*has a 94% in information security class*
*teacher gives us study guide for final exam*
*heavily take notes in the margins and study the packet obsessively for four days*
*come in to take the final*

*exam doesn't mention a single thing on the study guide*

*makes a 78 on it*
*final class grade drops down to an 87% (a letter grade lower than before)*

"Congratulations, Miss Meowijuanas! You had the highest score on the final!"
*hands me a candy bar like I'm a child*

"Maybe it's because you gave the class an extremely poor study guide which emphasized on material that wasn't covered on our actual exam? You shouldn't be congratulating me on a 78."

*teacher says he used the study guide from another teacher and must not have looked at it thoroughly enough*

*shakes hand and thanks him for having me as a student this semester*
*kicks a trash bin outside of the university 6 or 7 times*

I'm not even mad about my grade. An 87% is nice, although I know I would've done better otherwise. It's his pure, unmasked and unashamed laziness that makes me feel so violent. It's showing students like me that an educated individual like yourself couldn't be bothered to take five minutes or so to read over a fucking document for his students to make sure they're properly prepared for a major exam.
How the fuck can you be hired as a university professor and be this obvious about not putting effort into your work.
Fuck you, sir.
And fuck you again for all of my other classmates who did poorly because they followed your inaccurate study guide.

No, MD5 hash is not a safe way to store our users' passwords. I don't care if its been written in the past and still works. I've demonstrated how easy it is to reverse engineer and rainbow attack. I've told you your own password for the site! Now please let me fix it before someone else forces you to. We're too busy with other projects right now? Oh, ok then, I'll just be quiet and ignore our poor security. Whilst I'm busy getting on with my other work, could you figure out what we're gonna do with the tatters of our client's business (in which our company owns a stake) in the aftermath of the attack?

A while a go in class we were told to look at this article about poor to stupid security... and my brain melted

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

So... Some fake accounts on Twitter claimed to be Elon Musk and to give shitloads of Bitcoin to those who sent a little amount first. They stole... Wait for it... 180 grand.

That's basically your everyday 419 scam. Existing since before the internet, done with the names of Gates, Buffet, Bush, Obama...

They say "the big bad evil criminals and the poor little innocent victims" I say natural selection. Sorry, in those lion vs gazelle scenarios I always thought that it was fair, no matter how it went.

Just when did humanity get so brainless? Have we always been, is the internet just a catalyst for stupidity?

Just why the fuck must I be an infosec sheepdog instead of a wolf? Man, I could live the life, drink beer and smoke herb while working... Get up at 12, don't give a shit, no boss, no taxes, no social security payments that I don't see jack shit from, and the pay would be better to.

Damn.

The company I interned at last summer decided to adopt a JS framework a little over a year ago. The managers went with the old Angular 1.x because they didn't want a JS build process. Each page has ~100 script tags on it, and these are manually included in various files (no automated way to include dependencies). None of the CSS/JS files are minified, either.

They really should have chose Angular 2+, or an entirely different framework (React, VueJS). They're also just now upgrading the codebase from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.2 (5.6 support ended a long time ago, and security support ends this month).

I love the company itself but these practices are poor.

I may be working there full time eventually. I hope to eventually help with the inevitable transition to a newer framework once Angular 1.x is dead since I am an avid user of newer JS technologies. Any tips on convincing manager(s) towards newer technology? (Or at least convincing them to combine+minify these files in production to reduce # of requests and bandwidth.)

Also this company's product has millions of active users.

So this PR company hired my firm to convert their client's Wix website to WordPress to have better control over content and SEO, not to mention get away from the piss-poor "absolute position everything" setup of Wix. This is a single page design. 2 days later, we deliver it, performing faster than Wix and with a few extra goodies on the UI.

The client's director of IT wants to stay on Wix, because it's "the most secure provider", and will only move their ONE PAGE INFORMATIONAL WEBSITE to another platform and host if they answer a 133 item "security questionnaire". Short of SSNs, they want to basically know everything, including our proprietary and confidential security practices. You aren't Google...stop acting like you are...

How are people this stupid a "director" of anything?

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

IT security calls to tell me my new password, because it is poor practice to send it over encrypted message.

New password = password

I'm glad we are taking security so seriously!

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

We have a badly out of shape but functional product , the result of a "if its not broke don't fix it" mentality. The only thing manangement cares is our next release and making meetings to plan other meetings...

Now comes the time of the security Audit (PCI)...

Manager : oh noooo the audit will fix this issue, quickkk fix it !

Us : welllll its a lengthy process but doable, we just gotta do a,b,c,d,e . Part a is essentially what we need the rest are refactoring bits of the system to support part a since the performance would be shit otherwise

Manager: can you do part a before the audit starts ?

Us: yep.

Manager: do it . Oh and pop those other issues on JIRA so we can track em

Audit completed....

Manager: so we got through ok?

Us : 👍 yep

Manager: okayy, take those other issues..... and stick em at the bottom of the back log...

Us : huh ? *suspicious faces*..... okay but performance is gonna be poor with the system as it is cuz of part A....

