Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605

So let's talk about these tasks we were assigned. Ms Reliable and Mr DDTW's friend who I just realized I haven't named yet were in charge of programming communications. Ms Enabler and Mr DDTW were in charge of creating the vehicle subclasses for the new variants we were instructed to build. Each one had to handle one variant, and we estimated that both of these would be about the same difficulty (Ms Enabler's one turned out to be a little harder).

I like Ms Enabler, and she's a good friend, although she isn't the best at problem solving and her strengths as a dev lie in her work ethic and the sheer amount of theory she knows and can apply. These just so happened to be the exact opposites of my strengths and weaknesses. Within a few days of having assigned the tasks, she came up to me asking for help, and I agreed. Over the following couple of weeks I'd put in quite a lot of hours reviewing the design with her, and we'd often end up pair programming. It was more work for me, but it was enjoyable and overall we were very efficient.

The other two girls in the group were also absolutely fine this sprint. They simply did the work they had to and let us know on time. Outside of some feedback, requests, bugfixes, and mediating disagreements, I didn't have to do anything with their tasks.

A week and half into the sprint and everybody else has their part almost in an MVP state. As Mr DDTW hadn't said or shown anything yet, I asked if he could push his stuff to the repo (he got stuck with this and needed help btw), and what does he have?

A piece of shit "go to this location" algorithm that did not work and was, once again, 150 lines of if statements. This would not have been such a massive deal if THE ENTIRE PREVIOUS SPRINT HAD BEEN DEDICATED TO MAKING THE CODE DO THIS IN A SENSIBLE WAY. Every single thing that this guy had written was already done. EVERY SINGLE THING. A single function call with the coordinates would let the vehicle do what he wrote but in a way THAT ACTUALLY WORKED AND MADE THE TINIEST BIT OF FUCKING SENSE. He had literally given so few shits about this entire goddamn project that he had absolutely zero clue about what we'd even done last sprint.

After letting this man civilly know through our group chat about his failures, giving him pointers on what's wrong and what he can use and telling him that he should fix it by the end of the week, his response?

"I'll try"

That was it. Fuckass was starting to block us now, and this was the first sign of activity he's given since the sprint started. Ms Enabler had finished her work a fucking week ago, and she actually ASKED when she ran into trouble or thought that something could be improved. Mr DDTW? He never asked for shit, any clarification, any help, and I had let everybody know that I'm open. At least the other two who didn't ask for shit ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING. He'd been an useless sack of shit for half a semester in three separate projects and the one time he's been assigned something half important that would impact our grades he does this. I would not stand for it.

I let him know all this, still civil (so no insults) but much less kind, capped with "Stop fooling around. Finish this by the of the week." which probably came off as a threat but his shithead kinda had it coming.

He was actually mad. Dropped a huge faux-apologetic spiel in the chat. Why couldn't I just trust him (his code was garbage and he was constantly late without explanation), his work was almost done (it wasn't and if he'd started he'd understand the scope of what he was assigned), that the problem was that I'm a condescending piece of shit (bruh), and was suddenly very interested in doing work. Literally everybody ignored him. What was funny was seeing the first questions and requests for help after that spiel. I obliged and actually answered what he asked.

The end of the week came and went he'd just uploaded more garbage that didn't work. I had foreseen this and, on top of everything else, had been preparing his section of the work done by myself and properly. Thus came a single commit from me with a working version of the entire module, unblocking the entire team. I cannot imagine the sheer hatred for this man at that moment for the commit message to simply be:

"judgement"

And with that, all I got was a threat to report me to the professor for sabotaging his work. The following day our group got an email from the professor, with no explanation, asking for an almost-immediate video conference. Group chat was a shitshow of panic, as nobody knew what was going on. Least of all Mr DDTW.

Once again, I'm approaching the word limit so to be continued in part 3 (hopefully of 3)

Okay, That right there is pathetic https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/... .

First of all telekom was not able to assure their clients' safety so that some Joe would not access them.
Second of all after a friendly warning and pointing a finger to the exact problem telekom booted the guy out.
Thirdly telekom took a defensive position claiming "naah, we're all good, we don't need security. We'll just report any breaches to police hence no data will be leaked not altered" which I can't decide whether is moronic or idiotic.

