I'm going for longest rant. TL:DR; version here:

http://pastebin.com/0Bp4jX9y

then:

http://pastebin.com/FfUiTzsh

Twat Client,

As per our conversation, here is an invoice for the work you requested on behalf of U.S. Bloom. I realize that you ended up going with another designer, but you did request samples of what my take on the logo design would be. The following line item is indicative of 1 hour of graphic design consultation as per your request via Skype.

As I recall, you mentioned that this is not how Upwork "works" but considering it was you who requested that I converse with you via Skype instead of via the Upwork messenger, and since there were no clear instructions on how to proceed with Upwork after our initial consultation, It is assumed that you were foregoing Upwork altogether to work with me directly, thus the invoice from me directly for my time involved in the project. I would have reached out to you via Skype, but it seems that you may have severed our connection there.

After spending a little time researching your company, I could not find current information for Basic Media Marketing, but I was able to reach out to your former partner Not A. Twat, who was more than helpful and suggested that he would encourage you to pay for the services rendered.

It is discouraging that you asked for my help and I delivered, but when I ask for compensation in return for my skills, you refused to pay and have now taken your site offline and removed me as a contact from Skype.

{[CLIENT of CLIENT]},

I am sorry that I have bothered you with this email. I copied you on it merely for transparency's sake. I am sure that your logo is great and I am sure whatever decision was made is awesome for your decision. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't getting "samples" of other people's work passed off as original work by Twat Media Marketing.

I can't speak for any of the other candidates, but since Twat asked me to conduct work with him via Skype rather than through Upwork, and since he's pretty much a ghost online now, (Site Offline, LinkedIn Removed or Blocked, and now Skype blocked as well) one has to think this was a hit and run to either crowdsource your logo inexpensively or pass off other artist's work as his own. That may not be the case, but from my perspective all signs are pointing to that scenario.

Here is a transcript. Some of his messages have been redacted.

As you can clearly see, requests and edits to the logo were being made from Jon to me, but he thinks it's a joke when I ask about invoicing and tries to pass it off as an interview. Do you see any interview questions in there? There were no questions about how long I have been designing, what are my rates, who have I done work for in the past, or examples of my previous work. There were none because he didn't need them at this point.

He'd already seen my proposal and my Behance.net portfolio as well as my rates on Upwork.com. This was a cut to the chase request for my ideas for your logo. It was not just ideas, but mock designs with criticism and approval awaiting. Not only that, but I only asked for an hour of compensation. After looking at the timestamps on our conversation, you can clearly see that I spent at least 3 hours corresponding with Twat on this project. That's three hours of work I could have spent on an honest paying customer.

I trust that TWATCLIENT will do the right thing. I just wanted you guys to know that I was in it to do the best design I could for you. I didn't know I was in it to waste three hours of my life in an "interview" I wasn't aware I was participating in.

Reply from ClientClient:

Hello Sir,
This message is very confusing?
We do not owe your company any money and have never worked with you before.
Therefore, I am going to disregard that invoice.

Reply from TWATCLIENT's boss via phone:

I have two problems with this. One I don't think your business practices are ethical, especially calling MY client directly and sending them an invoice.

Two why didn't you call or email Jon before copying my client on the email invoice?

Me: Probably because he's purposely avoiding me and I had no way to find him. I only got his email address today and that was from a WHOIS lookup.

Really, you don't think my business practices are ethical? What about slavery? Is that ethical? Is it ethical to pass of my designs to your client for critique, but not pay me for doing them?

... I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK!

My email follow up:

http://pastebin.com/hMYPGtxV

I got paid. The power of CCing the right combination of people is greater than most things on Earth.

Follow-up to https://devrant.com/rants/1551635

I think that I've found the reason for this Acer motherboard's refusal to boot up now. Apparently this featureful piece of shit expects "something" on its ID pin as well.. and why ID pin you may ask? I reckon that it's because of "certified replacements". Because you know, if it doesn't come from our shitty factorias it's gotta be shit, right?!

