time I was quite new to unit testing (weird how it has become second nature in a years time). I was writing some software that was supposed to send out some SMS to customers. Of course this had to be tested. However, it was a bit difficult to test (or so I thought) without actually receiving an SMS to know if it was sent. So I decided to use the live API key to make sure the sending of SMS was actually working correctly. I tried it a few times but didn't receive an SMS. So I kept working on it and running tests.

The testing setup I had at the time was just a continues loop that went through all tests to make sure it all still worked (I've moved to only checking on file changes now, but that is besides the point). Keep in mind I was still running these tests, in a loop, with the _live_ API key.

So the end of the working day arrives and I go home and sit in the train. All of the sudden I receive some test SMS. I was thinking "hey nice, it did work". Then I started receiving more. It soon turned out to be an alarmingly big amount of SMS. It stopped around 100, but don't think that was the end of it. Oh no. I had changed the number to send the SMS to from my own number to a different number (+31612345678 to be exact, which I found out later isn't an actual phone number. I really hope I was right about that). I was beginning to become nervous, but there wasn't much I could do.

The next day I returned to work and checked the API for sent SMS. Turns out I had sent a couple of thousand (I think between two and three thousand) SMS in a couple of hours. Most of them to the test number I had supplied.

This probably cost the company a couple of hundred euros. Luckily my colleagues and team leader all thought it was pretty funny, but did tell me not to do it again. And I haven't of course.

Lesson learned: don't use live API keys during testing (among other things :)).

So yeah that was probably my worst dev experience.

Who the fuck sends good morning images to strangers?!

And there was this person who sent me images of good morning quotes out of blue on WhatsApp. I have never met or know this guy and vice versa. I was very creeped out.

I didn't recognise the phone number initially, but later I figured out that this person might be an employee of my ( relative ) client and he was using the mobile number assigned for the business like his personal WhatsApp account with his own profile picture and all. Very unprofessional.

He sent me similar messages for a week and I didn't bother to open the messages. I'm gonna pretend like I don't recognise the phone number. Anyways, his messages have stopped.

I hope I'll never have to face him or have any business discussion with him. I'm never ever gonna visit this relative client at his place as long as he is an employee there.

A recruiter landed in my LinkedIn inbox, I took pity and graciously provided my phone number so they could call me and beg me to leave my current job to join their company.. aaaaaand they don't call at the agreed upon time. Mate, you wanted me, not the other way around? 🤷🤭

Truecaller fraud😁 no internet or wifi connection on phone but the total number in truecaller keeps increasing. They have just added an increment function since establishment and here they have 2 billion contacts 😂😂😂#shame_truecaller

I know folks do their best, but come on Apple, this can't be that hard. Bought an IPhone at an estate sale (elderly individual died suddenly, so no one had knowledge of the apple id, passwords, etc) and I've been trying to convince apple to clear the activation lock. (AS = Apple Support)

<after explaining the situation>
AS: "Have you tried putting the phone in recovery mode? That should clear the lock"
Me: "I've already done that. It prompts for the apple id and password, which I don't have"
AS: "You need to talk to the owner and get the information"
Me: "As I explained, I purchased the phone at an estate sale of someone who died. I have the bill of sale, serial number, the box, obituary. What else do you need?"
AS: "Have you tried contacting a family member? They might have have that information."
Me: "The family members at the sale told us this is all they had. This kind of thing has to happen. I can't believe Apple can't clear the activation lock."
AS: "Yes, we can, but I'm very sorry we take security seriously."
Me: "I understand, what do I do now?"
AS: "Did you log out of the phone? Go to settings ..."
Me: "Yes, I tried all those steps before calling. It prompts for the AppleID and password."
AS: "Did you try entering the password?"
Me: "No, I don't have it. I already explained there is no way to know"
AS: "Yes..yes...sorry...I'm just reading the information in front of me. I found something, have you tried submitting a activation lock removal request?"
Me: "Yes, it was denied, didn't tell me why, which is why I'm calling. What about taking this phone to an Apple store? I have all the paperwork."
AS: "Sure, you can try. You might need the death certificate. The family or the coroner will have a copy."
Me: "What!? Apple requires a death certificate to unlock a phone!? I'm pretty sure not even the family is going to give a total stranger a death certificate"
AS: "Sorry sir, I'm just reading what is in front of me. Without that certificate, there is no way to prove the person died. You can try the Apple store, but they will likely require it."
Me: "That's a lot of drama for unlocking a phone. A *phone*"
AS: "Yes sir, I understand. If there anything else we can do let us know and thank you for being an a apple customer."

Next stop, the Apple Store.

I wont take privacy laws seriously as long as my pizza delivery service needs a fucken phone number as mandatory field.

