Can a knight in shiny armor lie?

Enter Eric Lippert(R)(TM):

We can either spend time debugging the compiler and
adding features, or we can spend time cleaning up thousands
of pages of design notes mostly about features that were
cut a decade ago. The vast majority of our customers would
prefer that we spend our budget doing the former activities.
– 
Eric Lippert
Sep 2, 2010 at 19:03 

But you never do! Your Chinese bouncers at Visual Studio bug tracker close our bug reports as either of "unable to reproduce" or "unable to prioritize". Liar, liar, pants on fire!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The slow and painful death

As someone whose daily job is to slap together software systems that run world's economy I am intimately aware of many tendencies on the global software market, both commercial and FOS. There is a tendency that I do not yet know how to feel about.

The cloud consolidation efforts of The Big 5 (i.e. Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Amazon) lead to many smaller projects dying off. I can feel it in the water... Shit! Not LOTR again. I can see it on Nuget, Github, Sourceforge, and other portals. I can see previously vivid projects becoming stagnant. Is this good or bad?

I still maintain that the shift from the North American university graduates doing software development to Asia is terrifying. Asians are afraid of losing their faces. They are genetically incapable of admitting fault. This makes them terrible candidates to development jobs. This and their pathological hatred of all things European and American. Big-5 consolidation shifts development further off-shore, predominantly to Asia. We are SOL.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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PHP: by idiots, for idiots!

Recently, I have figured out PHP's motto. It is in the title. When a project's goal is to write all possible boilerplate code so that idiots will not have to, it is clearly an idiotic project. Take for example the following function:

substr_replace(
    array|string $string,
    array|string $replace,
    array|int $offset,
    array|int|null $length = null
): string|array

Instead of allowing users of fringe cases to write a simple foreach() loop they created a mess. They are terminal cases of retardation.

Their other motto is: We have a function for that! Indeed, they have intdiv(int $num1, int $num2). Facepalm.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 01:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Programming languages that have to be wiped off the face of the Earth

• PHP
• Python
• Erlang
• Go
• Ruby
• Haskell
• Kotlyn
• Lua
• F#

These languages have to be forbidden and erased from Internet and all media. Teaching and using them has to be made a punishable offense. The 1-2-out principle has to be used on offenders. Otherwise, people of Earth are doomed.

The remaining languages have to be standardized and standard changes have to be legally allowed to be made once every 5 years. Violators of this last rule have to be executed.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 01:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Open letter to all American global monopolies

You have accumulated enormous wealth over the past few decades. Your wealth originates in our pockets: in the pockets of North American middle class. It has been us and our employers who bought your products and services. You are that which you are, thanks to us. Without us you would have not existed.

So why do you believe it is Okay to outsource all customer service and technical support to our enemies who hate our guts? Indeed, you have all but outsourced those two critically important functions to Communist China and backwards India. Populations of both countries hate and despise us. They consider us rich, spoiled capitalists, slave drivers, and condescending snobs. They look forward to avenging their perceived grievances with us. And now, you give them this opportunity, by handing customer service and technical support over to them. And they avenge!

They pretend to be dumb. They waste time. They deny fault. They pass the blame. They stonewall. They pretend to be powerless to assist. And when all of that fails they start all over. Does this make you happy? Probably it does. But it makes us, North American people, miserable. It also makes us hate you: filthy-rich owners of a handful of world's monopolies who have betrayed us.

I am not a communist. I am not a socialist. I am a healthy centrist. But it is you who make me hate and despise your insatiable and blind greed. Beware because sooner or later North-American people will come for you, and you will have nowhere to hide.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 05:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Microsoft's PowerTrip. Oops, sorry: PowerShell

Why do we disable weak TLS cyphers? We are told that they pose risk of intrusion/eavesdropping. A-ha! They pose a risk.

But here comes a genius degenerate from Microsoft and... Guess what they do? They write the code behind PowerShell commands. One such command is Get-TlsCipherSuite. It was devised to display information about the existing cypher suites. When you run it it spits out a bunch of information. So, what is the problem?

The problem is that genius degenerates in Microsoft did not bother to include Enabled/Disabled flag! What is the implication of this? The implication is that there are only 2 ways to find out whether a particular cypher suit is enabled or disabled. One is to try to disable it, and to get an error if it already is disabled. The other is to try to enable and re-disable it.

Let us pause to think, for a second. So, if a cypher suite is disabled, and we want to find out its status, then we can only enable it temporarily. Does this not create a vulnerability, which could be exploited?

And if we try to disable an already disabled cypher and receive an error do we know what causes the error? Is it the fact that it is disabled or is it some other reason? Here is the error, for you to judge:

Disable-TlsCipherSuite : Exception from HRESULT: 0xD0000225
At line:1 char:1
+ Disable-TlsCipherSuite -Name "TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (: ) [Disable-TlsCipherSuite], COMException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : Exception from HRESULT: 0xD0000225,Microsoft.WindowsAuthenticationProtocols.Commands.Rem
   oveTlsCipherSuiteCommand

The same error is thrown if PowerTrip, oops, sorry, PowerShell does not run under Administrator. There may be other cases of which I am not aware. How do you tell one reason from another?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:08 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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