Come on boys and girls... If some chap offers a friendly hand by pointing where you've made a mistake - fix the mistake, Not the boy. And for fucks sake, say THANK YOU to the good lad. He could use his findings for his own benefit, to destroy your service or even worse -- sell that knowledge on black market where fuck knows what these twisted minds could have done with it. Instead he came to your door saying "Hey folks, I think you could do better here and there. I am your customes and I'd love you to fix those bugzies, 'ciz I'd like to feel my data is safe with you".

How on earth could corporations be that shortsighted... Behaviour like this is an immediate red flag for me, shouting out loud "we are not safe, do not have any business with us unless you want your data to be leaked or secretly altered".

Yeah, I know, computer misuse act, etc. But there are people who do not give a tiny rat's ass about rules and laws and will find a way to do what they do without a trace back to them. Bad boys with bad intentions and black hoodies behind TOR will not be punished. The good guys, on the other hand, will.

Whre's the fucking logic in that...

P.S. It made me think... why wouldn't they want any security vulns reported to them? Why would they prefer to keep it unsafe? Is it intentional? For some special "clients"? Gosh that stinks

Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃

Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.

But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970

So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.

So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.

So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.

So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.

Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.

And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.

And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!

Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!

P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".

The ridiculous and shameful story of how simply "installing Windows" saved my hard drive from the garbage.
(Also update on https://devrant.com/rants/3105365/)

It started with my root partition turning read-only all of a sudden. Some quick search suggested that I should check the sanity of my hard drive, by running a SMART test, which failed of course. I backed up my data using ddrescue and ran a badblocks over the whole thing, which found around 800 unreadable blocks in a row. I was ready to bid farewell to my drive, but as a last resort, instead of the trash, I brought it to this place where they claimed they can repair the damaged hard drives by "surgery".

To my surprise, they returned my drive the next week, saying it is all well now, and charged me 1/8 the price of a new drive, with a refund guarantee if there was a problem in two days. There was a problem right there: I ran another SMART test which failed again, and also the faulty blocks were still unreadable! So I stormed the place and called for my refund, showing the failed SMART report. The only answer I would get from the staff was "Have you tried installing Windows?".

I usually try to be patient in such situations; I really don't like to declare publicly that "not everyone uses that stinky piece of rotten software you call an OS", but their suggestion seemed totally irrelevant! I got all types of IO errors all over the damn thing and they told me to install Windows. Why? Because this was the only test they would rely on. At last I managed to meet the "technician" there and showed him the IO errors: tried to read the bad sectors with dd and failed. He first mumbled somethings like "Have you checked the connector?" or "Are these the same blocks?", but after he ran out of bullshit, he said "Why don't you just install Windows first and see if that helps?" and I was ready to explode in his face!

"You test drives by installing Windows, just because it will make a nasty NTFS partition and probably does an fsck? If you shut your mouth for a sec and open your eyes you'll see this is a shit load of IO errors we got here: You can't install Windows, you can't even make an NTFS here, because it will try to zero-the-fuck-out the damn partition and it will face the same fucking IO error that I'm showing you right now in almost one single fucking system call!"

"I don't know this kind of test you are using. We have our own tests and they've passed successfully. So all I can do is to give you a Windows CD if you want."

"I don't need a Windows CD. I will just try to make an NTFS partition on the error spot and I will fail."

"Ok. Then call me when your done."

I was angry, not only because I felt they're just trying to avoid a refund, but also because I knew I've lost my drive. But just with hope that I could get my money back, I made a small partition over the error spot and ran `mkfs.ntfs` on it. I was ready to show the failure to the guy, but I looked more precisely and saw that "the filesystem was created successfully!" I was sure something is nor write. I then successfully mounted the new partition, write over it and read it again. I even dd'ed the blocks again, and this time there was no IO error. All of a sudden everything was fine.

I didn't know what happened. Maybe it just needed a write, while I'd just tried to read from those blocks. But anyway, I didn't called the technician guy again. I just thanked one of the staff there and said that my problem was solved. I then ran a successful SMART test and then restored my backup. Ridiculous like that.

I'm still not sure if my drive will continue to live with no more problems. I also have no explanation for what happened. (I appreciate any help on this https://superuser.com/questions/...) But I really like to see the look on the poor guy's face when he finds out that trying to install Windows just saved my ass!