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.

Fuck today was weird.

Today I received almost half a million on my bank account. 😯

Someone changed the ancient cryptic billing system. My user account at work has id 32 in the database, and the dev referenced the size of the creditor id instead of the of the value of the ids itself, and they're u32 ints... So ALL the money moving through our platform was accidentally transferred to my associated bank account.

For all the unit tests we have, this bug tumbled right through.

And no one at finances thought a transfer that big, to a backend dev they know by name, was suspicious — with almost no money going to other creditors...

That worries me a bit. The fact that this shit can happen, even at high test coverage, just because someone mindlessly did a wrong autocomplete or something.

Of course I will send it back... after two weeks and a few hundred € of interest.

When I finished my studies, I was looking for a job and had an interview at a smallish company.

Boss: can you do C?
Me: yes, I have already done some stuff in C.
Boss: I mean, are you really good in C?
Me, growing suspicious: well yes I already have been using it - but anyway, there's also the project documentation for looking up, right?
Boss: uhm, the code IS the documentation.

I envisioned myself being drowned in undocumented spaghetti code and wasn't really keen on that job anymore, but my following question pretty much ended the interview:

Me: oh, I see. Do you have any roadmap for getting your development to a more professional base?

His looks, priceless! He was just shocked when he realised that he had failed my interview, and that I was a fresher made it even harder to digest for him.

I really hate it when we have to wear formal dress to office. I feel like a marketing executive. My code stares at me with suspicious looks.

Hey everyone - tonight we performed a database upgrade and unfortunately there were a few "surprise" breaking changes to the query language we use that weren't caught during testing. Once they were discovered after the upgrade. The queries were corrected within a few minutes. You might have noticed some issues with commenting, voting, etc.

On this note, please let me know if you notice anything suspicious like errors when trying to perform normal actions, or anything at all. I appreciate any reports since it's a bit tricky for us to cover every last part of the app alone, though I think we went through most of it. Thanks and please let me know if you have any questions!

When your program runs perfectly on the first try

Start coding for work this morning, immediately notice a ui bug, ugh. Want to get cracking with another bug I'm supposed to fix.

Fix the bug, and it incidentally fixes the other bug. Two in one.

*Suspicious*

When your code runs way too smoothly it makes you suspicious.

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

I've got a mini stroke today. My project ended and I got delegated elsewhere.

"It's going to be fine, it's c++, you will find yourself there"

Suspicious, it's a project everybody was staying out of as hard as they can. But hey, it's cool, how bad can it be? what can go wrong with that?

Reality was brutal, project that uses Boost C++ as framework and bjam as builder. Builds with a decent dose of luck, and only under special circumstances, only under one specific version of compiler. No docs, quartet of the code is in Fortran, just to use ancient lisp part which was second qarter. The most senior Dev around does not have idea how it all works. Also everything is inside one enormous try/catch block. Because of the reasons.

That's how people end up with severe alcoholism and meth addiction.

AWS has identified suspicious activity on my account.

I'm using it for the first time in 2 years. That's the suspicious activity.

So guys i really need your help. My girlfriend started getting phone calls at odd hours, so I got suspicious and started tracking her phone. Then I found out that she has been going to this guys house at wears hours, then once when I was tracking her my computer froze, so what could it be? How do I fix my computer

Last weekend I witnessed the most infected computer I have ever seen in my life...

I went on a private party. A girl had her laptop plugged to the speakers to play some music. This thing was literally 99% cancer. The first thing I noticed, when I looked at her opened browser, was that nearly half the screen was taken by toolbars. Also any popular website you could visit had additional ads INJECTED into it. The fist 10 YouTube search results: always porn. No idea how that didn't make her suspicious.

Precisely every 10th click (anywhere not only in the browser) would open up a window with either more ads or an aggressively blinking message saying: "A virus has been detected on your machine. Click here to download our antivirus programm. You have 60 seconds left before your firewall breaks!!!".

Also physically this device was on the edge of completely broken. The power supply had to be taped to the socket because it was so loose. Every little jiggle would immediatly shut the system down and Windows had to be completely reinstalled (which of course didn't solved any of the "software issues").

First I wanted to use that laptop to show some friends a new web project of mine but this thing probably would have DDoSed the shit out of my recently finished work or something.

I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry...

I saw a commit with suspicious code days ago. After warning my immediate superior he ignored me and yesterday proceeded to deploy.

Now we have items in cache for days instead of minutes. I guess next time he will listen to me.

Corporate: Phishing Emails are serious. We need you guys to take this awareness training. Please report if you get any suspicious email.

*Sends the awareness training in a format that screams Phishing

Everybody: Wait... is this a test?

Tl;dr: owning and pranking other people with a wireless mouse is hacking and illegal.

Okay, so I wanted to fuck around with some people one day so I decide to bring a usb wireless mouse to my secondary school.

My first target was my science teacher (was a bitch). I got into class before everyone else and plugged in the small usb receiver then sat down and pretended as if nothing had happened. The lesson starts and here is where the fun begins. Her screen is projected onto a whiteboard so I could see what she was doing. Under the table I had my mouse and every time she tried clicking a dialogue, I would move the mouse ever so slightly so she would miss. After a couple of times, she started to get suspicious, maybe even slightly paranoid; my friend keked. I never got found out by that teacher.

Fast forward to next lesson: I already planted the receiver in my next victims pc. The victim was a bitch I hated so much at the time. She would used to bully me to an extent and was a loud noisy bitch. I really didn't like the person. I digress. When the time was right, I went to her folder, highlighted all her files, right click, hover over delete. But I wasn't so shallow to delete her stuff. That's not the person I am. I guess it was more of a threat really. But the teacher saw what was going on and she saw my wireless mouse and connected 2 and 2 together. She called the behaviour people, removed the reciever and the mouse from me.

Within a few minutes, I was in a room on my own talking to this woman talking about how hacking is bad/illegal and she knows I'm into it etc. But I wasn't hacking? I did no damage and was pulling a prank. Bitch didn't listen to me. She made me sign this document which said that if I fuck around with computers, I could be expelled and I won't be allowed to use to computers again or use them with many restrictions.

I didn't really care. To this day, I still don't have my mouse back. :(

My apparently my friend's wife gets suspicious whenever his Snapchat goes off after 10pm, always wants to know who it is.

"It's [algo], it's always him sending me pics of his code late at night. That's is the only person that Snapchat me this late"

And it's true.

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

I once woke up to a $65k invoice from AWS and almost puked in my pants.

2 years ago I was cycling through freelancers on upwork to find a decent candidate. I guess i hired the wrong guy because even after revoking access, they got into my AWS account and spun up 1000's of ec2 instances in multiple locations.

I was a newly wed and feared for my life. How do I tell my wife I gota pay $65k with barely any savings.

I contacted AWS. And they started off by saying "we see some suspicious activity on your account, don't worry, we will handle it". I was like "yehhh cuz I've been paying pennies for the last couple of years. No way I can rake up a bill like that."

