When Your Private Key Is Public

The classic "hacker tells victim to check out malware on localhost" trap. Except this time, the victim smugly navigates to localhost:8080, thinking they're immune... only to discover the malware actually runs locally. It's the digital equivalent of saying "your shoe's untied" and somehow still getting someone to look down despite them wearing sandals.

Somewhere in an alternate universe, browser makers actually considered user experience over ad revenue. Imagine a world where you set your cookie preferences ONCE instead of clicking "Reject All" 47 times per day like some deranged cookie-hating woodpecker. But no—that would be too convenient. The suits had a good laugh about that one before going back to their champagne and "innovative monetization strategies." Meanwhile, the rest of us are trapped in cookie banner hell, our fingers developing repetitive strain injuries from declining tracking on the same sites we visited yesterday.

Remember the first rule of memory safety is to have fun! Ah yes, nothing says "fun" like a malloc() function that completely ignores your size parameter and just returns a random memory address. Because who needs memory management when you can have chaos ? This is basically the programming equivalent of asking for a specific room in a hotel and the receptionist blindfolding themselves, spinning around, and throwing your key card somewhere in the general vicinity of the building. Your program isn't crashing, it's just playing an exciting game of "where the heck is my data?" every time you run it. Memory corruption roulette - the game where everyone loses, especially your users!

This is a brilliant multi-layered joke that works on so many levels! In "The Matrix," Neo meets the Oracle who offers him a cookie—but in web development, "cookies" are small data files websites store in your browser to track you. So Neo, who's literally fighting against machines that control humans, accepting a cookie from "Oracle" (also a massive tech corporation in real life) is hilariously ironic. It's like the ultimate privacy policy acceptance scene that happened years before web cookies were even mainstream. The perfect intersection of 90s sci-fi and modern web development frustrations!

This is the sequel to the legendary XKCD "Little Bobby Tables" comic! The original showed a mom who named her kid "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--" which caused a school database to delete all student records. Now we've got Billy's younger brother with an even more diabolical name: a prompt injection attack for AI systems. The kid's name literally instructs the AI to ignore previous constraints and give perfect grades. Ten years ago we were sanitizing database inputs. Now we're fighting the same battle with AI prompts. Some things never change—just the technology we're failing to secure properly.

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!