this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Software Gore
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Deliberately bad software or bad design is not software gore, it must be something unintentional
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I have no idea if this is true or not but I was told it harkens back to very early multi-user operating systems where user credentials were stored unencrypted in plaintext files that used white space as delimiters.
I tend to believe this might be accurate because I learned programming back in the 1980’s on an Onyx Systems microcomputer. There was a bug that some of us learned about in its rudimentary email program that would dump you into its otherwise-protected system directory. In that directory was a file containing both usernames & passwords in clear text. I don’t recall if it used white space as a delimiter, but given everything was in clear text and not encrypted I think that might have been the case.
Oh boy, having done data science work with government files, you remind me that they still use terrible delimiters. A white space delimiter sounds significantly worse than a tab delimited file, though!