Since I was going through so many devs, it was impossible to figure out who. But even if I did find out, what am I gona do. I'm just a code monkey.

My look when my code compiles at first go.

*That's suspicious*

That suspicious feeling, when everything seems to run as expected on the first attempt.

rant

When you start a new project.
You create a new directory.
You start the IDE and create a new application project.
You type just 5 lines of code for testing it.
Then you compile and run.
Nothing happens...
You abort and retry.
Nothing happens...
Half a minute later a window pops up and Norton reports you that an executable has been removed because its suspicious and has a lack of reputation!!!

I think this is so far one of the most priceless WTF moments I encountered at my current work:

A coworker of mine came up to me explaining the problem he had with russian characters in the filename. He explained in detail that everything works ok (the other part of the code he was fixing) if he changes the name of the file to test1.xlsx for example which doesn't use russian characters. OK great.

Then he goes on to show me how he fixed the other stuff and of course everything blows up. The file he used for demonstration was of course the original file our cusotomer provided, he just deleted the obvious russian chars and left the rest.

МТС != MTC

I cracked up: but you still have russian chars in the name.
The guy: no way, I deleted them all.
Me: but what about that МТС in the name?! Guy: what about it?
Me: did you actually typed that in or you left it there?! Those are russian chars that are fucking things up for you.
Guy: no way, it's MTC.
Me: checked the logs, you have ??? In the filename instead of МТС..don't you find that at least a little bit suspicious?!
Guy: but it looks the same. How does it (the computer) know it is in russian?!? //Why doesn't it understand?!

O.o I still can't believe it.. Is it just me & my high standards, or should it be normal for coders to know things such as character encoding & stuff?!?

I almost died of laughter, he and some other guy had problems finding customers in the software due to not being able to type the russian chars << happened more then once before, even after I told them about a quick hack on how to use google translate onboard keyboard & other stuff to make proper chars so they can get a match..

I think when they bury me, I'll still be facepalming and laughing over this incident. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

That's suspicious 😶

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

My girlfriend says to me:
"Any other girlfriend would be suspicious why you're smiling and laughing into your phone."
I showed her devRant, she gets ['hip','hip'] 😊

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.

I'm freelancing and there was a guy who needed help with JavaFX. He gave me code only to his view class so I don't steal the rest... It was around 5k lines and it was full of compilation errors because of missing classes. While checking the code I realised something is really wrong with his model classes. So I asked maybe he could send me this one model class that was suspicious. So he did and it was around 10k lines long and had around 200 fields... ALL OF THEM FUCKING STRINGS except 3. You know what the rest of 3 were? 2 Lists of strings and a boolean... It was his "main" model class, he was using it for everything. It had setters for all fields and empty default constructor, so he would just instantiate the object and would set the fields that he wanted to use. Need new functionality? Just add 5more String fields and set them!

Once on my old job I had several ssh sessions and I was running some tests where I frequently restarted the application... Until I entered the restart command in the terminal of the production system and shutdown the whole application. - Still gives me the creeps today, was just lucky the customer was in a break and we could remotely restart it, so probably nobody even noticed.

Now today I run a "rm -rf *" on a folder that is supposed to be local, but after some time I get suspicious because it is taking too long.. Only to discover that the mount point of the remote resource points to my "local copy". Shit.

What is next? The "delete from ...;" without where clause? Fuck, aren't you supposed to get more experienced and cautious?

I got some work on a new project so I ran the 500, or so, unit tests and it took almost 3 minutes. Everything was mocked and no external dependencies so I got curious as to how on earth they could take so long.

I found some suspicious code doing a while loop over a date range incrementing by 1 day each time. It turned out the tests didn't initialise the start date which defaults to 01/01/0001, and there are 5 scenarios!

I got test execution down to a respectful 10s.

So, California, land of no rain whatsoever.

Until today, where it actually rained!

Also today, a weather applet for tmux started misbehaving. Suspicious.

Coincidence, I think not! Sure enough, stopping that applet from running fixed everything. Turns out, the raining icon breaks the terminal, for some strange reason.

And why had this not been discovered earlier? This had been the first time it had rained for at least 8 months, and I added this only 4 months ago. Thus, it had never had its time to shine.

Yay for strange encoding!

Anyway, I now have a new excuse; blame bad code on global warming.

(Warning: kinda long && somewhat of a political rant)

Every time I tell someone I work with AI, the first thing to come out of their mouth is "oh but AI is going to take over the world!"

No.

It was only somewhat recently that it started being able to recognize what was in a picture from over 3 million images, and that too it's not that great at. Honestly people always say "AI is just if-else" ironically, but it isn't really that far from the truth, we just multiply an input by weights and check the output.

It isn't some magical sauce, it's not being born and then exploring a problem, it's just glorified-probability prediction. Even in "unsupervised" learning, the domain set is provided; in "reinforcement learning" which has gotten super popular lately we just have the computer decide which policy is optimal and apply that to an environment. It's a glorified decision tree (and technically tree models like XGBoost outperform neural networks and deep learning on a large number of problems) and it isn't going to "decide" to take over the planet.

Honestly all of this is just born out of Elon Musk fans who take his word as truth and have been led to believe that AI is going to take over the world. There are a billion reasons why it can't! And to top it off this takes away a lot of public attention from VERY concerning ethical issues with AI.

Am I the only one who saw Google Duplex being unveiled and immediately thought "fraud"? Forget phone scammers, if you trained duplex on the mannerisms of, for example, a famous politician's voice, you could impersonate them in an audio clip (or even video clip with deepfakes). Or for example the widespread use of object detection and facial recognition in surveillance systems deployed by DoD. Or the use of AI combined with location tracking and browsing analytics for targeted marketing.

The list of ethics breaches are endless, and I find it super suspicious that those profiting the most off of unethical AI are all too eager to shift public concern to some science fiction Terminator style takeover that, if ever possible, would be a long way out and is not any sort of a priority issue right now.

My websites contact form got a submission from some "manjeet" offering me his freelancing services, together with previous projects, where he apparently delivered and... has a login backdoor that he advertises to others to check out?.. with credentials etc.

Also got flagged with "It contains a suspicious link that was used to steal people's personal information. Avoid clicking links or replying with personal information."

lol..suspicious

Casually debugging some cuda code today. Something's not working so I add a breakpoint in the suspicious kernel. For some reason I set the display GPU as the active device from my code *GENIUS* ( I have two GPUs installed, one for compute, one for the monitors).

Starts cuda debugging... Control flow reached the kernel and eventually the breakpoint. Suddenly the whole system freezes. Mouse doesn't move, keyboard seems dead. I realize I have unsaved code on the open text editor😲 *panic*. Keyboard shortcut to stop debugging doesn't work *panic^2*. My colleague says I have to hard reset the machine *panic^3*. I don't remember the last time I saved *panic^4*.

