Notices by Tilton Raccoon (tilton@raccoon.zone)

You DON'T say...

Infosec friends, you want to have nightmares tonight? Let me tell you what it was like to work in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s. I worked at SGI, a major computer manufacturer. When I started, I was given an SGI Indy workstation running IRIX 5.3. It had no root password, setting one up was completely optional. I had full control over all software installed on it, and I could install anything I wanted from our internal dist server, including reinstalling the OS. New OS patches were occasionally available, but finding them and installing them was up to you. That workstation had a publicly routed IPv4 address and was connected to the campus Ethernet, which was in turn connected to the public Internet. There was no firewall, so I could access it from anywhere in the world (and since ssh wasn't much of a thing yet, that connection was unencrypted Telnet). And finally, to add to your nightmare, every workstation ran sendmail and received email directly: you could email me at <name>@sgi.com or directly at <name>@<workstation>.corp.sgi.com, and mail would be routed to my workstation. And yet... it all worked! And if I'm honest, I really miss it. Bad people broke things and ruined the good times for everyone.

The thing about nostalgia is that you forget how much everything smelled like cigarette smoke

Oh no. I posted about this on LinkedIn and the general consensus is “Well duh, we don’t need QA any more because we unit test!” followed by “and besides that, QA always argued with us that we couldn’t ship, so we’re better off without them”. I’m dying. Please help.

If you want to know why software is getting worse: the current trend, for a while now, has been to eliminate QA departments entirely. This sucks, because I have a TON of respect for QA engineers. The ones I’ve had the pleasure of working with have come up with ways of breaking my software that I never would have dreamed of.

Someone I know offline mentioned this as a joke, and it struck me as a perfect "is it real or not?" parody of every single New York Times headline from the past decade, so I grabbed the right font and turned it into one.

There's a certain brand of leftism that insists you can't enjoy anything as long as anyone anywhere is suffering. You can't live like that, though, you'll burn out and you won't actually help anyone. If you want to help people, you need to help them find some joy in this bitter world, no matter how small, and you can't do that if you won't let yourself experience any either.

Our production SSH keys expire every 60 days and must be manually rotated using a process that takes at least half a day to complete, involves a Change Control Board review, and requires updating our public keys in at least 5 different git repositories.

I can't believe I work here.

Plus this week have to stop everything and do a mock SOC2 audit, because we don't have anything more important to work on right now *.

(* that was sarcasm, we have so much important to work on right now)

Since the UNIX time just passed 1700000000, it's time to tell you about my favorite bug! Back in 2001, I'd just implemented a database backed job queue at work. It was all going great, and then suddenly on September 10, 2001 (I know I know...), we noticed it was hung! No jobs were getting taken. It took ages to figure it out: The UNIX clock had just rolled over to 1000000000. The jobs were sorted by timestamp, but the timestamps were stored as strings. Since the most recent completed job started with a 9 as the first character in the job ID, it was being sorted after the new jobs, and since the "most recent" job was already completed, the system just assumed no work needed to be done. That was a fun one to figure out!

Like, I started out doing Perl CGI scripts, I did it for a really long time. I loved it. It's just all... so much, now. It's awful. It ceased being fun a while ago.

I can't believe I used to like web development.