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A bit ago, I broke with my usual pattern and wrote up some security issues that I felt were particularly funny. It was a change of pace, a different thing, but not a thing that'd become a habit. After all, I'm not a security expert, this isn't a security site, and seriously, what are the odds that suitably funny security issues would crop up again less than a week later?
Well.
We all love format strings for generating human readable text. Certainly, they're a better choice than string concatenation. Even if I have a blind spot that keeps me from remembering the printf format tokens, I still prefer to use format strings.
Jasmine has a co-worker that does use format strings, but they also miss using string concatenation. So they've found a way to combine them, and avoid the perils of making readable code that describes the format of their text.
Today's code maybe isn't much of a WTF, but it does point in the general direction of, "Damn, you live like this?" Poor Nancy unfortunately does.
int x = 3;
int y = 4;
int z = 4;
x = y = z;
At my employer, we use a service called Coveralls, which is a code coverage reporting tool that hooks into your CI pipeline. It takes your lcov reports and gives you some insights, and also makes it easy to cause the CI pipeline to fail if newly added code doesn't have reasonable coverage.
I have no strong feelings about the tool, but on February 24th, our CI jobs started failing, and our CI step that talked to Coveralls was the culprit. Coveralls had gone down. That happened to us, and a lot of other people. It was a widespread outage impacting anybody who used their service.
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.
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.
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.