How about no?!! You Acer really aren't the only ones capable of producing a fucking lithium battery! And did you ever think of the edge cases where you may want to feed a lab bench power supply's voltage into the phone to mimic the battery and troubleshoot the bloody thing? Because that's what I initially wanted to do, instead of that Doogee battery. The only reason why I didn't is because the supply is currently charging up another lithium cell that I salvaged from a donated (broken) Samsung tablet, and is taking longer than expected.

Point is, if you receive the appropriate fucking level of angry pixies, YOU SHOULD FUCKING USE THEM AND BOOT UP ALREADY!!! Regardless of whether it's some sort of certified fucking Acer component or not! Somewhere between 4.2 and 2.7V stable should be good enough regardless of what produces it!

At least AliExpress sells these batteries for about €4.5, and another €2 for shipping. Considering that I can buy batteries with this capacity for €2 a pop and free shipping, this would better fucking work. Especially since I'm buying an overpriced battery of which almost half the cost is fucking shipping, just for a stupid "certified" controller that' I'll also have to put between the board and any pixie wrangler or angry pixie containment device that I use to power this shitty board. Acer, you motherfuckers!!!

Okay, That right there is pathetic https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/... .

First of all telekom was not able to assure their clients' safety so that some Joe would not access them.
Second of all after a friendly warning and pointing a finger to the exact problem telekom booted the guy out.
Thirdly telekom took a defensive position claiming "naah, we're all good, we don't need security. We'll just report any breaches to police hence no data will be leaked not altered" which I can't decide whether is moronic or idiotic.

Come on boys and girls... If some chap offers a friendly hand by pointing where you've made a mistake - fix the mistake, Not the boy. And for fucks sake, say THANK YOU to the good lad. He could use his findings for his own benefit, to destroy your service or even worse -- sell that knowledge on black market where fuck knows what these twisted minds could have done with it. Instead he came to your door saying "Hey folks, I think you could do better here and there. I am your customes and I'd love you to fix those bugzies, 'ciz I'd like to feel my data is safe with you".

How on earth could corporations be that shortsighted... Behaviour like this is an immediate red flag for me, shouting out loud "we are not safe, do not have any business with us unless you want your data to be leaked or secretly altered".

Yeah, I know, computer misuse act, etc. But there are people who do not give a tiny rat's ass about rules and laws and will find a way to do what they do without a trace back to them. Bad boys with bad intentions and black hoodies behind TOR will not be punished. The good guys, on the other hand, will.

Whre's the fucking logic in that...

P.S. It made me think... why wouldn't they want any security vulns reported to them? Why would they prefer to keep it unsafe? Is it intentional? For some special "clients"? Gosh that stinks

So I have seen this quite a few times now and posted the text below already, but I'd like to shed some light on this:

If you hit up your dev tools and check the network tab, you might see some repeated API calls. Those calls include a GET parameter named "token". The request looks something like this: "https://domain.tld/api/somecall/..."

You can think of this token as a temporary password, or a key that holds information about your user and other information in the backend. If one would steal a token that belongs to another user, you would have control over his account. Now many complained that this key is visible in the URL and not "encrypted". I'll try to explain why this is, well "wrong" or doesn't impose a bigger security risk than normal:

There is no such thing as an "unencrypted query", well besides really transmitting encrypted data. This fields are being protected by the transport layer (HTTPS) or not (HTTP) and while it might not be common to transmit these fields in a GET query parameter, it's standard to send those tokens as cookies, which are as exposed as query parameters. Hit up some random site. The chance that you'll see a PHP session id being transmitted as a cookie is high. Cookies are as exposed as any HTTP GET or POST Form data and can be viewed as easily. Look for a "details" or "http header" section in your dev tools.
Stolen tokens can be used to "log in" into the website, although it might be made harder by only allowing one IP per token or similar. However the use of such a that token is absolut standard and nothing special devRant does. Every site that offers you a "keep me logged in" or "remember me" option uses something like this, one way or the other. Because a token could have been stolen you sometimes need to additionally enter your current password when doings something security risky, like changing your password. In that case your password is being used as a second factor. The idea is, that an attacker could have stolen your token, but still doesn't know your password. It's not enough to grab a token, you need that second (or maybe thrid) factor. As an example - that's how githubs "sudo" mode works. You have got your token, that grants you more permissions than a non-logged in user has, but to do the critical stuff you need an additional token that's only valid for that session, because asking for your password before every action would be inconvenient when setting up a repo

