Great Moments in Computer Programming

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Now that I'm connected I click the withdraw money button and it says "Pending." I refresh it a few times and it still says Pending. There's a little pop up for more information so I click that and it says "payments are processed on Wednesdays." So as not to... overtax the scripts, I guess.

The CAPTCHAs are out of control. Thank you for posting this. Two systems having to work together are also something that nobody bothers testing, apparently. This is something that has to be considered from the design stage. And the bit about phones marking calls as spam is very interesting to me. I don't think we do any automated calling where I work, but ........ well, now I know how it can go wrong.

Thank you, Flack. I feel awful for you, but thank you.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Can anyone explain to me why streaming channels need 2FA? Can't be for my protection because how could someone hurt me through my Netflix account, change my settings?

They don't!

2FA, for the most part, is a stupid person's idea of security. I don't mean that the people who are here are stupid for using it. I mean that in a lot of designs of computer systems, it's bolted on without thinking about the purpose or the why or the how. It's just "oh, yeah, we should probably have this, since (some other system) does.

Absolutely no reason why Netflix should have 2FA. They did not for the longest time, I hope they didn't add it. (I canceled a couple of years ago.) Username and password is good, that is all that is needed. Now, they told everyone to share passwords many years ago and then went back on that, so that might be their way to drive it to one person, but that's not because of any security issue, that is just greed and trying to make the line go up.

But I would never, ever have two subscriptions for my wife and I if we got it again, and I can't imagine anyone at Netflix would write code to have two valid 2FA phone numbers to send a code, so .... I guess I'll just never get Netflix again.

I am amazed how much 2FA took off, considering how it creates more problems than it solves in most systems.

[Da King]

One of my favorite Great Moments!

TMobile lets you set up 2FA with an authenticator app. AWESOME! Sim swap attacks are real, they happen often, this is an easy layer of security to set up.

So I set it up.

I then logged out, and went to try and log back into my account.

I now have 2 choices to use for 2FA... a text message, or my authenticator app.

THE ENTIRE REASON FOR SETTING UP AN AUTHENTICATOR APP IS TO DISABLE SMS-BASED 2FA, PROVIDING AN EXTRA LAYER OF SECURITY.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yes. I didn't set 2FA up on it, but the last time I went to logon, they demanded sending a text to my phone.

"Hey guys, we're the phone company, if someone loses their phone, they're gonna want to come here and -- "

SEND THEM A CODE!!

I dread the day I lose my phone.

[Casual Observer]

And the bit about phones marking calls as spam is very interesting to me. I don't think we do any automated calling where I work, but ........ well, now I know how it can go wrong.

Any number that makes more than 80 calls a day or 10 calls per hour is supposed to be marked by the carrier as SPAM or likely. If a company uses the same caller ID for all 2fa calls then it's always going to come in as spam. My dialer rotates through hundreds of caller ID's per day for me because of this.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Tried to logon to soundcloud today. Saw in my password manager that zombieworld was used. Great. Here we go.

Try to login...... get told by soundcloud that hey, my account was involved in a security breach! So I have to reset my password. Over at an email address I don't have any more.

So just to be clear. Because of THEIR fuck up, I can no longer access my account. Way to go, dumbfucks.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Coincidentally, same shit happened with Nexus Mods. I hate gaming a lot.

- Buy Fallout 4 from GOG.
- Get the free Fallout: London mod.

You have to downgrade Fallout. There is a "downgrader" available. Does gog host it? Of course not. They tell me to go to nexusmods.

I login with a good username and password to Nexus Mods..... "A link has been sent to beaver@zombieworld.com!" Really? Why? The username and password were both good.

These stupid sites initiating 2FA using email as a primary key are SO GODDAMN STUPID.

Due to inactivity, your account needs to be validated before you can continue. You will receive an email shortly with instructions to reactivate your account.

If.... dumbfucks, if it's INACTIVE then I guess it hasn't been HACKED, has it?

How dumb are these people?

[RealNC]

Coincidentally, same shit happened with Nexus Mods. I hate gaming a lot.

- Buy Fallout 4 from GOG.
- Get the free Fallout: London mod.

You have to downgrade Fallout. There is a "downgrader" available. Does gog host it? Of course not. They tell me to go to nexusmods.

So this doesn't work for you?

https://www.gog.com/en/game/fallout_london

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

It does!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

When the company I work for was hiring, I would be on LinkedIn a few times a week, keeping an eye on who was looking for work.

What I have noticed in the last few months is that LinkedIn, very desperately, started re-using the "My Network" tab.

Before, it would tell you when you got a connection request. Cool. Easy. Most times, the only thing I used on that awful, awful site.

But now they are putting a red notification icon on the My Network tab and having unrelated shit and nonsense there.

LinkedIn figured out that people were logging on, seeing if they had any friend requests and leaving. So to "trick" people, they used the one part of the site we looked at to try to drive engagement elsewhere.

What a stupid, short sighted decision.

[Da King]

Ah yes, Facebook does the same thing.

"So and so posted a new Reel for you to watch!" (or whatever Facebook calls their version of instagram's "stories").

I do not give a shit about them. Stop telling me that someone posted shit that I dont care about.

I DID eventually find the setting to turn those notifications off.

[Casual Observer]

When the company I work for was hiring, I would be on LinkedIn a few times a week, keeping an eye on who was looking for work.

What I have noticed in the last few months is that LinkedIn, very desperately, started re-using the "My Network" tab.

Before, it would tell you when you got a connection request. Cool. Easy. Most times, the only thing I used on that awful, awful site.

