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Dr. Doom...scroller titled this one "Scrollbar-ception". Said he "Screenshot of the TikTok webpage (i.e. in a desktop browser) while not logged in. I swear this wasn't a NSFW TikTok video, instead it was a montage of some live show from some singer. Anyway... Back on the topic of the actual publishable snarky comments: Social media is known for doom-scrolling. Well, these are scrollbars of doom. Or doom-scrollbars."
We don't cover a lot of security issues here, simply because they're not usually funny. But sometimes, they are. So here's a quick hit about some recent ones.
We start with a very bad month for the Danish social security system, the Central Register of Persons (CPR). Last week, they detected a breach which exposed the personal details of 8.8m people. Per the Register article, a cybersecurity specialist correctly pointed out that treating your ID number as if it were a secret was a terrible idea in the first place, but unfortunately, so many systems have grown up around the idea that full knowledge of your state issued ID number as proof of identity, that the security expert is screaming into the wind. They're right, but it's going to take a lot to change.
Mandy's co-worker recently learned about virtual inheritance in C++. It's become their new favorite button to push, and they only use virtual inheritance.
Virtual inheritance is one workaround for the "diamond problem", where you have an inheritance tree that "recombines" via multiple inheritance: when a child class has a Hapsburg-esque parentage, it's hard to decide which inherited methods are being invoked or overridden.
Ever get some special letter, card, or picture from a friend or loved one that you held onto, maybe even taped to your cube or office wall? Is it something you still look at fondly, something that lifts your spirits whenever you're down? Certainly, a thoughtful card or letter is much nicer than a thoughtful email.
Now imagine your special keepsake being scanned, censored, and converted into a digital file that you can only view from a tablet — assuming you can afford the fee to access the tablet. The original has been destroyed; it's gone forever. You'll never get to see or feel it in your hands.
For some godawful reason, people like to explain object oriented concepts via analogy to biological taxonomies. I suppose it's easy to understand an "is-a" relationship (a cat is a mammal), but the down side is you get a complex and increasingly leaky analogy that over-emphasizes the importance of inheritance.
That's not to slight Alan's choice of using it to anoymize today's code. It's just a broad frustration on my part.
Matias shared a standard sort of flubstituted fail-merge error'd; not really egregious, just routine. "I am {{emotionType}} to hear this."
Robert G sends us a WTF from the outside, but I think we can come up with some hypotheses about what actually happened.
Robert was traveling by train. For complicated train reasons, the car he was seated on was not actually scheduled to continue with the train he was booked to ride, the replacement car missed its scheduled arrival, and the result was that Robert was left at a station needing to rebook his travel.
A junior dev on the team had a simple question: in Java, how do I correctly read user input from the CLI and act on it?
Now, we can wonder about a junior dev not having such basic knowledge, but maybe they're new to Java specifically. Who knows. But Robert's team has a senior on it who "likes to mentor". This senior has strong opinions about how to write software, extreme confidence in those opinions, and has somehow been around the company long enough that he knows where the bodies are buried and no one will fire him.
