The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

It's Daniel Time Again!

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-10-24

It's been several years now that our reliable contributor Daniel D. has been sending us the same gripe time after time. We get it, really we do. It irks us too, but it is astounding just how many times he's been able to find this!
With no further ado, here is Daniel's pet peeve. See if you can figure out what it is.

~~640 kB~~ 40 characters must be enough for anybody," right? Daniel bemoaned "US Banks, brokers, financial institutions. You would expect them to put heavy safeguards with stronger the password the better, right? But then you find out they require just 8 to 40 and not a bit more."

27 comments - Last comment @ 04:34

Domino Theory

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-10-17

Cool cat Adam R. commented "I've been getting a bunch of messages from null in my WhatsApp hockey group."

7 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-19

Yes We Have No Bananas

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-10-10

There is fire sale on "Test In Production" incidents this week. (Ok, truth is that some of them are a little crusty and stale so we just mark them way down and push them all out at a loss). To be completely fair, testing in production is vitally important. If you didn't do that, the only way you'd know if something is broken is when one of your paying customers finds out. I call that testing in production the expensive way. The only WTFy thing about these is that when you test in production, your customers shouldn't stumble across the messes.

"We don't often test, but when we do it's always in production" snarked Brad W. unfairly. "My phone gave its default alert noise mixed with... some sound that made it seem like the phone was damaged. This was the alert that appeared. "

6 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-11

Neither Here nor There

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-10-03

... or maybe I should have said both here and there?

The Beast in Black has an equivocal fuel system. "Apparently, the propane level in my storage tank just went quantum, and even the act of observing the level has not collapsed the superposition of more propane and less propane. I KNEW that the Copenhagen Interpretation couldn't be objectively correct."

5 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-05

Pickup Sticklers

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-09-26

An Anonymous quality analyst and audiophile accounted "As a returning customer at napalmrecords.com I was forced to update my Billing Address. Fine. Sure. But what if my *House number* is a very big number? More than 10 "symbols"? Fortunately, 0xDEADBEEF for House number and J****** for First Name both passed validation."

29 comments - Last comment @ 2025-10-06

You Talkin' to Me?

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-09-19

The Beast In Black is back with a simple but silly factual error on the part of the gateway to all (most) human knowledge.

5 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-22

Free Birds

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-09-12

"These results are incomprensible," Brian wrote testily. "The developers at SkillCertPro must use math derived from an entirely different universe than ours. I can boast a world record number of answered questions in one hour and fifteen minutes somewhere."

12 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-16

Superfluous U's

by Lyle Seaman in Error'd on 2025-09-05

In today's Error'd episode, we flirt with European English to acknowledge the GDPR.

Modern Architect jeffphi shared an example of a hot software pattern from the early 21st. "As a bonus, these pickleball events appear to come with pickleball event listeners, too!"

16 comments - Last comment @ 2025-09-15