Manager: yeaaahhh * troll face* ....about that.... roll it back and stick that too at the bottom of the log. We got to focus our next release. Lemme schedule a meeting for that 😊

Us : faceplam

Warning: This is gonna come across as a little cringe/self-pitying, but whatever

Jesus Christ I'm so fucking lonely it literally hurts. I know I should be grateful I have a hobby in coding, also recently I got my first job as a developer (even if I'm overworked and paid shit all with poor job security), but I swear what will eventually kill me will be my own hand cos this empty feeling is unbearable at times.

Also, I'll try to ask this in the most politically correct way possible: how do you single guys in your 20s/30s cope with the lack of females in the industry? I absolutely do not mean this in a "making-unwarranted-advances" sort of way; I just mean that we're biologically wired to desire some form of interaction with the opposite sex (unless you're queer), and this happens naturally in most professions but obviously not engineering/software dev. It's especially difficult when you don't have a big social circle so your job basically becomes your life.

So... For those of you who can relate, what do you do? Do you make an effort to socialize outside work? Or maybe you're lucky enough to work somewhere with a diverse mix of people? Should I blame Zuckerberg for damaging my adolescent brain and turning me into a needy piece of crap?

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

So I was setting up ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) all in one EC2 on AWS today for demo purposes. I had everything prepared. Elastic IP, correct security group rules, etc.

I figured I would just do quick test before writing filters and templates if I can access Kibana. So I started service for it and tried to open it with Chrome.

Timeout.

Checked config file. Compared it to documentation. Seemed good but changed some things just for sake of change. Restarted service.

Timeout.

Reverted changes I've made in config. Restarted service. Curl on localhost. It work... OK. 😐

It took me half an hour but finally I figured it out after I took my phone and opened it from there. It was working from the beginning. Stupid company network was for some reason blocking this connection. Fuck! 😡And I was restarting that poor service like crazy trying to fix something that wasn't broken.

My colleague told me today that companies with shit code quality, complete chaos, no tests of QA of any kind, and poor security practices still make loads of money and are extremely successful so it's all a waste of time.

I detest this idea and I refuse to work like that anymore. But I also think he's right :(

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

Just found the most embarrassing security hole. Basically a skelleton key to millions of user data. Names, email addresses, zip codes, orders. If the email indicates a birthdate, even more shit if you chain another vector. Basically an order id / hash pair that should allow users to enter data AND SHOULD ONLY AUTHORIZE THEM TO THE SITE FOR ENTRING DATA. Well, what happend was that a non mathing hash/id pair will not provide an aith token bit it will create a session linked to that order.

Long story short, call url 1 enter the foreign ID, get an error, access order overview site, profit. Obviously a big fucking problem and I still had to run directly to our CEO to get it prioritized because product management thought a style update would be more important.

Oh, and of course the IDs are counted upwards. Making them random would be too unfair towards the poor black hats out there.

First job while in college... Was working for web dev team lamp set up before lamp was lamp (year was 2000).

Had deadline one week after summer vacation. Worked non stop a couple of days to get shit done and didn't make it. Got in a conflict with my manager in front of the team and I blew my steam off. Quit on the spot.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't be a fucking idiot when estimating work.
2. Be cool with other teammates, nobody cares about drama and nobody has to feel sorry for you.
3. Uhm, plan? Had entire fucking vacation to get work done. I was a fucking moron.
4. Burning out is stupid and unproductive.
5. Your manager can be as poor in management as you are. Your job is to try to make them better at it, as they have less visibility in the details.

Next job in grad school. Worked for a security company. Direct manager had the bright idea to make execs sign the change requests. WTF. Code was in Perl/php, a mess. Team rewrote back end DB access , taking over six months, or more, failing twice the deadline. After a final 48 hour burn out, we ship and get laid off the week after.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't work for dicks.
2. Don't be a dick yourself.
3. Don't work for dicks.

Third job was in silicon valley. It was a great company, and I stayed there for five years.

Losing faith in Netflix and their awesome open source projects.

Had a hard time trying to install Security Monkey : poor quality quickstart Ubuntu-only, almost no documentation, same instructions for latest (aka dev) and stable (aka prod) version, no depencies list ... oh and the UI display well only on Chrome ..

Then you surrender and just want to check the dockerized version they provide : it doesn't work neither (build fail or back end process just shut down) !!

I'm done ...

I MISS TIGERDIRECT! a haiku&rant

Tiger, so direct
Hardware haven, my tech friend
Killed, by poor Insight

I thought I had found ways to cope with it all... became a cert'd refurbisher at enough lesser operations to rebuild some semblance of my hardware connects. I even resorted to newegg to fill small voids... why is it so hard to find a quickly shipping, scriptable, 2 WAN in 6+ channels out, non WiFi noob crap, router... or even an L3 managed switch for <250$ not tied to some bullshit excuse for network management like a "cloud management platform" with some rando 'security' bloat?!?! Not even trying to force the PoE functionality (realistically i know I'll just wire that up myself after procrastinating too long)... i even tried newegg and damn amazon, neither seem to realise that real routers and switches arent interchangeable terms.

I even tried tolerating supporting the murderous, treasonous, obfuscating high prices and insisting you register as your business and let them trap you in the equivalent of a 'free' ski trip, with "short" timeshare presentation.

