181–190 of 209 posts
Alright, guess I'll be using email verification
As long as you don't try to validate the email address I entered. The list of gotchas for email address parsing is impressive too. (e.g. "Cool Address"@example.store is a valid email)
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Not that I downvoted, but the attitude annoys me. As a developer you have two options: 1) Do nothing and support all valid addresses (that your mail system can handle) 2) Spend development time to make your system not support all valid addresses. Why do you spend development effort to make your software worse ?
3) Realize that undervalidation of input can create opportunities to introduce backdoors into your system. 4) Realize that the added benefit of supporting weird formats are not worth the time to verify that it actually works . As someone who works on an email client, I can absolutely tell you that using IP address literals and quoted localparts are more trouble than its worth. Chances are, the libraries you use can't…
Hint: I believe domain names cannot begin with digits.
Here's a good one: All phone numbers can be reached using tone dialing. (I know of at least one phone number to which one can connect only using pulse dialing.)
How is that even possible?
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Yup. I mean, every programmer I know considers stuff like this to be very interesting trivia to learn and apply. But even if you know this stuff, putting the knowledge to use often involves a series of battles against your PMs and managers and maybe even customers, who either don't know it, have their own vision, or just follow what everyone else does. (Getting a product to work correctly is as much an exercise of di…
I remember a discussion on the Linux kernel list years ago - and I believe Linus himself at one point insisted that names with less than three characters shouldn't be accepted, as they must surely be invalid. I pointed out that when I was a student there was another student with a full name consisting of just a single letter. No first name, no last name, just that letter. And the best thing - the student loans bank's…
I've also met a few "Jo"s in my time.
"Falsehoods programmers believe about..." * Names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... * REST APIs: http://slinkp.com/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-apis.... * Fonts/typefaces: https://github.com/RoelN/Font-Falsehoods Collection of falsehoods: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
Timezooooooones
In general, the Earth is a really lousy clock.
IF the description of the falsehood includes the line "Obviously, this isn't necessarily true." I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that programmers don't really believe it - at any rate I would like documentation of programmers believing that people have only one phone number. ¨´
"Falsehoods Programmers Believe" Titles Considered Harmful
Flying Spaghetti Monster I hate that this is real: > Only mobile phones can receive text messages > Some service providers support sending and receiving text messages to fixed-line numbers. There are also online services like Skype that can send and receive text messages. "Oh but not-mobile-number phone numbers are always fraudulent so we don't accept them!" Great, I love getting caught in spam traps because I have a…
This is expensive and time-consuming, however, and almost no CLEC (or other such provider) will do it - you have to petition and register your number(s) with every single mobile provider and get them to accept that these are not sources of spam, etc.
I have this problem because my main, personal number is actually a twilio number (as I built my own personal telco within twilio) and this means I cannot receive validation messages from shortcodes (like a bank). I spoke to some twilio engineers at Signal and they confirmed that it would indeed be possible to register twilio numbers as "mobile" but too expensive ...
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3) Realize that undervalidation of input can create opportunities to introduce backdoors into your system. 4) Realize that the added benefit of supporting weird formats are not worth the time to verify that it actually works . As someone who works on an email client, I can absolutely tell you that using IP address literals and quoted localparts are more trouble than its worth. Chances are, the libraries you use can't…
OK, try to get my email system to accept yourname@3com.com Hint: I believe domain names cannot begin with digits.
Note: USA-specific Not even 20 years ago, before any number could be ported to mobiles, landlines in some (all?) Baby Bell regions had their prefix determined by geography. In other words, you could know what "zone" a given phone number was in by its prefix. Take Silicon Valley. A (650) 960-xxxx number meant Mountain View. (408) 733-xxxx meant Sunnyvale. Etc. Zones roughly respected cities, but boundary conditions ab…
Around 1984 the ARB (named for its author, Arthur Richard Brock, R.I.P.) BBS system did store-and-forward e-mail from one ARB BBS to the next, covering a good portion of the New England and Mid-Atlantic states.
Back then toll charges were pretty high, but there were gateway nodes that had phone numbers which had free calling that spanned area codes and LATAs.
ARBnet was pretty awesome, ran on Commodore 64's, and was a pioneer in public e-mail, but is now completely forgotten.