I have a rule of thumb.
No call on private phone number.
Definately no reply on whatsapp...
Dare adding me on any WhatsApp group.
No communication beyond slack and Google meet.

People need to classify things between professional and personl communication medium.

Hi,

Oh man, what an unfuckingbelievible situation when you are activating
1) new user account
2) for new cellphone
3) with freshly issued SIM card.
You're waiting for your goddamn verification code to sent to phone. And you wait, and nothing happens and you click "send new code" until you get warning that too many codes has been requested. Then you start good ole debugging. You browse forums, help pages- try this and that, nothing ever works. But you keep trying for two friggin sequential nights. Guess what, you li'l fuckface, you're debugging wrong thing, because suddenly, only the man in the sky knows why, you get an urge to ask someone else to call you and when they do it they hear that your number is temporarily closed. No, the bills are fine, you can call and send messages from that very number, but all the motherfucking incoming traffic is blocked.
That's why you didn't get your verification codes, bitch.

Thanks for nothing, carrier.

When scammers want to follow GDPR regulations - the worst SCAM ever 🤦‍♂️

Long story:
I have just received a SMS message, informing me that my phone number is in several marketing databases. It also had a link to the website called stop-sms.pl, where you're supposed to be able to unsubscribe from those lists. At this moment I felt a little bit confused - the SMS seemed suspicious, but on the other hand who doesn't want to get rid of all this SMS crap. So I carefully followed the link to see the website with a form to fill with personal data - phone number included 😆 If that is not enough to realize that this is just a lame scam website, just below the input where you enter the phone number there are Terms and Conditions where it directly states that: "By filling the form you agree that your personal data (name, email, phone number) will be used for marketing purposes." - WTF?!

Who the f... gets fooled by such crap?! 😂😂😂

Google Business Profile is probably not meant for developers. "Help customers find your business by industry." Dev: set primary category to "Web Developer". Google: We didn't understand your category. Please select from the suggestions that appear when typing. Dev, typing: "Web D"... Google suggests: "Web Designer, Web hosting company, Well drilling contractor, Waterbed shop". Okay, Google, nevermind.
Google: "Update your customers. Keep your customers up to date about your business!" Dev clicks "add update", adds info about that customer should use different phone number temporarily due to broken phone. Google: "Your post has been removed from your Business Profile on Google because it violates one or more of our post content policies." Okay Google, at least you let me add an additional phone number on my profile without requiring to verify my primary number that I currently have not access to. Anything else?
Google: "Claim your €400 free advertising credit" Dev: clicks "claim credit" Google: "To access this Google Ads account, enable 2-Step Verification in your Google account." How to combine idiocy and deceptive patterns in a single UI: Google knows! Apart from their search engine, their unique business advantage is simple that they suck a little less than Apple and Microsoft. Sorry, not a day to be proud of our profession, once again.

I am a Full-Stack Developer and recently had a talk with my boss about how the push notifications work and he is pretty convinced that it has something to do with the IMEI number of the phone, he being a person with a non technical background makes it even more difficult for me to explain stuff to him :/

TL;DR: Google asked me to PROVIDE a phone number to verify connection from a new device, on the said device.

Yesterdayto log into my work Google account from my personal laptop to check emails, calendars update and so on. I opened up a private navigation window, went to Google sign-in page, entered my credentials, all is well.

Google then decided to "verify it's me" and prompted me to PROVIDE a phone number (work account without work phone means no phone number set up) so that they can send a verification code to the number I just provided to make sure the connection is legit.

Didn't want to do that, clicked "use another method" and got asked to fill the last password I remember, which would be my current password thanks to my trusty password manager. After submitting, I'm prompted with an error saying I have to contact my admin to reset my password because they can't log me in with my CURRENT password.

I ain't gonna do that, so went back to login page, provided my phone number, got the code, filled in the code, next thing I know I'm browsing through my emails.

What the duck? Could have been anybody giving any phone number. So much for extra security.

Also don't care that they have my phone number, the issue is more about the way used to obtain it: locking me out of my account and having no other way of logging in.

My failed interaction with a girl:
So I go to a convention at the university.
It's nice I'm having fun, I see a girl dressed as Hermione, she is cute so I go talk to her for a little we joke around I'm really starting to like her. Then I say bye and hang out with friends for the rest of the evening. I see her leaving so I run to her and after catching up to her I ask if I could have her phone number. She says yes and enters her number on my phone. I'm super happy. I excitedly wait for the next day's evening to message her. We message for a while the next day she messages good morning, so I think things are going well, she must like me too right ? I mean we glanced at each other at the convention, she gave me her phone number and messaged good morning so I'm pretty sure she does...