But now they are putting a red notification icon on the My Network tab and having unrelated shit and nonsense there.

LinkedIn figured out that people were logging on, seeing if they had any friend requests and leaving. So to "trick" people, they used the one part of the site we looked at to try to drive engagement elsewhere.

What a stupid, short sighted decision.

Only 50% of LinkedIn users even log in once a month so certainly they're trying to fix that. As for that feature, as someone who has to use it extensively for my business there is some value in the feature in that it helps to engage with people who might not respond otherwise. Wishing someone a "happy birthday" or "congrats on da new job" sometimes has ignited at least superficial conversations with folks. There's a whole bubble of people who live on Linkedin, their entire career depends on getting likes and comments, you would hate spending even one second more there.

[Casual Observer]

Edit: I use LI a lot but tried that feature for awhile and it does get responses but its a lot of drudge work.

[Jizaboz]

For my birthday, I finally upgraded from the Nvidia GTX 1660ti video card I've owned for many years. Bought a Gigabyte brand (same brand as my motherboard) RTX 4060 off Amazon. Day 1 I clean out the entire PC case which took quite a while, and replaced all the case fans. The next day, I installed the new video card. The manual said to grab drivers from Gigabyte. I knew Nvidia provides the latest and the greatest but figured why not; but their download site was down.

Get the Nvidia drivers in, play some games and have a great experience. The next day I boot up the machine and before I can even do shit I've got a Win10 blue screen. Initial error points to driver issues, but I keep worrying about hardware. After multiple reboots while uninstalling Unreal5, Malwarebytes, and a few older programs I never use anymore it was fixed. Scary and bullshit! I was thinking about it while out of town like man I hope I don't come back to it blue-screening again; it has not after a few hours of multiple modern games.

[Flack]

My wife is doing a consulting gig, needed to fill out an I-9, and needed someone to verify her identity. She put down my email address for this nonsense.

I got an email with a user ID (my name followed by 10 random numbers). While wondering what to do with that, I got another email with a link to their system. Then i got a third email with a temporary password. With all of these things I was able to log in. Then their site said THEY ARE LEGALLY REQUIRED TO USE 2FA. Then it emailed me a PIN to use to change my password. But... all they have is my email. They emailed me the account, the temporary password, the PIN... that ain't 2FA if they only have one way to contact me, duh.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

https://www.xda-developers.com/microsof ... uirements/

They are "cracking down" on people using their free OS that they force on unsuspecting people.

Demanding people change hardware.

During a time where Intel has two generations of broken chips out there.

How is this corporation still alive.

[Jizaboz]

Problems popped up again! Trying to uninstall a program resulted in a blue screen today even after a fresh install of Windows 10 yesterday (I even finally broke down and bought a legit key for 5$!). Then I start thinking.. "I must have bumped a cable or something when I installed the new graphics card." So, I gently push on my ram then gently push on the big 16-pin connector going to the motherboard. Fire it up again and <click!> it turns itself off after about 15 seconds. HMMMMM

So I completely remove the connector, re-attach it, re-arrange a few fan wires, and turn it on again. FINE! Downloaded CoD which took hours, played Cyberpunk, everything is working great. Then, I'm like "Let's reboot for a sanity check" aaaand it fails to load. Spits out all sorts of "can't find" shit from the Windows directory. FFFFF!!!!!!!

Well, my friend Chris is sitting here with me and starts hacking away at the command prompt in recovery mode to see that he can't list files on drive C! Starts trying random drives and finds my Windows files on drive G: (!?!?!) At that point I restart the machine and use the BIOS drive selector to select the first drive; my SSD with Windows installed aaaand it fires right up into Windows 10. I reboot again without touching anything.. and it loads correctly again. WHEW

I think what maybe happened was it was trying to load a bad boot sector off a DIFFERENT DRIVE, probably an old partition on my magnetic drive where Windows used to reside before I bought an SSD years back. WTF M$, really WTF

[RealNC]

Did you update the BIOS? Usually a good idea when buying a latest gen GPU.

[Jizaboz]

Did you update the BIOS? Usually a good idea when buying a latest gen GPU.

Newest available BIOS is from 2017 lol. It’s an I7 based board with no Uefi

I think what caused all of this was that the new card is longer, I pulled at the wiring harness while getting it in there, and I should have reseated the 16 pin connector when I originally installed the card.

That’s my current hypothesis anyway. I’ll run a few more games when I get home from work soon.

[Jizaboz]

Correction: Pretty sure that's actually a 24-pin connector (the main one that goes to the motherboard near the CPU)

At any rate, fired it up as soon as I came home and installing the U-Boat game now. Seems fine now that the connector was re-seated. It also didn't tried to load Windows from a bad boot sector again lol

Not a bad call at all though RealNC. A long time ago I had a very troublesome Intel "DuoCore" setup at one time that kept failing (getting hot and turning itself off) with all sort of hardware combos, got a local shop to look at it I had bought some of the parts from (total waste of money) and then finally taking it to a respected shop who put the CPU on a brand new Intel brand board. They were an Intel certified shop. A few days later.. it overheats again! At this point I was in a very "Just fuck computers" mood for a while until one night while playing the Wii drunk (which was new at the time; gives you an idea how long ago this was) when suddenly I space out and think to myself "I wonder what would happen if I update the BIOS? If I brick it at this point fuggit.." After updating the BIOS I switch on the machine and hear "WHIIIIIRRR!!!!" from the fans turning faster than I had ever heard them before after there is some significant load on the CPU. The fucking BIOS update told the board to actually trigger correct fan speeds at higher temps lolololol Never had another problem with that machine.