I hope this helps understanding a bit more of this topic :)
Keep safe and keep asking questions if you fell that your data is in danger
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Woohoo!!! I made it to 1000++s :) Now I feel less newbie-like around here :)

So... I don't want to shit-post, so in gratitude to all you guys for this awesome community you've built, specially @trogus and @dfox, I'll post here a list of my ideas/projects for the future, so you guys can have something to talk about or at least laugh at.

Here we go!

Current Project: Ensayador.
It's a webapp that intends to ease and help students write essays. I'm making it with history students in mind, but it should also help in other discipline's essay production. It will store the thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography so students can create a guideline before the moment of writting. It will also let students catalogue their reads with the same fields they'd use for an essay: that is thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography, for their further use in other essays. The bibliography field will consist on foreign keys to reads catalogued. The idea is to build upon the models natural/logical relations.

Apps: All the apps that will come next could be integrated in just one big app that I would call "ChatPo" ("Po" is a contextual word we use in my country when we end sentences, I think it derived from "Pues"). But I guess it's better to think about them as different apps, just so I don't find myself lost in a neverending side-project.

A subchat(similar to a subreddit)-based chat app:
An app where people can join/create sub-chats where they can talk about things they are interested in. In my country, this is normally done by facebook groups making a whatsapp group and posting the link in the group, but I think that an integrated app would let people find/create/join groups more easily. I'm not sure if this should work with nicknames or real names and phone numbers, but let's save that for the future.

A slack clone:
Yes, you read it right. I want to make a slack clone. You see, in my country, enterprise communications are shitty as hell: everything consists in emails and informal whatsapp groups. Slack solves all these problems, but nobody even knows what it is over here. I think a more localized solution would be perfect to fill this void, and it would be cool to make it myself (with a team of friends of course), and hopefully profit out of it.

A labour chat-app marketplace:
This is a big hybrid I'd like to make based on the premise of contracting services on a reliable manner and paying through the app. "Are you in need of a plumber, but don't know where to find a reliable one? Maybe you want a new look on your wall, but don't want to paint it yourself? Don't worry, we got you covered. In <Insert app name> you can find a professional perfect to suit your needs. Payment? It's just a tap away!". I guess you get the idea. I think wechat made something like this, I wonder how it worked out.

* Why so many chat apps? Well... I want to learn Erlang, it is something close to mythical to me, and it's perfect for the backend of a comms app. So I want to learn it and put it in practice in any of these ideas.*

Videogames:

Flat-land arena: A top down arena game based on the book "flat land". Different symmetrical shapes will fight on a 2d plane of existence, having different rotating and moving speeds, and attack mechanics. For example, the triangle could have a "lance" on the front, making it agressive but leaving the rest defenseless. The field of view will be small, but there'll be a 2d POV all around the screen, which will consist on a line that fills with the colors of surrounding objects, scaling from dark colors to lighter colors to give a sense of distance.
This read could help understand the concept better:
http://eldritchpress.org/eaa/...

A 2D darksouls-like class based adventure: I've thought very little about this, but it's a project I'm considering to build with my brothers. I hope we can make it.

Imposible/distant future projects:

History-reading AI: History is best teached when you start from a linguistic approach. That is, you first teach both the disciplinar vocabulary and the propper keywords, and from that you build on causality's logic. It would be cool to make an AI recognize keywords and disciplinary vocabulary to make sense of historical texts and maybe reformat them into another text/platform/database. (this is very close to the next idea)

Extensive Historical DB: A database containing the most historical phenomena posible, which is crazy, I know. It would be a neverending iterative software in which, through historical documents, it would store historical process, events, dates, figures, etc. All this would then be presented in a webapp in which you could query historical data and it would return it in a wikipedia like manner, but much more concize and prioritized, with links to documents about the data requested. This could be automated to an extent by History-reading AI.