I take a deep breath. I reset. *sidenote: WINDOWS DECIDED TO FUCKING UPDATE ON REBOOT* Once I login, 50% of my code was lost. I didn't save 😢

Fuck you Nvidia 😢

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

Everything is going surprisingly well. Pray for me guys. This doesn't look good. This is going too well :(

Google just emailed me to tell me that I should, "take action against suspicious apps that can access your data"... but the app in question was a Google Drive API token I made for a thing I am personally developing .-.

Nothing makes me more suspicious than when my code runs and works on the first try

GODDAMMIT okay time to set up 2fa

(GitHub says nothing was done to my account besides a login but i'm still suspicious...)

A rant about pretentious people:

So last week I walk into college and I find that a new "Machine Learning Crash Course" is being offered by a senior. Now I'm a beginner in this domain, and know the just basic concepts and math behind it. Naturally, I was super curious about this and decided to talk the student who was supposed to teach the course.

I asked him where he learned from, and mentioned that I'm an interested beginner. He just replied, "YouTube".
Okaaaaayyy?
Now I'm suspicious of this guy, so I asked him if he's worked on any related projects I could look into, to which he replies, "Not yet, but I'm working on some".

Now I'm SUPER suspicious. A guy that's got no experience with the subject, yet is teaching others about it?

Get this, at this point he rudely asks me if I have anything else to say. So I asked him a super simple question: "Do you know what gradient descent is?". He replies "Uhh, no, but I've heard about it".
I lost it.

HOW DID THIS GUY MANAGE TO CONVINCE THE HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT AND SEVERAL OTHER PROFESSORS TO TEACH A MACHINE LEARNING CRASH COURSE?

People like him need to go away.

/rant

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

Choosing java as my interview language over python. Still suspicious. 😓😓

Not exactly a dev story, but an annoying experience overall. So, I was going to a Starbucks near me, I was too lazy to drive to the nearest shop that sells coffee, so I just went here. I was beginning my work (updating one of my old programs to a usable level). I was downloading some libraries from github for the project, as a middle-aged woman walks behind me. She looks at my laptop, and sees a terminal screen with git clone running. Now, I can understand, that if you aren't proficient at technology, a terminal can look suspicious. But she straight up said: "Stop hacking our passwords, it's illegal!". At this point, she walks over and asks the manager to come look. The manager comes, and calls their "IT guy". The supposed IT guy comes over, chuckles a bit and walks away. The manager proceeds to kick me out, and give me a warning to not come again.

WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY YOU FUCKING SPYING SNEAKY LITTLE CUNTS?!?

This is the Calendar app that comes with my phone. Can't disable, uninstall, or change these slightly suspicious permissions. FUCK MY LIFE

Boss: So what are your biggest achievements for this year?
Me: mmm, probably not killing myself
Boss: .....
Me: I meant I reduced the number of fraudulent transactions in our service by adding machine learning to flag suspicious transaction
Boss: Yeah, you should've start with that
Me: .....

I just logged into my dad's computer and see a bunch of apps running in the background that seems very suspicious and like malware...

He's a developer and he makes like twice what I do...

I've got my new job less than a month ago. On this Monday i've got annoyed by the unhappy faces in the office and said to them, that i'll work from home. But instead I boarded a train from Zurich to Milan. Checked in to a really nice Milan coworking space called Login. And had some google hangouts meetings all while beeing anxious that some might get suspicious that I left the country. 😅

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?! 😂😂😂

Oldie but goldie.. after my studies, I was looking for my first job and did interviews. In one of the companies, they asked me whether I knew C. Well yes, I had been programming in C. Ah no, that wasn't enough - they asked whether I was really good in C. I got suspicious and argued that there was the project documentation anyway, right? Turned out, no. The code was the documentation, as I had suspected.
Then my question - as freshman, mind you: "Do you have any plans to get to a more professional way of developing?"
The interview was pretty much over at that point, the boss got actually angry. Well, interviews work both ways, and he had failed. I surely dodged a bullet.

!Dev

Fuck that day, honestly. Today during my driving lesson I was a witness of a car crash literally 5 meters in front of me (the older man cut the road of other guy, that other guy hit the old man's car and old man has hit the lamp post. Good thing no was injured, except of few bumpers, car doors and lamp).

The train which was supposed to take me back to Leiden was 10 minutes late, so I couldn't catch the earlier bus.

When I got off the train, went to catch a next bus, there was huge crowd outside, because police was taking care of the suspicious bag left in front of the train station (pic). Lots of cop, lots of people. Fortunately that wasn't a bomb.

The only positive thing was that I helped some nice Hindi guy find his bus 😁

many from the outside world believe incognito is the purest form of anonymity and security.....because its logo has a suspicious man with a hat and an overcoat

Finally had the time to implement that feature I wanted all the time. Testing now and everything works just fine again. Very suspicious.

No one ever tells you that once you start doing facial recognition that your computer gets filled with tons images of your colleagues.

Looks a bit suspicious.

I FINALLY GOT CHROME BACK!!! A few weeks ago, my computer, for no reason, said I couldn't use chrome due to Microsoft Family features, despite me not having a Microsoft Family setup. I have been using edge for weeks. Pray for my sanity.

The solution, was to create a new Microsoft account and run chrome as that. But, it does bring up the interesting topic of how much Microsoft sucks. They do this all the time, they look at something that doesn't need meddling with, like my right to use my property and my apllications, and release some garbage they didn't test without thinking of the implications. Did anyone ever as Microsoft for a way to manage your family forcefully? No. Because, if you cared enough, I'm sure you could just download a stupid family app, rather than let Microsoft take hostage of your computers.

One thing really interesting to me was that Firefox nor chrome worked, but edge could launch just fine. A little suspicious, don't ya think, Microsoft?

For the Project Management exam, my university requires us to install a program on our PERSONAL laptops that is meant to take over the control over the entire system during the exam, monitor any “suspicious activities”. The software is closed-source (it’s called Schoolyear Exams), does god-knows-what in the background, takes the control over the entire system and can be summoned through any Chromium web browser.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that you want to make sure nobody is cheating - but at this point, I’d rather write it with pen and paper. Or just provide us with computers for the time of exam.

I decided to whip out my old laptop instead, installed a Windows 10 on a separate SSD, and installed that software on it.

Also it’s very amusing that this software is also mandatory for the Linux exam… But the program can’t run on Linux (it’s Windows and Mac only and doesn’t even support M1 chips).

EDIT: typos

My Team Lead: Hey do you know goofy?

Me: What is it?

TL: It's a new programming language

Me: *being suspicious* show me what are you dealing with

TL: *Shows me a Groovy code snippet*

Me: Yeah!! Your goofy is pretty good!! Enjoy! 😡

Everytime I want to use a well recommended library which last commit was two years ago or longer i get suspicious

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

Dear recruiters,

I have no problem if you write me an e-mail or a private message on linkedin.
But don't assume I will accept your contact requests. That will be a bit suspicious considering my company's management is also on linkedin, don't you think?

