Am I Cooked?

Remember when "hacking" meant editing the HTML in your browser and taking a screenshot? Nothing says "elite hacker" like right-clicking, hitting inspect element, and changing NASA's homepage text to "I'm in the mainframe!" The number of relatives who thought I was one keyboard shortcut away from jail time after showing them this trick was truly concerning. Bonus points if you added some green text on black background for maximum "Hollywood hacker" aesthetic.

Just another Tuesday in DevOps. You're casually sipping coffee, testing a new rate limiter in what you thought was the staging environment. Then you realize you typed 10.0.1.5 instead of 10.0.1.6 and suddenly the entire company Slack is lighting up with alerts. Production is down, customers are screaming, and your coffee is now being violently expelled from your body as pure adrenaline takes over. The best part? You'll get to explain this in the post-mortem tomorrow while the CTO stares directly into your soul.

Just trying to keep your files neatly organized on your local machine when OneDrive kicks down your door with a knife and that innocent "Let's finish setting up" prompt. The digital equivalent of a mafia shakedown. "Nice files you got there... would be a shame if they were forcibly synced to the cloud." No Microsoft, I don't want my embarrassingly named folders automatically uploaded to your servers. Sometimes a dev just wants to keep their code hoarder tendencies private without fighting off cloud services every time they boot up.

Someone: "Obfuscation doesn't work!" Meanwhile, the obfuscated code looks like hieroglyphics designed by an ancient programmer who hated their future self. It's not just unreadable—it's actively trying to cause psychic damage. The kind of code that makes your IDE contemplate a career change. Whoever wrote this didn't just obfuscate their code, they turned it into a cryptic summoning ritual that would make even the most hardened security expert weep into their mechanical keyboard. And yet, somewhere out there, a developer is proudly thinking "No one will ever reverse engineer THIS masterpiece!"

The first part of this authentication function is actually doing its job—checking if the password matches. But then comes the security masterpiece: if (true == true) . Congratulations, you've created the digital equivalent of a bouncer who checks your ID and then lets you in anyway because "yep, gravity still works!" This function will authenticate literally anyone who gets past the first check... or fails it and just keeps trying. Security experts hate this one weird trick!

The irony of AI companies fighting over scraped data is peak Silicon Valley drama. OpenAI spent years vacuuming up the internet's content to train ChatGPT, and now they're clutching their pearls when DeepSeek does the same to them. It's like watching a digital version of "The Princess Bride" where the dude who stole everything is suddenly outraged when someone steals from him. Twenty years in tech has taught me one universal truth: there's nothing more sacred than the data you've already pilfered from someone else.