All bullshit and overpriced af trying to force some bloat down your throat so you "feel" like you're properly managing a network.

Anyone have an ace up their sleeve? For quick delivery (USA) minus bloat, pandering and ass-to-mouth rape???

I even tried stooping to a current Cisco OEM!

I mean, if it was *only* a bit of ass rape, I'm fine with that... but the bloat, pandering and shit-stained lollipop...

I'd rather just disappear from valid business obligations, get somewhat intoxicated, and hyperfocus tear apart my tech graveyards, go ghetto apocalyptic tech macgyver on that shit and emerge days later low on solder, in dire need of a flintstones size whetstone, more arduinos, a tetanus shot and a shower.

I’m having this issue for the online marketplace I’m working on the side. It’s blockchain tech where you can purchase normal goods and services(no, not like Amazon or Fiverr, eww, this one’s more inclined with promoting organic growth for small businesses and freelancers).

I’m stuck with what solution is in the best interest of the user and the business for the long-term.

The dilemma about anonymity, online freedom and privacy is yes, it protects users from predators and attackers, but then, it’s harder for authorities to hunt down people who uses platforms for malicious intent, and also, digital footprint is helpful during litigation as evidence.

You don’t know who to trust.

-There is nothing to differentiate normal users with spammers, scammers, etc.
-There is no accountability for if they break the rules. They can easily delete and create a new account.

Platforms, communities big or small are plagued with these.
There are a lot of people out there who would rather project their insecurities on other people than to seek therapy.

Also, how platforms uses psychology tricks to make platforms addicting, it’s safe to assume that it’s bound to get toxic. Fixation on these platforms, leads to other needs being neglected or people forget to stay present.

Another thing, automated moderation is not that effective as there are still biases in data and human verification is still required. But then, human moderators get exposed to extreme violence, gore, etc that leads to poor mental health. (see Facebook got sued by moderators)

Also, I’ve had a recent experience where some unstable dev was stalking and harassing me. During that turmoil, I’ve found the many loopholes in every platform out there and how crappy their support is. Like they’ll just say, “make your account more secure”, bitch it’s your platform not providing enough security, your blocking feature means nothing coz anyone can still create accounts and message anyone.
It happened like February-August (it ended coz I quit going online and made private all my accounts). UGH I MISS ALL MY FRIENDS THO. FUCK THAT DUDE. He deserves to be in jail TBH

Lol if this product booms, now u know the back story lololol

A while back I was looking for a new job and was given an interview by one company who shall remain nameless. Before the interview, they asked me look through their current site, nothing unusual there, so I started browsing. Then I received an email with all the details I needed to access their production server. Apparently they wanted me to look through the code, unusual but I did so.

First thing all the passwords, including those belonging to members of the public were stored in plain text and many were still the default passwords which were based on the Id so were sequential.

I highlighted these issues at the interview and they then asked me to do a test, not the usual test though, they asked me to add some charts to their prod site. Needless to say that didn’t happen and I got another job elsewhere.

I decided to use Docker Compose on a tiny project that essentially consists of an API and a Caddy server that serves static files and proxies to the API, all of this running on an EC2 t1-nano. I made this admittedly odd choice because I wanted to learn Compose and simultaneously forego figuring out why the node-gyp bindings for sqlite3 refuse to build on EC2 even though it builds just fine on my machine.

I am storing secrets in .env which is committed into the private GH repo. Just now I came across a rant that described the same security practice and it sounded pretty bad from an outside perspective so I decided to research alternatives.

Apparently professional methods for storing secrets generally have higher system requirements than a t1-nano. I'm not looking for a complex service orchestration system, I'm not trying to run an enterprise on this poor little cloud-based raspberry pi. I just want to move my secrets out of the Git repo,

Any tips?

I was hoping it would be possible in a big international company to work (as a software developer) on my own laptop (MacBook Pro) - cause of better parameters = better performance = better efficiency. After I got hired, I was told that it is not possible to bring my own laptop. So I was given an old DELL laptop with Windows + a lot of security stuff in it from the company. The poor DELL is so slow - that even a single commit into the branch takes about 2 minutes because of the security stuff : -O ...I am soooo disappointed... :[ .... On the other hand, by working at home on my MacBook in compare with that DELL I feel about it like I work with some super ultra alien technology from the future :D what a feeling <3

Why in the fuck does everyone expose specific ports in Dockerfiles?

If I wanted to expose the port, I would fucking expose it.

Currently can't run my home infra platform because I'm running two separate instances of Maria DB on the same private internal network. These are two databases for two separate applications.

Why don't I run them on one? Because they're two separate fucking applications.

Why the fuck can I not do this when I used to be able to do it a week ago.

Stop exposing your fucking ports in your fucking Dockerfiles.

This shit is getting so bad, I'm just about to throw my towel in on all fucking containers and just install everything in multiple VM environments.

I am God damn appalled that after 8 years of using docker, core concepts like a port exposure is being leveraged as a way to somehow circumvent poor security practices.

You want a secure container environment? Expose your own goddamn ports.

Fuck you Maria DB, and fuck you docker.