!dev
!!personal
!!abuse

I'm a victim of rather severe child abuse, both physical and mental. I've cut my mother out of my life on several occasions, and disowned her husband on father's day a few years ago. Whenever they're in my life they make things slowly but significantly worse.

They'd been using my previous hard times to push their way into my life again, and are now trying to buy their way in -- this time not into my life, but into my 2yo son's life.

I've done everything I could to keep his existence from them. I hid pregnancy from them, dropped any mew mannerisms and cute vocabulary when speaking to them, never let them see toys or hear sounds if I needed to call them, hid the carseat, etc. I did a perfect job. Out of necessity I've been hiding my life from them since I was 13, and I've never done better than this.

But they knew his name, sex, and age. This means they went digging, and a bloody lot. There is literally no public info relating him to me, and nobody that knows us would tell them, either -- they all know and understand.

For years I've refused to tell these people where I lived, too. We've been here for over five years, and three years ago they just randomly showed up at our door. I never gave them an address, and the house isn't in my name. I never had any privacy when I lived with them, either -- literally not even in the bathroom -- but now we have our own house and they still randomly intrude? asldhflakshdf

But. This Christmas Eve, we got two large boxes (fruit flats) stacked full of presents from them. A third for me, a third for my girlfriend, and a third for my 2yo. Name tags and all.

Why can't they just leave us alone? On Christmas of all holidays? Why do they have to ruin everything? Why can't they just go away?

I've made things abundantly clear, and they just. won't. stop. I feel so angry and exasperated and helpless and trapped. I went from listening to "die in a fire" to crying helplessly on the stairs. All I want is to be left alone and not harassed and blackmailed and manipulated and guilted and given expired food as "gifts."

and before you ever even think to defend them, please re-read my first three sentences.

Just.
Merry fucking Christmas.

devRant needed my "physical address" to send me stickers.
I sent them: 8D:*E:85:12:**:**

Waiting for the stickers... :-/

I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.

(tl;dr at the bottom.)

I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.

For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.

tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.

There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.

And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.

The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.

OH MY GOD

WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??

At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.

Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.

I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!

YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!

Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?

And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!

It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!

Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.

OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.

coworker: what's your address?
me: 173.168.15.10
coworker: no, your local address
me: 127.0.0.1
coworker: no, your physical address
me: 29:01:38:62:31:58
coworker: ...........

I wonder how would devRant send the mail with my MAC address? The hard way by tracking down my system having having the MAC address and deliver it to me?? 😂😂

DevRant is being unaware that we all are devs here 😂

About a year ago, I did an e-commerce for a client who wanted to sell electronic goods. It was a custom design, so the team prepared a mock-up and we showed it to the client who absolutely loved it. The specs were that he was going to sell only a few products (like 50 or so) so the website had to showcase the categories and didn't need to put a lot of products on page. Also the design had to be unique as he wanted to be different from his competitors.

A few weeks later, during the dev phase the client checks again the design and starts doubting about it. We redesign it adjusting to his oppinion. A week later he schedules a meeting where he starts complaining that the deadline is late and that the design doesn't accomplish his specs. At that meeting he tells us that he wants to sell thousands of articles since he's doing dropshipping.

We start from scratch and make a third design, which he approves after quite a lot of changes. He also asks for a dropshipping plugin which we install in its free version, when he complains about having to update manually, we answer politely that he has to purchase the paid version.

Fast forward, we deploy the website and the design has a few issues related to responsive development. We fix it quickly and the site starts working.

He also has a physical shop, however, since he's competing with big corporates like Amazon or eBay and he can't offer any difference, neither his phisical address or his on-line shop manages to be profitable.

He decides to close the business but before, he calls my PM saying that the website has "never worked" (There were a couple of people who bought with 0 issues and we tested the site countless times). And that we shouldn't have recommended a custom design because the website never worked. He also implied that we should compensate him because of that.

I've never seen my PM to tell someone to "fuck off" as fast as he did.

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

I hate fucking stupid badly made websites of biggest companies in my country. I just bought an expensive pc in one of the biggest chain of physical tech shops, and it sucked as fuck, full of popups hiding the buttons, fucking popups advertising their own products. But I'm so stupid I continued despite it.

I selected the item, I inserted the address and card info, no summary page. An email arrives in my inbox, I check it: there's a typo in my address. I go back in the website, I discover not only that I can't cancel the order or change the address, but doesn't even exist a personal page where I can check the items I bought and their shopping state. OH. MY. GOD. We are in 2017 darling, I saw better websites 25 years ago, in the end of the month do you also expect to be paid? Do you go around saying "I'm a programmer"? Do you say this to your children? How can you keep a serious face saying it?

And like if it's not enough, the only way to contact them is calling them to their number, which is paid 0,15€ each minute. And knowing it, they will make me wait to charge me as much as possible.

Then they complain because they're missing money and everyone wants to buy on Amazon instead than their shop. Fuck them.

This is fucking bad. I just stumbled across a database online, unencrypted plain text containing ALL details of thousands of students at my university. Full names, ID number (SSN), student numbers, address, family info, medical aid info, physical fitness reports

What do I do? I was not on any VPN or proxy when I accessed it

About a year ago I was doing work for a client that hired a separate contractor for SEO consultation. I could easily end the rant here.

This lady was trying to convince my client to write the same page or blog article several times over and merely change their physical address at the bottom of the page to one of their many respective clinics.