Turns out she doesn't, she says she thought I wanted to be friends...
WHAT ?! FRIENDS ?? Are you 12 ? What friend would run to you to get your phone number and after getting it there would be a stupid grin on his face ??? She looks at 9gag and doesn't know the most overly used meme of "friendzone" ? Unbelievable either she was screwing with me or she is just that socially dense. So after that I'm pretty mad but I don't say any mean things I just accept the fact like a gentleman and carry on with my life. But also feeling depressed after believing we actually had a connection. Ugh I guess back to the coal mines for me huh, stupid conventions 😒

For fucks sake can people stop using phones while walking, especially in busy places it's getting fucking ridiculous not to mention dangerous, the number of people I've seen that have headphones on and are glued to their screens almost bumping into people. What can they possibly be doing that's so important that they cant leave their phone in their pocket for 15 minutes while they get to where they need to be.

Yay, our 2FA of our accounts for the stores are linked to the phone number of the CTO who has left the company

I have this login page on my app. A user (a number of them actually) told me that they can't log in because the app tells them to "login in later". 😨

Is my button for deciding to login later so poorly designed that it looks like a message?

And the only way you can log in later is by pressing the frikin button, how does a person, with a smart phone tell me for the second time that its telling them to log in later

Attention: incomming resentful boiled up for months rant.

Hands down G2APAY is the worst because:

Merchant account aproval takes fcking months. It starts with unreasonable delays in documents approval. I mean insane nitpicking. They want to see merchants name surname and address on every god damn document that you submit even if for example bank statement doesnt include these details. I had to manually edit pdf’s just so that they would fck off and approve the merchant application. Insane requirements for document check also combined with their email only support answering only once a week you will have to wait one month just to get your account approved.

Then you get to the fun part, approval proccess for vendor gateway and webhook integration. They are nitpicking everything you can imagine: about website not having https, website forum missing some icons, merchants phone number being from another country then he is, and bunch of other hundreds of problems imagined only by them. Again combined with their one email reply per week policy you will waste atleast one month to finish up your integration.

Now finally you are their client and you think you can chill and go back to focusing on your business? Nope bro. Prepare for threatening emails. Last time I got a request to install https or my merchant application will be shut down. I was given 3 days notice on a fcking friday and had to do it.

Then g2a backend is crashing quite often. Combined with their one email per week policy you are fcked in the ass if your users were not able to pay through g2a and you will get no compensation.

Their backend documentation is shiet. Not clear how to integrate everything and after you integrate they make changes without publishing any changesets. Your integration is working? Good luck if it will still be working tomorrow.

And the very worst part is that they stopped proccessing credit cards like month ago with zero notice. Its been weeks and still zero news about bringing card proccessing back. They sad that they were acquired by some other company so shitty support got even shittier now while they are in a proccess of handover.

So yeah thats the worst vendor I have ever seen in my life. For example integrating paypal took me 30 minutes. Integrating stripe and getting all documents reviewed took me one business day. Same with paymentwall integration and document approval took 1 business day. Support is amazing and even have a phone number that I can reach if urgent problems arise. Thats how it should be. Thats why I can pay percentage of my transactions with a smile for them.

Sorry for the typos since im typing on my shiet phone while driving.

Eat a bag of dicks g2apay. I hope you go bankrupt and shutdown.

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

Me: "Omg, I'm so not sorry you didn't get a response to your 2:00am text sent to my private phone number about that super duper not important thing that a four year old could solve... but my girlfriend gave me a wrist band thingy that puts my phone on silent whenever it thinks I'm sleeping."

Product Owner: "And you can't set it up properly!? Your title says `señor software engineer` for god's sake!"

Me: "Yeah, it does. This is a hardware issue, though."

...is what I told her and she bought it. 🤷‍♂️

just had to jump through ALL THE HOOPS to get a kid some help in Canada from the US. I can't believe the bullshit involved in reporting child abuse when the victim's in another country... why is there no standard for that? Why does Canada have IP and phone number filters for reporting abuse? Long-distance abuse reports do happen, it's not unheard of at all, so why the fuck would you actively prevent that?

Be a fellow who's distracted af. You just had a presentation in another city. You're driving home and a light lits up saying you need gas. You stop at the petrol station, pour in some gas, grab a cop of joe while you're at it, pay and leave. You're 15minutes away from the gas stop already and an unknown number is calling you. You pick it up. A male voice says

Voice: "hello, this is police. Did you just leave a gas stop 15 minutes ago?"

You: *wtf, what the fuck did I do now!* "yes, I sure did."

Voice: "you forgot to pay for the fuel"

you: *oh shit, he's right! I remember now - I only paid for the coffee! Shit! I'm in trouble now. *
"oh.. Right, you're right, I forgot... I'll turn around and come back to pay

Voice: "wait, don't rush, I may be able to help you. I'll call you back, keep your phone close" *hangs up*

5 minutes later phone rings again.