"Our system has detected that this message is[nl]421-4.7.0 suspicious due to the very low reputation of the sending IP address"

Oh shit..

Note to self: Don't test on production servers. Gmail has now blocked my ass.

Do HACKERS Always Wear Hoodies?
Not in movies ! Real life ...

Went back to Laravel from JS stack after a year. Thought I might have a lot of errors while setting up but everything is working so perfectly that I'm becoming suspicious 😕

Some Project Manager outsourced a redundant RADIUS setup with MySQL backend. We got 2 copies of a daloradius appliance running on Ubuntu 10.04. Once I saw this, I started to get a bit suspicious and requested to audit the system and database redundancy. With the system in production, and without getting back any documentation, I got into the VMs using the default root password. This was not even the worst part, as I found. One server was using a local MySQL instance, while the other was also using the first one's MySQL instance. When I reported this, I was told to comment clearly any changes to the configuration files, which resulted in commenting the word SHAME above each change.

refactored model code to be async and use promises. executed successfully on first try.
ME: this looks suspicious, leta debug it!!!!

"Don't fall for the hype. A lot of ideas, groups and methodologies are basically cults trying to advertise their consulting services. While I have no problem with that, just remember that when you run into one of these guys and they are quick to shit on the alternatives to their way (and those who built them) to always be very suspicious."

Context:

We had the opportunity to meet 2 very bright people who were heads of their respective communities in a similar area. They were both talking a lot of shit, and getting kinda harsh.

A brilliant dev I worked with, who knew both people for years, took me aside and told me this.

Some cults have cool shit, just don't drink the kool-aid

!story

So, this is the story of my lay off from last organisation. It was just 4 months and i was getting good ratings in features development and overall timely completion. So, during this lockdown/Covid-19, one day out of the blue i and my teammate got a mail from HR to have a catch up. We were suspicious about that. My team mate was sure that it is regarding layoff but I was like we are doing well, why the hell they will fire us, and also it's only 2 of us who is handling the whole project, I don't think they will fire us; they are probably gonna discuss about something or may be covid situation. So my teammate was having his discussion earlier than me; after the discussion he told me that he has been fired, he tried to reason with them for half an hour but ultimately they asked him to put the papers.
I was bit scared, but still i was having hope that maybe..
So, the conversation started like this is the meeting..
HR- Hey, how are you. I thought if we can catch up a little?

Me- I'm good, what happened?

Tech. VP- See, we wanted to talk about your performance, from some past months you're not performing well and ...

Me- but i have been here just for 4 months and our team was the highest scorer in task completion last month.

Tech. VP- i know, i dont deny your technical capability. You're an awesome developer and technology wise you can achieve anything but your performance..

Me- ok, (to HR), anything will change your mind

HR- umm(silence)

Me- cut the crap and let me know how to put resignation via mail, bye.

And i cut the call.
The call lasted only for 7 mins, i was proud to not waste time on such assholes.

Such hypocrites are there...

When you do a deploy and none of the tests fail and you get more suspicious of the code than when a couple of them do fail.

Job security:
- Create bugs purposely
- Discover the bugs after a while (if you discover it too quickly it will look suspicious)
- Fix the bug

Ibwish I had remembered this when the weekly theme was office pranks.

In the first or second year of high school we covered basic internet security. Stuff like don't follow suspicious urls, don't open suspicious emails and such.

Our teacher let us play around with some sort of simulated desktop environment, where we could execute some hacks like ad popups and such on each other's environment, if we fell for the trap.

Anyways, one hack I found interesting was a hack, that lockes a user out of their virual desktop, until he enters a password, that will be displayed on his environment.

Yes, a very interesting hack, because it contains two obvious yet major design flaws, which I could exploit 😈

1. It's case sensitive
In itself not a problem, but combined with #2, it's fatal.
2. "IlIlllIlI"
Depending on your font, you probably have no idea what exactly I just typed.

Let's just say, the font displayed uppercase i and lowercase L completely undifferentiable.

Guess whom I let suffer.

It was our teacher, who had to demonstrate us some things and who was connected to the same network.

I swear, nothing beats that feeling when your tearcher has go come to you and embarrassingly ask you to "unhack" them, because they can't type it 😂

Okay, Google. Stop this.

I'm very upset. Drive applications have gotten slower and slower over time on every single browser that isn't chromium based. This isn't their fault. You can't make your application, that tons of institutions pay for, gradually slower on every browser that's not yours. This never used to be a problem, and now it affects everyone *but you*. It's highly suspicious given your track record with YouTube. Hidden div over the video to prevent hardware optimization. What the hell?

You used to be the only big 4 company I had some trust left in. Over the last few months, I've lost it.

Why can I not add a hairstyle, and expression to my duck?

@dfox not sure if I'm ready to identify with a duck who doesn't share my hair and always-suspicious look.

When you don't get a server 500 error on your JDBC application.

The ticket system blokes - episode 3

So we always had and have very awful performance with our ticket system. You can't get anything to load in under ~4s normally. Now since it has gotten worse over the last weeks i decided to set aside a few hours to closely watch our SQL server.
After i identified a culprit that was hogging the CPU almost every 2 minutes i looked at other long running queries in the server and found out where exactly the 4s come from.

6 tables from various DBs. Sure, no problem.

Left Outer Join. Sure, why not.

Querying every fucking column in every fucking table explicitly adding up to a whopping 160 columns which they need not even 10% of. We're talking about session IDs, passwords, stock count, IBANs and all that stuff to show the work done on a ticket. Absolutely not.

So i extracted the query and reduced it to the stuff we need and the execution time went from 4 seconds to almost instant.

The funny thing is that their idea of performance optimization is throwing LIMIT around everywhere to get these monstrous queries under control.

So in the next few days I'll have an appointment with their lead programmer. I'm looking forwards to it.

So out of curiosity: does anyone know an SQL builder or toolset that does shit like
SELECT X AS [t0_c0],
SELECT Y AS [t0_c1],
SELECT Z AS [t1_c0],
and so on? I'd like to know how they got to this point.

ChaseBank is getting up my nose. Twice in four business days my account was flagged and I had to change my password for 'security' purposes. I spent the better part of 90 minutes in a futile attempt to find out why, when there's been no suspicious activity on my account, I'm being flagged. My father contacted a branch manager near him who told him to dial the priolrity customer service number and key in the letters (I shit you not) HO HO. I called the number. It's the same damn number I'd been calling. I called the branch. They told me I'd definitely receive a call back last Friday by 1800. No call. So, yesterday I called the manager of that branch, verified its location, told the manager he was supposed to call me by 1800 last Friday, and Chase Corporate would be in touch with him soon to explain that when you tell a customer you'll call them, you'll fucking call them.

I am working in a speciffic engineering team. We are using tools the company has bought and has separate teams administrating them.

