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Woody
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Humor | ReportWire publishes the latest breaking U.S. and world news, trending topics and developing stories from around globe.
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As the single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures creep across the northeast United States, one’s mind drifts off to holidays- specifically summer holidays where it isn’t so cold that it hurts to breathe.
Luciano M works in Italy, where August 15th is a national holiday, but also August is the traditional time of year for everyone to take off, leaving the country mostly shut down for the month.
A long time ago, Luciano worked for a small company, along with some friends. This was long enough that you didn’t rent compute from a cloud provider, but instead ran most of your intranet services off of a private server in your network closet somewhere.
This particular server ran mostly everything: private git hosting, VPN, email, and an internal Jabber server for chat. Given that it ran most services in the company, one might think that they were backing it up regularly- and you’d be right. One might also think that they had some sort of failover setup, and that’s where you’d be wrong.
Late August 12th, the hard drive on their server decided it was time to start its own holiday. The main reason everyone noticed when it happened wasn’t due to some alert that got triggered, but as mentioned, Luciano was friends with the team, which meant they used the Jabber server to chat with each other about non-work stuff.
Because half the country was already closed for August, getting replacements delivered was a dubious proposition, at best. Especially with the 15th looming, which not only made shipping delays worse, but this particular year was on a Friday, marking a 3-day weekend. Unless they wanted to spend the better part of a week out of commission, they needed to find an alternative.
The only silver lining was that “shipping is delayed” is the kind of problem which can be solved by spending money. By the time it was all said and done, they paid more for shipping than they paid for the drive itself, but the drive arrived by the 14th, and by the end of the day, they had the server back up and running, restored from backup.
And everything was happy, until August 12th, the following year, when the new hard drive decided to die the exact same way as the previous one, and the entire cycle repeated itself.
And on the third year, a hard drive also failed on August 12th. At least, by that point, they were so used to the problem that they kept spare drives in inventory. Eventually, someone upgraded them to a RAID, which at least kept the downtime at a minimum.
Luciano has long since moved on to a new job, but the date of August 12th is his own personal holiday: an unpleasant one.
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Remy Porter
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Norm Macdonald always played the long game.
He was never chasing applause or looking to land a quick punchline. He trusted the joke, his delivery, and trusted that if you were paying attention, you’d get there with him.
He’s a legend in the art form.
That’s why other comedians revered him. Norm zigged when everyone else zagged, dragged jokes out until they became absurd, and somehow made the dumbest ideas feel smart, and the smartest jokes feel effortless.
These jokes are a reminder of why Norm is still held up as a comedian’s comedian, as timeless and funny as ever.
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Ty
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Have you ever scrolled past one of those so-called “inspirational” images and instantly known the person who posted it thought they’d cracked the code to the universe?
You know the type… “Only those with a pure heart will understand this” energy.
Anyway, here’s a collection of images that are desperately trying to be profound, but end up being about as deep as my spelling ability (which, to be clear, is absolute sh!t).
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Hendy
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Our anonymous submitter was looking for a Microsoft partner to manage his firm's MSDN subscriptions; the pile of licenses and seats and allowed uses was complex enough to want specialists. In hopes of quickly zeroing in on a known and reputable firm, he tracked down the website of a tech consultancy that'd been used by one of his previous employers.
When he browsed to their Contact Us page, filled out the contact form, and clicked Submit, the webpage simply refreshed with no signs of actually doing anything. After staring at the screen for a moment, wondering what had gone wrong, Subby noticed the single quotes used within his message were now escaped. Clicking Submit a few more times kept adding escape characters, with no submission ever occurring. So he amended his message to remove every it's, we're, and other such contraction.
Without single quotes, the next submission was successful. It's impossible to say what was going on behind the scenes, but this seemed to suggest a SQL injection vulnerability in their form submission code. They were escaping "'" characters because they were building their query through string concatenation. But in addition to escaping the single quotes, it seemed to be rejecting any string which contained them.
A stellar first impression, to be sure. In fairness, this firm hadn't designed their own website. The name of the designer they'd contracted with, displayed in the webpage footer, looked more embarrassing than proud in light of his trouble.
An email address was listed beside the contact form. Subby sent a separate email alerting them of the bug he'd found. Hopefully, someone would acknowledge and channel it to the proper support contact.
A week passed. Subby never received a response or any confirmation that any of his messages had been received. Had that mailbox been abandoned after most, if not all, attempted contacts had mysteriously failed?
"I guess no SQL injection if it's never submitted!" Subby joked to himself.
He moved on to other prospects.
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Ellis Morning
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A Tyrolean choir (from the Austrian Alps region of Tyrol) sing a rumbling, a cappella chorus by flicking their tongues back and forth. The choir is invite only and their tagline is “Happy wives, happy lives” (totally false, I just made that up) submitted by /u/Shootingstar_woofers |
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/u/Shootingstar_woofers
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Today's anonymous submitter sends us a short snippet. They found this because they were going through code committed by an expensive third-party contractor, trying to track down a bug: every report in the database kept getting duplicated for some reason.
This code has been in production for over a decade, bugs and all:
if (reportStatuses.indexOf(newStatus > -1))
{
// add report to database
}
This is server-side JavaScript running in NodeJS. The mistake here is easy to make, it's a simple transposition error. But it's also easy to catch. Any sort of testing at all would find it.
The specific problem, if you haven't spotted it, is where the comparison operator happens: we're passing newStatus > -1 into indexOf as a parameter: this is a boolean value. Now, neither true nor false are in the reportStatuses array, so indexOf returns -1. But -1 is a truthy value, so the condition evaluates to true, adding the report to the database, even if it's already there.
Our submitter writes:
How has no one noticed this? How is the company still in business? How does the world not come down crashing around us more every day?
How is the world not crashing down? Have you looked outside, recently? Tis the season to quote Clark Griswold:
Worse? How could things get any worse? Take a look around here, Ellen. We're at the threshold of hell.
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Remy Porter
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