Voice: "can you pull over, please? Here's a phone number of that gas stop. Give them a call, I'm sure you'll sort it our. Have a nice day!" *hangs up*

you call that number. A woman picks up.

You: "hello, I forgot to pay you for the gas, gimme a few minutes - I'll turn around and get back to you"

Operator: "do not worry, I think I can help you! You can pay for it at your home town if you like, but I'm afraid they might not be working today. But they will tomorrow! Would that be OK for you?"

you: "umm, yeah, of course! It's my fault - anything is OK for me!"

operator: "ooorrr.. I could pay for you now and you would pay me back. Would that work? Here's my bank account, I'll pay for you when you send me those 50 something €"

a fantasy story? Made up story? Bed time stories? Dysney movie plot? Phishing? Canada?

No. This is Lithuania :) believe it or not, this is a true story, and there are more like this one.
Respect to the police!

Phone rings...
'I'm calling about the car accident you had recently that wasn't your fault.'

Me: 'Yup, ok. I'm surprised at how quickly you got through!'

Them: 'Could you tell me when the accident was?'

Me: 'This morning before work'

Them: 'And whereabouts did this happen?'

Me: 'My living room'

Them: 'That's strange. Were you driving at the time?'

Me: 'No, I was on foot, I generally am in my living room.'

Them: 'Were you injured?'

Me: 'I sustained some pain in my foot'

Them: 'So you were hit by a car? Do you remember the make and model?'

Me: 'Yes, it was a red Ford, but I'm not sure which model.'

Them: 'Did you get the registration number?'

Me: 'I'm not sure it had one. The car was quite small'

Them: 'Did you get the driver's name?'

Me: 'It was James Jones'

Them: 'Could you describe the driver?'

Me: 'About two foot tall, blonde hair, green top, dungarees'.

Them: 'Did you know the driver?'

Me: 'Yes, he's my two year old son'

Them: ...(click)...

Originally, somebody had the phone number 8.

Unfortunately, he kept getting calls from interns who would simply give him weather updates.

"It's sunny out" *hangs up*

"Quite bright outside today!" *hangs up*

"Very warm today, with blue skies!" *hangs up*

Eventually the man was forced to change his number, but it was his fault, really. He should have known that when it gets bright out your pupils dial 8.

So am mainly a backend developer , my friend called me asking if I can hack someone phone ..!
I asked him if the phone is in the same wifi network as urs. Then maybe there is a possibility .. he said : " I only have the phone number . And also the phone is switched off .. I keep calling it and it's always off .. "
I told him .. : dude if I can hack a switched off phone ! We wouldn't be friends.. !!!! 🤭🤭

TLDR: Ask irritating questions, you could end up saving the company money and time...

I’m working on a project where we are integrating 2 legacy web applications with each other.

Business Analyst/Project manager (BA) : Save all the contact details of the selected firm in application A into the database of application B, then expose that data later so that we can output it into the document when the user generates them.
Me: Seems a bit excessive, there’s even a fax number, nobody uses that anymore, are you sure we need all that?
BA: The old document has all that information.
Me: Please just check with client that witch fields are still needed in the document.
BA: Ok, fine, but it’s probably a waste of time…
BA: * Talks with client on phone for 10 minz *
BA: Ok client stays we only need the Lodgement Number on the document.
Me: We already store that and populate it in the document.
BA: I had budgeted 2 days labour for all that, you just saved us a lot of money!

Recruiters who cold e-mail me get hard and specific questions before I ever give them a resume and phone number. Been doing this too long to just randomly hand a resume and contact info to whoever. YOU came to ME. Make it worth my while.

Took dad's phone in hand to find out a contact number and realised that his phone has become quite slow to respond.
Asked him why is that and he didn't answer my question and said that he has got a message that Airtel is giving away free 4G Sims.
Bewildered, I asked him so what is that supposed to do with his phone being slow and he said, "If we take the 4G sim, then won't that make my phone faster? I have heard that 4G is fastest network".
And my reaction was like

Good news: my company has received more calls today since I can ever remember

Bad news: It's because a telemarketing company spoofed our phone number, so it's not drumming up any business.

So my friend was copying a 32 character long hash string from one phone to another because he has the banking app in one phone and registered mobile number in the other phone...
So, I was waiting when he was halfway done... The I said, bro... you could have sent that text as message from Phone1 to Phone2.... His facial expression was unexpressable. I could have told in the begining but I am a devil. 😈

For fuck sake!
Fuck locatefamily.com, just searched out on google my name and surname, both foreign and hard to even spell out for many, and it's the first time that I saw my data(where did I live, my current work phone number, name and surname) open wide as the second link of my search, fuck!