Tool X is malfunctioning, throwing server-side errors (some .dlls are mentioned in the err msg)

Me: XAdmin team, there are some suspicious errors and I cannot achieve desired results using tool X

XAdmin: Let me see
XAdmin: I have checked a few forums and could not find a solution. Please log a vendor case

Me: *wat........*
Me: Vendor will most likely require some techical info, some licencing info. How do I go about that?

XAdmin: reach out to the vendor, they will schedule a call. Forward that call to me

Me: *wat............*
Me: *for shits and giggles, register a bogus account at vendor site, try to log the SR*
Me: XAdmin, while logging a SR I am asked for licencing info. What is the aaa, bbb, ccc info of your licence?

XAdmin: *crickets mating*

wtf buddy... How can you call yourself Admin of tool X and ask your customers to log vendor cases for you.....? WTF are YOU there for then??

I'm still WTFed. Like wtf....

EDIT: the guy I was talking to is XAdmins' team lead

!dev

i think i need to control my emotions and expression around girls. things are going quite wrong and i am not sure i am able to interact with this beautiful gender correctly.

<misc: somewhat unrelated event. need to vent>

- got called out "a creep", "jerk", and "hypocrite" by this girl. she may be totally correct in calling me these but these words made me think about my behavior and therefore this post .

- characters? she: a friend of a friend, to whom i have met 3-4 times, in trips where we drank together, danced together nd talked till late night, among other people.
me : well me . based on previous allegations you can also label me as creep and hypocrite , but i would describe myself as an introvert, nerdy person who talks better on a keyboard than real life (otherwise i wouldn't be typing this post but whatever.)

- action : i made a comment on her insta story

- action details:
• we follow each other on insta. it was 12 am and i was in a half sleep state, scrolling the damn app before falling asleep
• saw her story with his 3 girl nd 2 guy cousins probably, so out of fun, replied her about how all of their specs look the same and if they all take out their specs from the same shop (cheeky comment, i know)
• she just erupted. from asking whether i also wanna buy from the same shop, to why am i talking to her, who gave you the right to compliment, jerk, hypocrite who can't talk in real life but compliments on keyboard, to creep and "stay away"
• I really wanted to say sorry at some point, but i kept making more cheeky comments in between. i was like , yeah she is my friend going through something and bursting her anger on me, she will come back and laugh, but she kept going towards hypocrite, jerk and finally stay away thing

• after that i knew i crossed the line and immediately got out of the conversation. i didn't apologize though.
• as of now am calm and don't mind the current situation of she being angry at a person who means nothing to her and me realising she is not a friend but a common connection . and till the time i was making cheeky comments, i saw her as my homie friend, so i am not bothered if she is angry
</misc>

I think i am a very needy person. i didn't have many friends in school time and i didn't had any relatives/cousins/siblings to get a lot of affection. a 25 yo horny virgin with no relationships till date does give a bad personality vibe from far, but keep in mind that i have mainly focused on personality growth and a conservative chsracter development my whole life. i do not act on my lonly feelings, but i try to be helpful and nice to everyone (which might be a suspicious/bad thing. just trying to defend my character, but feel free to judge)

every girl that talks nice with me, i get very helpful, nice and cheeky with them. most girls likes nd ignores these things, but some also get along, trust me and are willing to spend more time with me.

This makes me not only be more nice and cheeky with them but also start developing feelings for them and imagining my future/relation with them.

as of now i think there are 12 or 13 girls with whom i got into "vibing" (here, assume that vibing means me talking with them, cracking jokes nd compliments, meeting them alone ,etc. no adult stuff ofc), nd then after a few days told them directly or indirectly that i like them ( in a hope of getting some affection back i guess), getting rejected and still trying to keep the "friendship"

i think this needs to be changed. the people calling me creep, despo, perv , whatever might be correct in calling me those till now(based in my behavior) but i don't wanna be that.

i need to understand the girls might not want anything more than just a help at some point and then be done with it. I shouldn't be going out a limb and trying to get i to conversation/flirt/whatever.

i just am too emotional to let any person go away from my life just because our reason for interaction is over.
If I am commenting on a girl's post to whom i met on some trip, i will be commenting on a guy's post (to whom i met on a similar trip) too , in a similar manner,

if i see a post from one of my school's batchmates , and i find it nice/funny/weird, i will comment as if me and this batchmate met yesterday and not for 1 hr 10 years ago (irrespective of the gender)

and even after that if people are so intolerant, then maybe i am wrong and rather should start forgetting every person with whom i have spent less than 50 days alone.

hope this is the correct math and i could expect people with 50 days = 600+ hours of daytime to be enough to not see me as a stranger

Not entirely dev related, but definitely shameless. In high-school we had to study CS, but it was more about knowing to use Office. We had class tests, which mean that we all had the same task and we had to finish it until the end of the class. Obviously no one wanted to do it, so whoever finished first would email it to everyone. Most people, however, were stupid enough to leave the meta data untouched, so it was obvious who was the original author. To not appear suspicious, I removed the original metadata and put my own in, and deliberately made errors in the sheet and corrected others that I noticed. I never got caught, because my work would always have "unique" mistakes.

I really don't get why creators of already-suspicious looking software (and the related suspicious looking website) put terms like "NO VIRUS" or "100% free of malware" next to the download area.

I mean, why would that help anything?

(I understand those typical virustotal scan widgets though, those are fine)

Somebody is onto me.

This week, I received a suspicious email claiming to reset my apple account password.

And just now, I received another mail from Facebook about unsuccessful login attempt.

I use this email only for serious stuff. Looks like one of them is a mole.

So I get an email from college career development for a web developer & designer position.

Read into the requirements & function, I find this....

Who the fuck does put HARD CODING before CODING.. why would you even put that on the requirements. People are going to read that and find out how you run your company.

We all do some hard coding here & there but recruiters think it's a skill that comes before coding.. hard coding isn't coding hard...

They don't say company's name in email so I got suspicious.. or perhaps I thought I can be a detective lol. I was able to find out the company and looked at their Glassdoor.

Of course they have 1.6 stars.. two 1 star reviews by their employees. I can just imagine the horror working at this place lol.

Oh & the manager makes something like 110k.

Brave Browser.

There’s a reason why brave is generally advised against on privacy subreddits, and even brave wanted it to be removed from privacytools.io to hide negativity.

Brave rewards: There’s many reasons why this is terrible for privacy, a lot dont care since it can be “disabled“ but in reality it isn’t actually disabled:

Despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, every few secs a request to: “variations.brave.com”, “laptop-updates.brave.com” which despite its name isn’t just for updates and fetches affiliates for brave rewards, with pings such as grammarly, softonic, uphold e.g. Despite again explicitly opting out of brave rewards. There’s also “static1.brave.com”

If you’re on Linux curl the static1 link. curl --head
static1.brave.com,
if you want proof of even further telemetry: it lists cloudfare and google, two unnecessary domains, but most importantly telemetry domains.