I'm out of characters, but this was fun. Plus, I don't want this to be any more cringy than it already is.

The cleaning lady saga continues...
(previous: https://devrant.com/rants/1850777)

Had an appointment with their manager, stuff gets discussed and coordinated at a 3x slower pace than if I'd done it myself (as usual because fuck efficiency when there's muggles involved -_-), yada yada.

*mail addresses for contact start getting discussed*
Incompetent fuck of a manager: And you $realName, your email address is $company@nixmagic.com, then changed to $nickname@nixmagic.com? Mind explaining this?

Me: Oh yeah that's just because I give out different email addresses to each contact person when it involves public forms or registrations, helps with spam prevention and putting the company name of the correspondent in there helps with easy recognition when some company's database leaks and I start getting a lot of spam on that mailbox.

IFOM: Really.. we actually weren't sure whether we should reply to something with our company name in it.. you know, not sure whether it's legit etc. Why would anyone want to use one of our email addresses as theirs?

… Let that sink in for a moment. They think that $company@nixmagic.com is theirs? Just because it's their domain (minus TLD) in front of MY FUCKING DOMAIN? How about you start by learning how email addresses work first, because clearly you have no fucking clue about it. Are you the kind of brainless fucks that get lured in by http://totallylegitbank.com.freehost.com/... scams? Fucking stupid piece of fucking shit.

Oh, and when you're using MS Exchange, of course you can't know that when you're having your own domain, you actually also own every fucking mailbox on it, because Microshaft doesn't allow you to have more than n amount of mailboxes, unless you gobble up money for them. But you know what, in my case it's a fucking catch-all domain running Linux on its servers, so yeah I can use whatever the fuck I want in front of it, including your stupid fucking cleaning company.

IFOM: And then there's your current designated email address. $nickname@nixmagic.com..

Oh you're going to criticise that as well?! Yeah condor is my fucking nickname all over the internet, and my username on all my systems. That's why I use it. But you know what else is an email address that you might come across, because people are shallow idiots like that? ILoveBigTits69@gmail.com or something like that. You know what, how about I address you next time from ILoveBigTits69_OhAndYoursAreAWashboard@nixmagic.com, because you know what? I CAN FUCKING DO THAT. But you know, I at least am halfway fucking professional about my business-related stuff, so I won't because I really don't want to be associated with such an email address. So don't you fucking dare to criticize me for using my fucking nickname instead of my real name.

Long story short, people are fucking idiots.

Follow-up to https://devrant.com/rants/1754950:

I've finally been able to completely migrate my 4TB Elements to btrfs, copy all the data over (initially did it from my laptop out of laziness, thing overheated, mounted to my server afterwards to copy from there) and now it's mounted to my WanBLowS host again. And I gotta say, it works like a charm! Rsync which previously would mindlessly copy everything over from the server to the (at the time) NTFS drive, now leaves existing files as-is, as it should.

And why is that? Btrfs to btrfs, or a POSIX-compliant filesystem to another POSIX-compliant filesystem rather. Could be ext filesystems, HFS filesystems, or whatever. But not NTFS, because its file attributes aren't POSIX-compatible. That's why rsync chokes on it. And you think that Crapple Thinks Different.. which, granted, they do. But Microshit.. that's a whole different level beast altogether! Every fucking thing they do, every time it's shit and never is it remotely compatible with common standards, and it extends itself even to something rather trivial yet vital to the OS - the NTFS filesystem. Think fucking Different, it isn't an Apple exclusive!

The wage for the publishing company is too low to my liking (see previous rant), has so many asterisks when it comes to payment that it's downright shady, and I'd rather work for a company that follows European standards and is located in Europe anyway. So I've started to look again for sysadmin jobs.

Came across this fucking site, because apparently Glassdoor is down for maintenance (maybe those guys could use another sysadmin as well, hmm? 🤔)
https://totaljobs.com/jobs/...