But there's a clue, at that address I lived for a not so long period, so I did search my emails in that period and other than my employers and government emails(in which I don't trust either), here's a list of companies that had my info(partial or full):
Only address(with name and surname):

Amazon.it with 14 other companies(for shipping)
eBay with 4 other companies(for shipping)
voxelfarm.com
trenord.it
DUMA (LIGHT) di Adel
decathlon.com
gruppoargenta.it
paypal.it

All info:
gearbest.com
glistockisti.com
oculus.com
Banggood.com

Overall there are 33(including government, employers and national main mail service) potential leaks of that data, with 7 in full exposure.

After this, I'm thinking how it's even avoidable to not leak personal data, because from any of those businesses I got goods or services that otherwise I couldn't without exposing such informations... fuck.

One of the higher ups just sent me a message on my private phone number after 10pm asking if we could discuss something work related. I'm a working student, leave me alone.

Question: What is the fuckiest fuckup?

A) That it turrned out our apps login does not work on Safari at all? Although Safari should be Webkit and App works fine on Chrome and Firefox for years and should be normal Angular stuff by the way?

B) That in three years appareantly nobody considered trying it out in Safari?

C) That I can not use the iPad I got from my employer because fucking AppleId is requiring a fucking Phone number.

Answer: all of them.

YOU DENSE MOTHERFUCKER!

If anyone read my last rant, I talked about how I wanted to buy a new phone with a subscription line, but they didn't allow me because "the system says you already have one and you're over due with the payments"

FUCKING MORONS, I don't know who coded the system but I will find you and bury your head in your own shit!

They use people's RFC (Mexican Tax ID number) to create an "account" and allow buying a phone. The ID it's composed by:

NNNNYYMMDDXXX

Where N are letters from our name, then they use our birthdate's year, month and day, finally they generate three unique characters to avoid ID clashes.

Well, this stupid fucker who coded the system thought it was OKAY TO STORE ALL BUT THE CHARACTERS THAT MAKE THE ID UNIQUE.

Fucking fucker...what were you thinking?

Freelance Headhunters...

No idea where they got my name and the number of my work phone...

- they do not give a damn and call me 1045 am to discuss "EXCITING BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES™"

- they are sure I am having a case of stockholm syndrome, because I could NEVER be satisfied in my current employment

- they call every other day with a new number and start the same process again

How fucking dense can people get?

Great news, I just lost my email account's password. The password is in password manager but apparently, when I was changing it, I did something wrong. Now, neither the old one, nor the new one work and I can't login into my email. I didn't even change the password reset phone number to my new one! And I also forgot the recovery mailbox' password. Fucking great.

Here's the lesson: **ALWAYS** re-check your new password in your browser's private window.

Why the heck is Office so incompatible with everything??? They have their own proprietary standards for Word, Powerpoint and Excel and then implement them WRONG. WTF?

And don't get me started on Outlook: MSG files are the worst horsecrap ever, why can't you use EML like a normal mail application? Not to mention the complete incompatibility with CSS in mails. Nooooo you have to design everything with tables and images like we are still in the 90s. WHAT YEAR IS IT? Everytime i have to work with this boolshit i can feel sweaty Steve Ballmer scream "DEVELOPERS!!!" right in my fuckin' face.

The real cherry on top is their permanent advertisement being shoved up your ass. The stuff is all over the place! When you register a new mail account via IMAP they open Edge and prompt you to give them your phone number so they can send you a download link to their stupid Outlook app. I could understand that if the Office suite would be free... but it isn't! I effectively pay a shitton of money to see ads.

Why is everyone still using these applications?

Could anyone link me to a good tutorial on getting started with bitcoin..? I would look myself, but there are a lot of different ways, and I'm not sure what's a good way, and what's a bad way.. Or, if anyone would like to give me a quick rundown, that would be great, too!

I'm looking to stockpile bitcoins overtime and let them sit, like a savings account. (Currentally have a little over $13 USD to spend (Paypal))

Process must not require a phone number!

Process must support Paypal~!

Thanks in advance,
April.

An identity platform where you can find each other, get the other's public key and preferred contact method. And the entire key exchange and choice of contact method are negotiated automatically. No vendor lock in, encryption happens on your own device. Effortlessly and securely communicating, no searching for skype name, email, phone number, setting up shit. It would just work.

(This conversation is going in WhatsApp)

So a friend of mine asks me if i can build an app for a restaurant to place orders etc.

Me: “Sure, can i have his/her phone number to get in touch with them?”

Friend: “uhmm.. i’d prefer that the communication goes via myself. So what do you want to ask to them?”

Me: “i think that it’ll be easier if i can discuss their wishes and the costs directly with them. Don’t you think?”

He did not answered my question yet.

My question is to you guys; is it wise to take a project from someone that i don’t even know..? Probably my friend is willing to earn some money by raising the price that i ask.
Would you take this project?
Tips-/advices please.

