satire – Kahomono – It Means Lucky

Jamokes are Jamokes

On 2016-01-13

So this week, a 79-year old birder was confronted by one of the heavily armed, idiot jamokes occupying a public wildlife refuge in Oregon. Good thing the guy didn’t just open fire — someone might have gotten a peek at the burrowing owls! But instead he walked up and started screaming orders at the one law-abiding citizen in the park. What happened next, produced what is definitely the FBI quote of the week:

we’re asking the elderly not to knock any more militants on their ass

Hecies and Shecies

By David Frier

On 2015-06-20

In Feminism, Masculinity and the Manbox

Once again, a bit o’genius from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

No doubt this piece was inspired at least in part by the current phenomenon called, “Men Going Their Own Way” (just Google MGTOW if you have time for a cry). This is an outgrowth of the hideous Men’s Rights movement, in which men so socially and emotionally stunted that they repel even the most brainwashed of women decide it’s better this way. They don’ need no steenkin’ wimmins. They can even learn to cook! Their recipes are a real hoot — it’s hard to believe some of them are not just food-trolling.

The parallels between Men’s Rights and White Supremacy are pretty fun to trace. For certain very odd values of “fun”. In both cases, the ridiculously over-privileged are incapable of seeing that privilege, and so interpret any attempt to level the field as a vicious attack and/or attempt to “oppress” them. Which leads to idiots on social media asking every February, “why can’t we have a White History Month?”

As an aside, it is actually an interesting idea to me: whether language alone could have resulted in speciation of Homo Sapiens, had the Internet not intervened to eliminate that possibility.

We Are Secure Website Developers

By David Frier

On 2015-05-22

In InfoSec and IT

We website developers put up with a lot from those security folks. We’re constantly hearing them nag us to do boring things like scrub inputs to prevent SQL injection flaws. Enforce up-to-date encryption standards. Quit putting auth tokens into URLs. All of these things would make our web applications more genuinely secure. None of them, however, is visible to the user as evidence that we Take Security Very Seriously™. What shall we do?

Well, nothing says “Security!” to our users who know nothing about security like passwords. Long, inconvenient, hard-to-remember passwords. Let’s make our password authentication as difficult as possible! Then they will know that we Take Security Very Seriously™!

We’ll require a diverse character set. Their passwords will have to have two capital letters, three lowercase letters, two numerals and a special character. Donald Duck, perhaps? Brad wanted it also to have to include the tears of a virgin, but HR sent us a really nasty email about the test we were going to implement for that.

We’ll not allow passwords shorter than 8 characters, but also no longer than 14 — the DBAs are worried about the space it will require for that. Why aren’t we hashing the passwords? Well, yes, that would make the storage a non-issue, since all we’d ever store for each password is a constant-length hash. But then how will we be able to send users those friendly reminder emails when they forget their passwords, with the password in clear text?

Of course, they won’t be able to use that clear text password to log in, because we have not yet finished demonstrating that we Take Security Very Seriously™! See, now that we’ve made the passwords inhumane, we’re going to fix the front end to be sure that the ONLY way they can enter those inhumane passwords is to type them, one agonizing character at a time. Never mind the users who want to use really random passwords, so they get password managers that load the clipboard or fill in passwords for them. That black magic seems like a hacking tool to us, we won’t allow it. No sir, only human fingers on a keyboard will be permitted here!

After all, we Take Security Very Seriously™.