Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

etherrotmutex.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 176 posts

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#41

Post by fferen »

thawaya3113 wrote: post #38
not2b wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse. A very long time ago a was working for a startup that was doing real-time speech compression, for telephony applications, using a DSP, with the compression/decompression implemented in assembly language. The code had two processes, an analysis process and a synthesis process. My colleague named the entry point to the synthesis process synth_entry, and he named the entry point to the analysis process an…

I wouldn’t be surprised if I have a few “anal”s lying around in veritable names I’ve written over the years. We have a lot of “analysis” in our application and I bet I have shortened them a few times, and in my head I would have pronounced it as uh-naa-l not realizing what it also looked like.

Exactly what I was thinking. I remember I once used "ana" everywhere in a program to avoid this.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#42

Post by mrpopo »

thawaya3113 wrote: post #37

5 people have posted about this very thing over the past 14 years and this will be searchable for decades going forward, either through Google or the way back machine, or possibly through a publicly funded way back machine like alternative. Meanwhile the odds that your tweet or FB post will be searchable and archivable anywhere close to that is extremely low. The open Internet is so much better. I hope we start movin…

Also interesting that this is this person's only blog post ever, and dating from 2017.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#43

Post by eyelidlessness »

thawaya3113 wrote: post #37

5 people have posted about this very thing over the past 14 years and this will be searchable for decades going forward, either through Google or the way back machine, or possibly through a publicly funded way back machine like alternative. Meanwhile the odds that your tweet or FB post will be searchable and archivable anywhere close to that is extremely low. The open Internet is so much better. I hope we start movin…

I certainly don’t expect my FB posts to live forever except on some surveillance server. But tweets? They’re almost all public. They’ve been and are being crawled just like the old web. I’m pretty confident I have a higher likelihood of finding my tweets in some distant future than anything I’ve self-published on the web.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#44

Post by cossatot »

not2b wrote: post #20
sprior wrote: post #7

Back when I was in high school and programming on the original IBM PCs I wrote a program that would graph "solids of rotation" (a function rotated around the X axis). Well I chose the obvious name based on the 8.3 filename limitations. One day someone looked over my shoulder and said "you named your program solid rot???" Oops.

It gets worse. A very long time ago a was working for a startup that was doing real-time speech compression, for telephony applications, using a DSP, with the compression/decompression implemented in assembly language. The code had two processes, an analysis process and a synthesis process. My colleague named the entry point to the synthesis process synth_entry, and he named the entry point to the analysis process an…

Matlab and SciPy both have ‘cumtrapz’ for trapezoidal integration.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#45

Post by eyelidlessness »

DarylZero wrote: post #24
javert wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have to let them steal a word from the English language, that belongs to all of us. We don't have to let them cause confusion. Just don't call it the name they want you to call it.

Yeah we need to use a good mocking nickname for that company.

I see what you did there

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#46

Post by gomox »

The best part of this is that it is concrete evidence of Google Search result quality decay. The screenshot of the search in the article shows a result from a Blogspot blog called "Frankie's Joint".

If you do today the exact same search that the OP does on his screenshot, that result does not show up. ALL the results I get are either a reference to this Hacker News post, or computer generated pages. A short 2 pages worth of useless computer generated content, including binary analysis pages and alternative frontends to the HN post.

The original article on Frankie's Joint still exists, here it is: https://frankiesjoint.blogspot.com/2014/08/nein-doktor-nein....

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#47

Post by thrtythreeforty »

gomox wrote: post #46

The best part of this is that it is concrete evidence of Google Search result quality decay. The screenshot of the search in the article shows a result from a Blogspot blog called "Frankie's Joint". If you do today the exact same search that the OP does on his screenshot, that result does not show up. ALL the results I get are either a reference to this Hacker News post, or computer generated pages. A short 2 pages w…

Has anyone attempted to create a "search engine benchmark" of, say, oddly specific phrases that almost certainly need to return a certain set of pages as the top result? This could quantify the loss in quality we keep talking about.

If the full list were public then the results could of course be gamed, but if only a sample were public and the full set were private then it would probably provide a useful metric (and would be able to measure attempted gaming by the score on the public and private datasets).

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#48

Post by pteraspidomorph »

iKlsR wrote: post #13

From the comments on the blog. > This is a comment made in a software called InstallShield, version X at last, a software intent to create installers, so it probably will appear in many other products. > Found in a InstallShield sample that I was reversing to check if it's a malware. The line made me chuckle, and it's so heartwarming to see someone actually made a blog on it and the fact the line has been around sinc…

Good old InstallShield. At one point it was everywhere, and then... it wasn't.

I keep all the bundled installers I've ever had in a folder. Currently there are files there from 2009 onwards (older ones are archived somewhere). I didn't bother looking for the older ones, but running grep -a ether-rot-mutex quickly yielded a match containing the entire snippet! The culprit is the installer for Ulead (now Corel) PhotoImpact 12 and it has been there since 2010.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#49

Post by walterbell »

gomox wrote: post #46

The best part of this is that it is concrete evidence of Google Search result quality decay. The screenshot of the search in the article shows a result from a Blogspot blog called "Frankie's Joint". If you do today the exact same search that the OP does on his screenshot, that result does not show up. ALL the results I get are either a reference to this Hacker News post, or computer generated pages. A short 2 pages w…

The Dunk Web, only visible by archaeological reconstruction from photos of past Google searches.

Re: What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex (2017)

#50

Post by a-dub »

wild guess: there was some sort of registration or copy protection that generated a unique machine id or cryptographic key by applying some simple transformations to the mac address. it was trivially defeated because it was easy to find where this was calculated because of the naming of a mutex that enclosed it. after defeat and remediation, this was added as a grumble.

for background: it wasn't uncommon in the old dark days of proprietary windows software to have an installer generate a machine id that would then be used to compute a machine specific install or registration key.

i don't want to use the word sign, because that was probably more advanced than what actually went on, but the registration key was often a function of the machine id.

Post reply on HN