"5 Linux Systems Administrator jobs in Belgium + 10 miles"

Alright, excellent! Let's see what they are!!!
- Active Directory administrator, wage unspecified.
- Senior VMware administrator, wage unspecified.
- Freelance Windows administrator, wage unspecified.
- Application services PM (i.e. DevOps), freelance, €500/day.
- System applications manager, requirements clearly noting Windows systems but why on Earth would you put that in the title?

Well thank you mate, useless shitsite. Do you see that none of these jobs have anything to do with Linux? Thanks you bastard, totaljobs.com! Time well spent, don't you think? 😑

So i just had an interesting conversation.

View source images in comments

So some background. I used to do a lot of Minecraft development and server configuration. And Minecraft being made of mostly 12-year-olds they really don't pay very well. So I moved on from Minecraft but someone reached out for me to do their configuration for their server. (this was about a month ago) and I quoted them 40/hr because that's what I charge for my web dev work. So he promptly declined and I thought that was that. But tonight he messaged me and found a 5 month old post saying how I was looking to do free development work in order to get experience. And here is how the converstion when.

(His name is "Candy")

Candy:
Lol
Trying to take advantage of me with your bullshit $40/hour claims
Which is outright laughable
https://mc-market.org/threads/...
”I am looking for a network to stay long-term with and help/see it grow into a bigger server. (I would expect pay later down the road if we work together on an ongoing basis)”
—
Quoting your MC-Market post.
What do you have to say for yourself? Trying to take advantage of people?
Going to say something else completely delusional or own up to the fact that you were trying to take advantage of me?
I already knew you were, but now I have the hard evidence.
As I am not a stupid person.
Not only did your friend lie, but you tried to take advantage of me, thinking I was stupid enough to fall for your $40/hour bullshit for basic configuration work. MineSaga charges $30.00 an hour on the high. Don’t even try to do the same shit you did to me to anyone else. It won’t work.

Me:I was interested in doing plugin development and learning so I offered my services for free so I could learn in a more real environment. I no longer do minecraft plugins rather I am a web developer and my rate is $40/hr I am good at configuration which is why i contacted you but I am not going to lower my rate because it is "simpler" work. Just like how you can higher a prostitute to wash your car but it would be cheaper to get the kid from around the block to do it. Also not sure what your end goal is here. I gave you my rate and you didn't agree with it. So you should just move on. Plus this is the minecraft world let me know when you get to the real world so you you can pay in big boy money.

Candy:
So your configuration work for minecraft is $40/h as well?
Lol
Absolutely hilarious.

Me:
did you not read my message?
"I am not going to lower my rate because it is "simpler" work."

Candy:
Who were your most recent clients?

Me:

i'm not going to give you that information

Candy:
Because you know you are lying to me with your crazy rates, and if you aren't, that means you have near to no clients.
Yet another lie.

Me:
keep telling yourself that buddy

Candy:
Lol
Good luck getting any more clients.
rip

Me:
?
I get more clients all the time
They just are not in your realm of your minecraft imagination where you can pay a developer 20$/hr

Candy:
I just strongly disagree with the fact that you are charging $40/hour for configurative work
xD

Me:
Okay
But why even contact me? Did you really think trying to "Call me out" was going to have me lower my rates or something.
Just get over it

Candy:
I haven't called you out and overcharging like that to others in the minecraft realm for a significant gain in money for work that is not worth nearly that amount is absolutely delusional.
I would recommend you stop making up false assumptions

Me: What ever you say

I left it at that. There was some more stuff but it was not that interesting so i left it out

You think jQuery would finally have died after the IE era? Or that it would only be used to still pander to IE users?

Well... nope: https://w3techs.com/technologies/... says jQuery 3 has overtaken jQuery 1, which was the only version to even polyfill IE.

WTF is wrong with web devs, just WHY?! jQuery's use cases are shit that would be simpler and with less code without jQuery, shit that should be done in CSS instead, or shit that doesn't belong on websites to begin with.