But say you were to enable it, which most brave users do since it’s the marketing scheme of the browser, it uses uphold:

“To verify your identity, we collect your name, address, phone, email, and other similar information. We may also require you to provide additional Personal Data for verification purposes, including your date of birth, taxpayer or government identification number, or a copy of your government-issued identification
Uphold uses Veriff to verify your identity by determining whether a selfie you take matches the photo in your government-issued identification. Veriff’s facial recognition technology collects information from your photos that may include biometric data, and when you provide your selfie, you will be asked to agree that Veriff may process biometric data and other data (including special categories of data) from the photos you submit and share it with Uphold. Automated processes may be used to make a verification decision.”

Oh sweet telemetry, now I can get rich, by earning a single pound every 2 months, with brave taking a 30 percent cut of all profits, all whilst selling my own data, what a deal.

In addition this request: “brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com” seems to either be some sort of shilling or suspicious behaviour since it fetches 5 extensions and installs them. For all we know this could be a backdoor.

Previously in their privacy policy they shilled for Facebook, they shared data with Facebook, and afterwards they whitelisted Facebook, Twitter, and large company trackers for money in their adblock: Source. Which is quite ironic, since the whole purpose of its adblock is to block.. tracking.

I’d consider the final grain of salt to be its crappy tor implementation imo. Who makes tor but doesn’t change the dns? source It was literally snake oil, all traffic was leaked to your isp, but you were using “tor”. They only realised after backlash as well, which shows how inexperienced some staff were. If they don’t understand something, why implement it as a feature? It causes more harm than good. In fact they still haven’t fixed the extremely unique fingerprint.

There’s many other reasons why a lot of people dislike brave that arent strictly telemetry related. It injecting its own referral links when users purchased cryptocurrency source. Brave promoting what I’d consider a scam on its sponsored backgrounds: etoro where 62% of users lose all their crypto potentially leading to bankruptcy, hence why brave is paid 200 dollars per sign up, because sweet profit. Not only that but it was accused of theft on its bat platform source, but I can’t fully verify this.

In fact there was a fork of brave (without telemetry) a while back, called braver but it was given countless lawsuits by brave, forced to rename, and eventually they gave up out of plain fear. It’s a shame really since open source was designed to encourage the community to participate, not a marketing feature.

Tl;dr: Brave‘s taken the fake privacy approach similar to a lot of other companies (e.g edge), use “privacy“ for marketing but in reality providing a hypocritical service which “blocks tracking” but instead tracks you.

Who the fuck thought that carieer grade NAT would be a great solution instead of just switching over to IPv6 and have functioning internet?

I don't want to share my IP with some bastard who fails every reCaptcha so that pictures take 5 fucking seconds for me to fade out and in again.

Neither Chrome nor Firefox have a reliable way of forcing IPv6 if possible so Google still thinks I'm an evil bot.
I'm waiting for my PayPal to be frozen because of "suspicious actions from 'my' internet connection".
I don't want to share my IP. I want to be responsible myself for everything that happens to it.

Please replace that old switches that are too slow to manage serious traffic anyway and are just wasting their power for being turned on so that I can have an IP address to myself

A very suspicious thing happened at work last Friday, security team told me to uninstall adblockplus and disconnect.me plugin 😟

Today, someone popular (ViGrey, @vigreytech) contacted me out of nowhere and offered to send me things.

Why?

I broke a project of his by talking in a Twitch chat during Airgap 2020.

Not to be rude to the man, he seems nice and this is a very kind thing to do, i'm very thankful, but this makes me simultaneously flattered as fuck and wary as fuck, as it's simultaneously flattering and suspicious. I'm a literal no one, and this is something that happens between popular people, not between a popular person and someone who is only remembered by alias by like 6 people.

I couldn't figure out how to respond for a while.

Might be good news, maybe not.

And.co was bought by Fiverr and the platform's software was made completely free.

I'm suspicious of Fiverr and every other freelancing platform out there, and am wondering what's the whole point of buying a SaaS and letting people get its services for 'nothing' in return.

This is a mail from apple support where I got a mac to get repaired !isupport (Not iSupport) look suspicious :P

I reinstalled windows through the automatic install process where it wipes my previous windows installation. To my absolute surprise grub, and all of its options are still working.

Still kinda suspicious, but I'll take it.

I find it ironic that Signal refuses to run without Google Play Services 😄
It was good to know ya, miss RedPhone times, you're just making more and more suspicious.
Is this your mine canary guys?

A good way to avoid working for a bad company is that you can spot major problems in the interview and pre-employment phase. There are a number of things that indicate a bad culture that you can ask about right off the bat. Dress code, blocked websites, and work from home policy(or a lack thereof) can all indicate what kind of work environment to expect.

But the biggest one of all is a request for your salary history. If a recruiter or hiring manager wants to know how much you are or were making at a previous job, and will not allow the process to continue without the information, run.

Every job opening has a budget associated with it. The employer already knows what they want to spend on the position. They want to know what your current or previous compensation is or was, so they can perhaps save some money of that budget by offering you a very small amount more than the amount you tell them.

If they ask the question, I get suspicious, but then say, "I'd prefer not to disclose that. What is the budget for the requirement?"

If the person who asks you relents and tells you the budget, then all is well, in my opinion. But if they stick to the subject and insist on getting your salary history, then it indicates a culture of arbitrary subordination, which is not a healthy work environment. If it ever goes this way, I politely tell them that I'm not comfortable disclosing that information, and that I would like to withdraw my interest in the position.

This phising email I just received in my yahoo account almost got me fooled with the very convincing email design, but thankfully the culprit didn't smart enough to spoof his email address.
Ohh and they attach a suspicious pdf file too despite the message didn't say anything about attachment.
Apparently the spam detector in yahoo is not very good as this one was received in my main inbox.

Fried two devices today by simply connecting them to a power source.

Changed nothing in the circuitry, no shorts due to solder residues (a simple modification was made), no changes in the input parameters. Check.

The afromentioned devices should have only minor HW changes compared to a previous version I'm working with and as far as I can see absolutely nothing which should cause the damn microcontroller to release smoke like a steam train. (All right, a very miniature steam train.)

So the only significant difference might be the firmware which I didn't check yet but will tomorrow. Not my code and the corresponding IDE just basically sucks. Yay.

On the other hand, the Software part finally feels like I'm getting somewhere. It seems just ... to work. Very suspicious.

Feeling ambivalently frustrated and relieved at the same time. Sigh.

Fuck you Scaleway! With a large rusty spiked pole!
Yesterday you locked my account due to "suspicious activity" and asked me for ID to verify me for "anti-fraud reasons". Fair enough. I comply, and you unlock my account.

Today, another person from support locks my account AGAIN, saying that I haven't yet replied and requests that I send you my ID *AGAIN*.