Thanks.

(one day before the phone interview)

Them: Please call to us at (TIME) to (PHONENUMBER)

Me: Ok

(interview day)

--[[CHORUS START]]--
Me: (calls to the number at (TIME))

Phone: Your call has been forwarded to automatic voice message system. (PHONENUMBER) is not availible. After tone please leave message. When you are finish the recording you may hang up or press 1 for more option, please leave message now.

Me: (deep breath, patiently waits 5 mins.)

--[[CHORUS END]]--

--[[CHORUS]]--

WHY DO YOU MAKE ME CALL YOU WHEN YOU TURN OFF THE PHONE / TALK WITH SOMEONE ELSE????
IF YOU DON'T LIKE ME, JUST DON'T MAKE ME CALL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

--> Could not reach them for 3 days, gave up

Sending automatic spinned content email to a client asking him for payement... Starting at 60mn and decreasing interval by 1 minute each step ! He pays when interval become 7 minutes and phone me to say: "Hi ! How are you ?" ... mmmm' well well well... Calculate the number of emails he receive !

I just had such a forfilling moment.

Normally, i often (force myself) go to bed at night, after i worked on a project of mine, with these thought saying "oh man i wanted to get that feature done today" or "i want to finish this and that part of my code".I am sure everyone of you knows the feeling, when your brain communicates that you are just not done for today.

Today it was different. I got a project of mine working in it's first state, where i put much heart, love and time in.Just a few minutes before i finished for today i got my server responding the expected numbers(some kind of pin-code). It's a very easy system: Someone(at the time only me and my debug mode :3) on a android phone request a verification which is checked and processed by the server. The server creates a random six-digit number, returns it encoded to the client and sends an email to the user, which currently sends it in plain text(shame on me).
Yeah, the user enters the number and voilà
And of course, all the Pincodes can only be used once.
I got to bed with this feeling of luck and succes.

I hope tomorrow is going to be a productive day!

I am so lucky right now.

Have a good day everyone!

Hey Bad-practice, i see you’re looking for a new job? Are you interested in working in the main capital only 60km away?

Yeah sure, here are my contact details.

Ok great! Expect an invitation for somewhere next week.

Two days later i receive an email from their HR manager, who wasn’t even able to spell their own company name correctly... Asking again my phone number that i already gave to the first contact.

Impression so far? Very mediocore.

Fucking LinkedIn.

I created a new account with my main e-mail, and suddenly it was restricted. I sent an ID verification, I received an e-mail saying it was now back, but then it was fucking restricted again, and I CANNOT HAVE IT BACK BECAUSE THE TO GET HELP FROM THEM IS A HASSLE. Sometimes it asks me for a phone number, but then, and error appears saying the session is invalid.

I created a support ticket, their response takes hours with a new link to verify again, but when I send again a new ID, for some reason, my verifications do not reach them, and they send the same link again. FUCK'S SAKE.

Finally, I subscribed to Premium just to talk to someone, but they can't help with this matter. At least left a note to Jenny.

Why the hell is a newly created account being restricted? Fix your systems.

Most awkward video meeting?

Can a conference call count? This happened several years ago.

Diving into international markets that could potentially make us millions of $$ (no pressure), while the phone was ringing the CEO's number (in Norway), my manager leans over and whispers
DevMgr: "This project will be managed using *proper* software development methodologies, none of this agile shit you want to use."
<CEO picks up>

I had already been in talks with their dev team to get a feel for their tech stack and we had discussed project milestones, potential release cycles (laying the ground work for using agile methodologies) before getting upper mgmt involved.

The partner dev team was listening and kept throwing out agile buzzwords and I could tell my manager was getting pissed. He would blurt out "Those specifications will need to be fully documented before PaperTrail writes one line of code!". No one said anything, but I could tell the other mgrs/VPs in the room were uncomfortable with the hostility towards discussing features.

Phone meeting with the makers of a program the company uses regularly:

Me: "so I believe you received the list of problems we have run into recently, can you walk us through how to make the changes necessary to fix them?"

them: "we see none of these errors"

me: "that's impossible, we had all of them yesterday, they crashed a few servers"

*checks version number on program, it's different*

me: "hold on one second"

*checks computer log, they were logged in this morning before I came in*

I figured out they received the list, fixed it, and then turned to us and said we didn't know what we were talking about because none of the errors were there, because they wanted to look superior.

Fuck those guys.

Last year I was asked to optimize a code in our legacy portal (yet to be replaced with the new portal). The legacy system didn't have a design phase. Straight away went to development by whatever developer available at that time.
It was seriously fucked up.

