The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Tales from the World Cup

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-08-31

All I can say in response to our anonymous submitter's story is, ALMOST?!

With the World Cup being hosted in North America this year, I remembered this story that happened back in 2014. At the time I was working in Brazil, for a company that builds software systems for public services. And, with the World Cup being hosted there, in came the opportunity for local agencies to invest in modernization, with pretty much a blank check to get new services, so long as it was deployed before the end of the World Cup. And so the sales people did what they did best, and went around trying to upsell whoever would be willing to buy — no matter our actual capacity for developing the things.

2 comments - Last comment @ 06:54

Hello, New Mexico!

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-08-28

Peter G. shared with us yet another ordering bungled example of. "Should really say "please engage in an Easter egg hunt to find your language"."

14 comments - Last comment @ 05:28

The Big Family

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-08-27

Some time ago, Charles shared with us some awful PHP, aka the most common sort. Today's code sample is maybe a little too big to sum up, but I'll let Charles take a crack at it.

It's so bad that even analyzing and laughing at it feels impossible. But it’s so bad, I couldn’t not share it.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-28

Lock 'Em Dead

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2026-08-26

Kevin sends us an exception handler from C++. Let's see if we can spot what's going wrong:

catch (Exception::Deadlock)
{
   retry;
}

25 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-30

Both Ways Bug Me

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-08-25

There are many cases where some sort of debugging block sneaks by, especially cases where we see preprocessors or templates working, which leave us with nonsense like if (true == false) running in production. But Codemonkey found a new twist on that sort of thing, in a SQL query being run in production.

WHERE (some conditions) AND (1 = 0 OR (1 = 1 AND (other conditions)))

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-29

RCE As a Feature

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2026-08-24

The opposite of meritocracy is kakistocracy: the worst and least-qualified are the ones who rise to the top.

Get real familiar with that word, dear readers. I think you'll need it.

9 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-25

Failure, After Failure, After Failure...

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2026-08-21

We have a couple from Foo (AKA Foo) today, include a special text copy-paste

Foo shared "I know you usually post image WTFs here, but here's a text output from chromium:

5 comments - Last comment @ 2026-08-24

We All Register This

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2026-08-20

Today's maybe more of a "representative data sheet entry" than anything else.

Every developer has the experience of reading the documentation. If you've been at this for some time, you've probably read bad documentation. Documentation that is incomplete, inaccurate, or otherwise flawed. Or, my personal favorite, the brief time where Oracle tried to put all of its documentation into an Adobe Flex site (aka, a Flash application, not a real web app). That one had fun bonus features, like "breaking copy and paste" and "preventing you from deep linking to a piece of the documentation".

23 comments - Last comment @ 06:09