Either you motherfuckers have no fucking clue how to handle a fucking support ticket, or your answers are NOT FUCKING CLEAR.
Fuck you and your free credits, I'd rather spend money on a service I can actually rely upon.

That moment when someone on your class has a 11 in a test and a 20 in a project... Suspicious?

The conversations that come across my DevOps desk on a monthly basis.... These have come into my care via Slack, Email, Jira Tickets, PagerDuty alerts, text messages, GitHub PR Reviews, and phone calls. I spend most of my day just trying to log the work I'm being asked to do.

From Random People:
* Employee <A> and Contractor <B> are starting today. Please provision all 19 of their required accounts.
* Oh, they actually started yesterday, please hurry on this request.

From Engineers:
* The database is failing. Why?
* The read-only replica isn't accepting writes. Can you fix this?
* We have this new project we're starting and we need you to set up continuous integration, deployment, write our unit tests, define an integration test strategy, tell us how to mock every call to everything. We'll need several thousand dollars in AWS resources that we've barely defined. Can you define what AWS resources we need?
* We didn't like your definition of AWS resources, so we came up with our own. We're also going to need you to rearchitect the networking to support our single typescript API.
* The VPN is down and nobody can do any work because you locked us all out of connecting directly over SSH from home. Please unblock my home IP.
* Oh, looks like my VPN password expired. How do I reset my VPN password?
* My GitHub account doesn't have access to this repo. Please make my PR for me.
* Can you tell me how to run this app's test suite?
* CI system failed a build. Why?
* App doesn't send logs to the logging platform. Please tell me why.
* How do I add logging statements to my app?
* Why would I need a logging library, can't you just understand why my app doesn't need to waste my time with logs?

From Various 3rd party vendors:
* <X> application changed their license terms. How much do you really want to pay us now?

From Management:
* <X> left the company, and he was working on these tasks that seem closely related to your work. Here are the 3 GitHub Repos you now own.
* Why is our AWS bill so high? I need you to lower our bill by tomorrow. Preferably by 10k-20k monthly. Thanks.
* Please send this month's plan for DevOps work.
* Please don't do anything on your plan.
* Here's your actual new plan for the month.
* Please also do these 10 interruptions-which-became-epic-projects

From AWS:
* Dear AWS Admin, 17 instances need to be rebooted. Please do so by tomorrow.
* Dear AWS Admin, 3 user accounts saw suspicious activity. Please confirm these were actually you.
* Dear AWS Admin, you need to relaunch every one of your instances into a new VPC within the next year.
* Dear AWS Admin, Your app was suspiciously accessing XYZ, which is a violation of our terms of service. You have 24 hours to address this before we delete your AWS account.

Finally, From Management:
* Please provide management with updates, nobody knows what you do.

From me:
Please pay me more. Please give me a team to assist so I'm not a team of one. Also, my wife is asking me to look for a new job, and she's not wrong. Just saying.

So, there was this time I was a security intern for google, It was my first day as an intern tho :p and I got a little excited about exploring stuff and all at the workplace. Me having a large appetite was mesmerized by the food supplied over there.
I might have sat approximately 2 hours over there fantasizing about how much could I save over food by eating a lot over here and taking some to home.
Then came the SE/SDE guys over my place and we started discussing how there was a loophole here and how one could exploit it. All were heads over heels how was I making calculations for "my" property. All seemed to be pretty interested except for one guy. This guy was over excited how I was managing this and slacking off over the first day. He happened to be a senior lead architect, turns out he shows too much interest in anything he finds suspicious. This wasn't supposed to be rant, but yeah. My story.

My first cpp project takes 148GB ram. My mentor says it's okay till 50GB. God help me optimise this thing. I have started doubting everything. Int I = 0 also looks suspicious.

This may be obvious, but debugging is all about input / algorithm / output. If there's something wrong, it's one of the three. Work with the method of elimination. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not.

I'll give you an example from my situation:

I wanted to play an old DOS game on my modern PC and so I used DosBox. I made an iso from the original CD, mounted it, referred to it in the game's mount settings and launched the game.

Then, after I had saved the game and I tried to load it again, the game would say: "Could not read/write savegame". And so I thought something was amuck with my mount settings and I started fiddling with those, but it only made it worse and it gave me more (cryptic) errors.
The next approach was to save a new game and load that one. Nope, same problem.
Finally I decided to follow a DosBox tutorial for the game and load the game again.. same problem. So I think hmm.. my algorithm is correct.. my output is wrong.. so then my input must be wrong. So I decided to save the game again with these new and correct settings and low and behold, it finally loaded.

One thing to note was that when it failed to load the savegame, it was because it had done a partial save because due to incorrect mount settings it couldn't figure out all the right config folders/files/paths and my savegame ended up being corrupt with 80% of the files having 0 Bytes, which was suspicious. That usually means a file became corrupt.

And then it hit me.. if the game says: "Could not read/write", that doesn't mean the same as "Could not access the file/folder". It could access it, it just couldn't parse it. And of course.. the 'write' part of the message indicates that it messed up in writing, causing it to misread. Sometimes you really have to think about it..

Anyway, input, algorithm, output. :)

I'm about to submit an app to the App Store. I took some time to make sure signing in/out of different social media accounts worked properly in my app.

I've been locked out of my Facebook developer account since yesterday due to "suspicious activity" and was asked to upload a photo of myself to verify my identity. I'm not too confident my account will be unlocked as I don't use Facebook regularly and therefore never felt the need to upload a profile picture.

Fantastic.

Ok, I'm not saying there's a causal relationship here... I'm just going to say that the morning the VSCode Python extension is publicly moved in to the Microsoft product line, it starts devouring my resources by spawning a million instances of python.exe on startup. Computer unresponsive in minutes.

Again, I'm not *saying* there's a causal relationship... but I do find the timing somewhat suspicious.

Uni team project. Our presentation was on Friday. Code and report submission this Monday. We have to write on the report the % of work each person has done. One certain member of this team has been steadily moving functions other people have done into his personal package area to "clean up the code" and will edit your files without permission to clean them too. If it were from anyone else I would not be suspicious, but this person has proved himself to be a snake. The result of his efforts? Breaks your fucking code, let's him claim ownership when you run a git blame on your own files and the functions you made he can now claim responsibility for. Actual fucking bastard I'm going to murder this little fuck. Doing zero fucking work except breaking other people's and claiming a larger % of the work done than anyone else. Uuugh.

Someone has a cloud VM running automated attempts to sign up at our website, which is causing the payment processor to block us because of all the suspicious credit card creation attempts, so we get no new signups... I suppose implementing recaptcha is a potential solution/mitigation for this? Do you guys have any other suggestions?

I'm excited about flutter, looks like it will make cross platform mobile dev more fun.

Also dx12 rtx real time raytracing. It would be cool to work on it at work. We do animations for short movies at work and render times are huge now.

I'm kinda suspicious for both though. Couldn't check it out yet.