So I went and had a look at the vanilla PHP code that served data for a datatable.
** I nearly fainted **

A query was done to get data from a table without any joins.
Then for loop to display those data.
Then inside for loop, for every single column that gets data from a related table there's a fucking query.
Eg: select * from users where.... to display username. Then again select * from users where..... to display user's email, then another query for his phone number. Then another query to get service providers name, then another to get their phone number.

I think the guy who did it wrote his first hello world app with a bunch of queries and sent it to production. No one bothered to check until 4 years later when it slowed down like a friggin snail.
I'm surprised it even survived that long.

Recruiter on LinkedIn:
"Hi *dev*,
I hope you don't mind me contacting on LinkedIn but I couldn't find your contact details. I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't share this awesome job with you. Can U have you're phone number? I think you are a great candidate for this job.

If it's not quite right for you, please refer your contacts!"

Where do I start...
There's a good reason why I don't have my contact details in my profile. I also have a note saying I'm not looking for any jobs at the moment. If I'm "great candidate" what would you ask me to refer my friends? I know they're doing their job, but honestly it feels like they're retarded or something.

The global joke of Information Security

So I broke my iPhone because the nuclear adhesive turned my display into a shopping bag.

This started the ride for my character arc in this boring dystopia novel:

Amazon is preventing me from accessing my account because they want my password, email AND mobile phone number in their TWO.STEP Verifivation.
Just because one too many scammers managed to woo one too many 90+y/o's into bailing their long lost WW2 comrades from a nigerian jail with Amazon gift cards and Amazon doesn't know what to do about anymore,

DHL is keeping my new phone in a "highly secure" vault 200m away from my place, waiting for a letter to register some device with a camera because you need to verify your identity with an app,

all the while my former car insurance is making regress claims of about 7k€ against me for a minor car accident (no-one hurt fortunately, but was my fault).

Every rep from each of the above had the same stupid bitchass scapegoat to create high-tech supra chargers to the account deletion request:

- Amazon: We need to verify your password, whether the email was yours and whether the phone number is yours.

They call it 2-step-verification.

Guess what Amazon requests to verify you before contacting customer support since you dont have access to your number? Your passwoooooord. While youre at it, click on that button we sent you will ya? ...

I call this design pattern the "dement Tupi-Guarani"

- DHL: We need an ID to verify your identity for the request for changing the delivery address you just made. Oh you wanted to give us ANOTHER address than the one written on your ID? Too bad bro, we can't help, GDPR

- Car Insurance: We are making regress claims against you, which might throw you back to mom's basement, oh and also we compensated the injured party for something else, it doesn't matter what it is but it's definitely something, so our claims against you just raised by 1.2k. Wait you want proof we compensated something to the injured at all? Nah mate we cant do that , GDPR. But trust me, those numbers are legit, my quant forecasted the cost of childrens' christmas wishes. You have 14 days or we'll see you in court haha

I am also their customer in a pension scheme. Something special to Germany, where you save some taxes but have to pay them back once you get the fund paid out. I have sent them a letter to terminate the contract.

Funniest thing is, the whole rant is my second take. Because when I hit the post button, devrant made me verify my e-mail. The text was gone afterwards. If someone from devRant reads this, you are free to quote this in the ticket description.

Fuck losing your virginity, or filing your first tax return, or by God get your first car, living through this sad Truman dystopia without going batshit insane is what becoming a true adult is.

I am grateful for all this though:

Amazon's safety measures prevented me from spending the money I can use to conclude the insurance odyssey, and DHLs "giving a fuck about customers" prevention policies made me support local businesses. And having ranted all this here does feel healthy too. So there's that.

Oh, cherry on top. I cant check my balance, because I can only verify my login requests to my banking account wiiiiiiith...?

I'm wondering if recruiters are just as irritating everywhere or that this is just the shitty situation we have in the Netherlands.

I was once called by an unknown number and heard a typical recruiter story. Since i never heard of or spoke to this person i kindly asked where he'd get my information from. Since mr, Recruiter didn't answer and just kept selling his great position i hung up.

He called back.

I picked up the phone again and he told me there were connection issues. I once again asked where he found my number. And again he just acted like he didnt hear me and sells his great position.

Hangs up and blocks the number. Go f(...) yourself damn recruiter!

WTF is going on with twitter?!

- Yesterday I've Installed the app and tried to signup
- I've entered my birthday
- Entered phone number
- Wait for SMS...no SMS
- Tap resend...no SMS
- Wait half an hour...no SMS
- Tried few times...Started getting error: This number cannot be registered..

- Today I've tried again
- Phone number accepted
- Wait for SMS...no SMS
- Tried adding my number to a friend's twitter account...Received SMS code..
- Tried again signing up with my phone number, got error: This number cannot be registered..
- Tried from web, getting error: You reached your SMS limit try again in 24h...

