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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Before I replace it with something that won’t catastrophically collapse when the wind blows the wrong way, I get some sort of sick satisfaction out of doing autopsies on the house-built-of-matchsticks “solutions” that users come up with and I don’t know why. Some of them are truly fascinating and make you wonder how someone could possibly arrive at that conclusion based on what they were actually try to achieve.

    It’s also why if I’m asked to implement something, my first question isn’t “When does this need to be done?,” it’s “What exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve?”

    What a user asks for and what they actually need very rarely intersect.




  • It would be better to our them on blast on social media since that sometimes gets the companies attention to try and fix PR.

    Works almost every time. I had a ticket with a vendor open at work for just about 3 months, and then only replies I’d gotten on the ticket was the “We’ve received your support request which we’ll promptly ignore!” autoresponse upon opening, and then another auto-response a month later saying the ticket was being assigned to another department. I’d replied to the ticket ~20 times asking for updates in that time.

    I finally got sick of essentially yelling into an empty room and called out the company, their marketing team, their support team, and their CEO on Twitter, making sure to @ each one of them in the message. I got a reply from their CEO and an actual human responded to the ticket less than an hour later.

    It’s shitty and a last resort, but it’s generally very effective.


  • I have a Hisense and had a similar experience. I was watching something fullscreen on an HDMI input, and then it suddenly switched inputs and showed a fullscreen firmware update prompt. I had no choice available other than to agree to update the firmware, no cancel button, couldn’t change inputs, nothing, the only choice was to update the firmware. So I unplugged the TV.

    About 10 seconds after I powered it back on, the exact same update prompt happened, still with no choice to decline it. I pulled power and booted it back up one more time just to be sure, met with the update prompt again.

    This made me very angry.

    The next time I powered it on, I had a packet capture running to see where it was phoning home. I created a firewall rule blocking all the hostnames it tried to connect to at startup, pulled the plug, and then booted it back up. No more update prompt, and it hasn’t happened again. Good thing they don’t download and pre-stage the new firmware, I guess.

    Let me know if you want the hostnames and I’ll PM them to you.


  • While on the topic, this isn’t how passwords work in systems.

    Passwords are stored as one way hashes. So it’s cryptoed only in one direction, it’s lossy, and can’t be recovered back to the original password.

    When you log on, your cleartext PW is hashed in ephemeral memory/storage and then the cleartext password is thrown away.

    That hash is compared to the hash in the DB. If the hash matches, then you have access. If it doesn’t, then your PW is incorrect.

    Oh my sweet Summer Child. This is definitely how it’s supposed to work, but there are plenty of services that just don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

    Have you ever been on a site that has a stupid-low character limit for a password? There’s literally no reason to do that, all the hashes are going to end up the same size in the DB anyway regardless of the original string length. Even bcrypt’s max secret character limit is 70-something characters.

    Ever change a password and have it not work on the next login because they’re silently truncating it after a certain character limit? Ever get an email with an actual password in it?

    The only reason you would do things like this is if you’re storing/processing passwords in plaintext and not hashing it client-side first.

    I can think of 3 offenders of this off the top of my head. It’s a lot more common than you’d think.










  • tool@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldMicrosoft is bringing Python to Excel
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    11 months ago

    Bet it’ll be their own special flavor of Python that doesn’t play nice with literally any other packages or interpreters.

    It’s literally just Python and it says that it supports standard packages/modules. And Guido Van Rossum works at Microsoft now, there’s no way he would let them bastardize it, he would’ve quit before that happened.

    I don’t understand why people will find any reason to shit on anything while not even (seemingly) reading the article. If you did, I’m sorry, but it really doesn’t seem like you did.

    But yeah, fuck it, let’s rip it all out and just keep the VBA integration until the heat death of the universe.



  • A times B times C equals X… I am jacks something something something

    Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.

    Woman on Plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

    Narrator: You wouldn’t believe.

    Woman on Plane: Which car company do you work for?

    Narrator: A major one.