Need a serious help as I can't find a solution to this. My Google search (homepage + results) changes the language to a regional one on every refresh. I want it back to English, I even changed search language setting and the account language for all apps to english. When it hinted, "some apps don't have the same language" in a toast message, I updated that too.

Now I don't understand what is causing this. Here's what I tried. I reinstalled chrome. Removed all my extensions. Used the chrome malicious software detection. Used a different browser- Edge.

I see this is a problem with my Google account as this only happens after I sign in. The language automatically changes to a random regional language, but the search language settings still show English selected.

I checked all the apps authorized with my account but there's nothing suspicious there.
I added "?hl=en" to the url as a temporary fix but that doesn't really help much if I'm on another device. I also found some video suggesting to add "/ncr" to the url. It somehow fixed this for like 10 secs. and then I refreshed to see- back to the same problem.

I tried looking for similar issues and even asked a question on google forums but no luck. Somehow after an hour of repeating the same process of switching the language in settings, it seemed like it got fixed. Until now, where I logged into another device and the issue is back.

Any help? Please? Thanks. :)

Got my devRant-letter today, it arrived pre-opened and taped back together with two strips.. anyone else got it this way?

I've been given two months to make an AR app that gives information on buildings seen out of the window of a client's skyscraper office.

So off I go, smash together some Ar.js in a few days because it looks easy. Yet I quickly find out that the compass on mobile phones are completely trash. Every device I try has true north randomly chosen from anywhere between 10 degrees wrong or full on 180 degrees the opposite direction. It's a miracle that none of these devices have managed to stumble onto true north by luck. I'm getting suspicious that ar.js is actually just mapping coordinates based on north instead of true north or something ridiculous. This likely won't be helped by GPS interference from the skyscraper.

It isn't helped that ar.js is a steaming pile of bugs on top of bugs, many of the examples taken straight from documentation straight up don't work.

I'm trying to get ar.js with three.js now in the hope that I can figure out some kind of true north calibration controls as an offset to whatever the phone says north is.

If anyone has any suggestions for a better solution that would be grand.

Day 2 was fun to implement but…

I find that elf very suspicious. How does he know what another elf will play? Is he a demon that can see into the future?
And why would that elf help me? He could keep this knowledge for himself and secure a place near the snacks tent.
🤔

Why does everyone want to work at Google? I know it's a great job and all, but the amount of blogs talking about how they got their internship at Google and how it was their life goal makes me suspicious.

If a pentester find a very critical bug and the boss is not aware of him knowing this type of exploitation (no one is expecting him to find such flaws)

Should he report it ? Or reporting will make him suspicious ?

[SPOILER]
I just watched Black Mirror: Bandersnatch the movie with chromecast, I didn't know what was going on until the movie told me, then I switched to the laptop

Any ideas how to bypass a Linux based paywall? I’m on a cruise and the internet access is ridiculously expensive... The OS boots straight into a session, and opens the login app maximised. Originally I tried unplugging it, cloning its MAC, etc, but that looked quite suspicious 😂 (the BIOS is password protected)

Obviously for research purposes 😇

When you aint suspicious until the assert fails :q

Confirmation bias: the tendency to interpret suspicious software behavior as a feature, not a bug. For example I just saw something that I'm not sure it's OK on a web app that I'm developing but let's pretend it's the intended behavior and keep coding.

Another new JS library rears it's head. It's called 'Preact.js'.

I'm as little suspicious at this point. Is it written by devs from China? A year from now I'll have to learn 'Predux' if Preact gains popularity.

Don't even know how to start. I currently work as technician (fix broken shit devices like apple and manage our servers).

Before the rant, here's a note: I'm a newbie-ish something.. Like I do some Java and Android stuff but nothing amazing (yet).

Here's my rant:
Boss: Hey, you mentioned in your CV that you do some programming.
Me: Yep, but just starting. Already made few apps but nothing crazy big.
Boss: Well, doesn't really matter. But, can you make an app and a website for us? We'll decide on the budget later.
Me: *kinda suspicious* Ehm, yep? I'll just make a wireframe and show you what I came up with.

*few weeks later*

Boss: So how's the app doing?
Me: I told ya that I'm making only wireframe. If you want the app you can:
a) pay for it
b) don't do anything and I'll make it open-source
Boss: No don't do that. We want the source on our FTP server.
Me: Riiight... That's a big no-no for me. It's gonna be on VCS, otherwise you can forget about the app and web.
Boss: *staring silently at me*
Me: ...

To this day, not a single response from him. We had one meeting where I presented the Website and app design, everyone was ok with it but no answer when I asked about the budget. Should I just scrap these projects and continue making them on github ('cuz I kinda like to learn new shit this way)

Last week I spent a couple of days researching how to sync a CalDAV server with any Android calendar.
I downloaded several apps, and tried to connect in many ways (without HTTPS, calendar link, user link, any combination of them, with and without www, etc.)
Today I chose an option I had been trying to avoid: downloading an app that was recommended in some places but that's no longer on Google Play Store.
Got the APK from some website that didn't look too suspicious...
website.com, username, password; and it WORKED. (This also confirmed my server was well configured)
IN A MATTER OF SECONDS. Within the next minutes I could test sending events to and fro.
WHY?
WHAT- WHY IS THERE NO ALTERNATIVE FOR SOMETHING SO TRIVIAL. This future is so dumb.
One would have thought that there was something better than a dead-simple app made for Android 4.4
I really can't believe it.

!rant; question = true;

Switched to non-google for every device I own, however:
When I accidently go to Google and try to search, it tells me that I am blocked for suspicious activity and need to solve a captcha - If I do, the current search works.. Shortly after tho, it gives me the same thing again.

Any idea how to get more detailed info about the issue, e.g. Ensure none of my systems is quietly participating in a botnet?

PS: why should I care? Just don't use Google! That's right, yes, it still bugs me tho

There was a rant about an online hoster "comparable to Google", "for free" and "with moral" this morning.
After I asked how it makes money and pays the services one gets for free, the rant got deleted.

I should have kept the name of the hoster in mind, to know which one I will never use, obviously. This is too suspicious.

Dejar A.I. who's about to rule the world:
If you steal my job I'll have to go back working as waiter and I hate it more than I hate grub updates. Please, consider to preserve my job as sysadmin and, in exchange I will rat out all my contacts with suspicious non digital activities. If I loose my job I'll be forced to do something drastic, like tell everyone you've been created by Steve Jobs. Let's be nice to each other, uh?

Another disaster of 2020 had struck.
The internet is fucked again. This time of a global scale. Did you grow a bit suspicious why everything takes more to load? USA is getting ddosed by china again... I get dns proube failed error on every website and things that work are as fast as that inter your company have hired for thag cobol project from 1876. I have a online test tomorrow, usa can you fucking get ddosed later?

Yep and the attack is currently shown on the famous ddos graph web site

installed xscreensaver on my phone and suddenly haven't had to reboot it in like a week due to unrelated issues

suspicious