How can I reach my f***** limit when I haven't even received a mail!

I've been trying to signup to twitter for 2 f**** days now with no luck, wtf is happening? it's a major social network for f*** sake.

And what's worse there is no way to send support mail, their "Contact US" page only has options for existing users..

LinkedIn recruiter message
Hi I have an exciting opportunity for you which i will not share on messages but why don't you give me your phone number, email, home address, favorite color so that i can email the same shit to you instead of sending it in the LinkedIn messages and also give me your phone number.

SecureMessengerAndroid

A chat app that uses AES encryption and doesn't require any personal information like phone number or email address.

[LinkedIn, Recruiter InMail]

Hello,

I am Lazy As Fuck, and I'm looking for people to work for a company that pays me for doing nothing.

Do you know anyone that is an Angular developer? If you do, please tell them to send me their resume and phone number.

Thanks.

Anybody know any good .net web devs in Sydney? I'm sick of reading seek and LinkedIn resumes where 95% of the applicants have a phone number starting with +91 and are skilled in "user testing and SAP".

I mean, what are they expecting? "Absolutely sir, we will mail you a first class plane ticket right now for your interview! Oh .net was just a suggestion, you can code in COBOL if you prefer. And don't worry about that pesky working Visa, we can pay cash!"

You wouldn't believe how hard it is to create an anonymous e-mail address these days. Spent 30 minutes looking for a non-blacklisted provider after failing at Gmail, Yahoo etc..

Thoughts on Session as a secure messenger? It looks fine at a glance, especially not using PII like a phone number, but I haven’t delved into it — and honestly don’t have the mental energy to.

What’s everyone’s thoughts on it?

You know how they start calling you when you register a new domain and are not careful enough not to put your own phone number there?

I recently registered a domain that ends in ***shit.com

No calls :) It's like private registration LoL

I got my domain from Swisscom (Switzerlands "T-Mobile") Every damn time I try to renew/adjust the domain it feels like I have to search for the fucking Higgs Boson. Searching for it on DDG only yields wrong results. Domains are hidden deep within the business part of their homepage. Their buisness site barely mentions domains, the login is somehow tied to an account you would normally use in combination with your phone number which only adds more to the confusion and the whole domain thing seems to be a shitty frontend coverup of someone elses service.

My bank created a "new and improved" banking app asking me to take a selfie after first sending them a picture of my id.
I am already a customer of the bank, they have a copy of my id, why do they also want a selfie?
Also with the old banking app I could just call them from my phone number (which they also have) and they confirmed it was me over the phone by asking 2 questions and then provided me with a code to just enable the app on my personal phone.

The biggest pro of GDPR for me will be when some fucking agency will ever call me again, I will ask them right away to delete my phone number and everything.

Dear recruiters, if you prefer telephone calls, why not also learn how to leave a message on a voicebox, display a caller ID, and list your phone number on some legit page on the internet?

Otherwise you'll leave the impression of a desperate outbound call center agent paid not by leads and conversions but just by the quantity of calls made during the day. If I had such a job, I'd also call voiceboxes and busy developers all day and get money for listening to signals tones before hanging up.

CVE-2019-3568
Description: A buffer overflow vulnerability in WhatsApp VOIP stack allowed remote code execution via specially crafted series of SRTCP packets sent to a target phone number.

NSO group even sell a spyware application based on that vulnerability to governments.

Listen!!!!! I'm going to the toilet with my phone!!! Listen!!!

Pretty annoyed with Siri...

The other day I was mowing the lawn with my headphones on, and I asked her what time it was. It took her about 10 seconds to respond, and then finally she says “at the tone, the time will be 12:59 PM. Beep!” Like, she literally said the word “beep” in the response.

Ugh...so many things that annoy me about this.

One, it would have been faster to just take my phone out and look at the time.

Two, the cutesy response is annoying and takes too long for her to say.

Three, unless the time actually was approaching 12:59:00 and her response took the exact number of seconds remaining before then, the stupid “beep” isn’t even accurate!

If I ask what time it is, I just want the phone to say “12:59,” immediately. Anything longer or more convoluted than that, and it’s pointless – I could just take out the phone and look at the screen instead.

This one was from my Tech Lead, She had to update phone number of a customer in Database on production server. And guess what she forgot 'WHERE'. Next we were facing each other with poker face. :|

p.s: fortunately we had backup of just 4 hours back. Still we lost data of about 100 people.

I sometimes forget windows is absolute shit. Then I get to work with one and remember. Specially since microshit has actually banned my email (because I didn't give it my mew phone number it's sulking like a creepy stalker) and so I can't even properly log the fuck in into a machine I was using a few years back. 😐

If someone makes a windows rip off that could properly deal with .exe files, count me a customer. (in future tho. I haven't got money for shit rn)