When I told them not to do this because they would suffer for stuffing and duplicating content, their response was to ask me to be respectful of the other contractor's skills and knowledge regarding digital marketing and to call her and sort it out.

I called. We argued. I called the client back and asked if they should respect the skills of an auto mechanic with pliers to remove a teenager's braces rather than send them to one of their orthodontic clinics.

this just happened a few seconds ago and I am just laughing at the pathetic site that is Facebook. xD
4 years ago:
So I was quite a noobie gamer/hacker(sort of) back then and i had a habit of having multiple gmail/fb accounts, just for gaming, like accounts through which i can log in all at once in the same poker room, so 4/5 players in the game are me, or just some multiple accounts for clash of clans for donations.
I had 7-8 accounts back then. one had a name that translated to "may the dead remain in peace "@yahoomail.com . it was linked to fb using same initials. after sometime only this and 2 of my main accs were all i cared about.even today when i feel like playing, i sometimes use those accs.

2 years ago.
My dad is a simple man and was quite naive to modern techs and used to hang around with physical button nokia phones.But we had a business change, my father was now in a partnership in a restaurant where his daily work included a lot of sitting job and and casual working. So he bought a smartphone for some time pass.
He now wanted to download apps and me to teach him.I tried a lot to get him his own acc, but he couldn't remember his login credentials.
so at the end i added one of my own fake ID's(maythedead...) so he could install from playstore, watch vids on youtube and whatever.

The Actual Adventure starts now
Today, 1 hour ago:
I had completely forgot about this incident, since my parents are now quite modern in terms of tech.
But today out of nowhere i recieved an email that someone has JUST CHAINGED MY FB PASSWORD FOR ONE OF MY FAKE ACCS!?!??
what the hell, i know it was just a useless acc and i never even check my fb from any acc these days, but if someone could login into that acc, its not very difficult to track my main accs, id's, etc so i immediately opened this fb security portal and that's where the stupidity starts:

1)To recover your account they FUCKIN ASKS FOR A PHYSICAL ID. yeah, no email, no security question you have to scan your driving license or passport to get back to your account.And where would I get a license for some person named "may the dead remain in peace"? i simply went back.
2) tried another hack that i thought that will work.Closed fb help page, opened fb again , tried to login with my old credentials, it says" old password has been changed,please enter new password", i click forget password and they send an otp. i thought yes i won, because the number and recover mail id was mine only so i received it.
when i added the otp, i was first sent to a password change page (woohoo, i really won! :)) but then it sends me again to the same fuckin physical id verification page.FFFFFFFFFuck

3)I was sad and terrified that i got hacked.But 10 mins later a mail comes ,"Your Facebook password was reset using the email address on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8:24pm (UTC+05:30)."
I tried clicking the links attached, hoping that the password i changed(point<2>) has actually done something to account.NADA, the account still needs a physical license to open:/

4) lost, i just login to my main account and lookup for my lost fake account. the fun part:my account has the display pic of my father?!!?!
So apparently, my father wanted to try facebook, he used the fake account i gave him to create one, fb showed him that this id already has an fb account attached to it and he accidently changed my password.MY FATHER WAS THE HACKER THE WHOLE TIME xD.
but response from fb?" well sir, if you want your virtually shitty account back , you first will have to provide us with all details of your bank transactions or your voter id card, maybe trump will like it"

Me: Hey girl, what's your address?
Girl: 5.15.126.4
Me: No man, your local address.
Girl: 127.0.0.1
Me: Oh, you geeky nerd! I mean your physical address!
Girl: 40:37:0E:6A:A7:AD

Boss: What is your address?
Me: 173.168.15.10

Boss: No, your local address
Me: 127.0.01

Boss: I mean your physical address
Me: 29:01:38:62:31:58

I switched my job a few months ago.

And now instead of having daily rants in our team lead's channel on slack on how I wish to inflict physical harm on one of my interns (and I'm talking interns that would just interrupt a daily to make their breakfast), and having something to bitch about because our method of version control was using the IDE's history.

And that I came on here to make another post about the times that I brought up that we should address our technical debt, and only being met with "we don't have technical debt" by our CTO.

I now have a good dev environment, with also a lot more trust given to the employees, where I actually don't have much to complain, and 0 reason to really post rants about my work here :D

(and the previous company I worked at got sold and merged with another, so I jumped that ship in time :P)

Google Business continues to piss me off. Just because I don't have a physical storefront at which to receive clients for web development doesn't mean I'm not working in a legitimate business. The fact that there's STILL no option to hide my home address from searches for web developers nearby is just inexcusable. And it's not just me. There are TONS of at-home freelance workers who RELY on organic searches to stay afloat. But Google only cares about people who make decisions about how to run their businesses in the way Google finds beneficial.

now instead of if I type in my address bar and select a bookmark to go to my Vivaldi web browser switches me to the fact I already have that tab open somewhere in one of my hidden workspaces

I want it to notice if I click on a link I already have open and switch to it lol

then I can hibernate my billions of tabs over and over again and not forget they exist somewhere in a workspace I forgot about lol

why have web browsers when you can have an immensely messy desk of notes you never got to

web browsers are inching ever closer to the Innovation that was WebOS. it's all about them cards, ayyo. let's invent the physics of the real world in boring digital spaces already idk. at least it's intuitive cuz millions of years of evolution conformed us to the physical world

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