And Then There Are the Sordid Faculty Parties

Part of the job of being a geek is being severely paranoid. You don’t trust anything coming in from the Internet when you’re programming a website. And you especially don’t program a URL that repeats on the page whatever you feed it.

Like, well, this. Or, while we’re playing, this.

Additional nominations accepted in the comments.

Update: Oh, darn, they’re on to us. Say, whose weekend did we just ruin?

16 Comments

How about this? Don’t try it in Safari, as it helpfully refuses to let the page get pwned with script injection (it spits out “Refused to execute a JavaScript script. Source code of script found within request.” in the console). FF dutifully pops up the alert, though.

Bleh. They’ve taken it down completely, now…

@al2o3cr: You gotta wonder whether the underlying programming also left a hole for an SQL injection. Somebody that sloppy surely didn’t stop there.

@nojo:

No doubt – the whole premise of passing the page title is so fucktarded that I have no doubt there were other issues, right up with ColdFusion’s love of encoding which page layout to use in the URL. On the other hand, if they’re seriously using SHTML still, they may not have discovered databases yet. :)

Unrelated: So much for “Minnesota Nice”: State Rethugs pushing bill that makes it a crime for welfare recipients to have cash

Heh. I read that header as “And Then There Are Soiled Faculty Panties” at first.

@al2o3cr: Since I haven’t even seen an shtml page in — what, ten years? — I have no idea what they can or can’t do these days.

(And I once had to liberate a website from ColdFusion — the original developer left, nobody around knew what to do, and I ended up just migrating it to lamp.)

Also, the fact that this is an engineering school gives them Bonus Shame Points. Mind the gap on those bridges!

@al2o3cr: That woman is pure evil. In a related story, the Children’s Defense Fund reports that child poverty is so dire in parts of Mississippi that Dutch NGOs are providing funding to some communities.

@SanFranLefty:

I recall hearing some discussion in an MTR (mountaintop removal) documentary that chunks of Appalachia were the “Fourth World”, since industry could get away with shit there that not even Third World countries would put up with (MTR causing massive watershed pollution, for instance).

Perhaps that’s the TOP SEKRIT conservative plan to solve the immigration problem – turn this country into such a festering shitpile of low wages and quasi-indentured servitude that people don’t want to come anymore…

I’d say you ruined Assistant Registrar’s Jennifer Laur’s weekend.

She looks like a nice girl. Maybe you should ask her out, Nojo. She might be in to tall guys who wear Birks with socks.

@SanFranLefty: The original was much nastier — and now unavailable — but I adapted it when I realized what the trick was.

Oh, and my Mom worked in the UO Registrar’s Office. Dating one would be creepy.

Sadly, I was too late to see your handiwork and I have no idea from the description how you were doing it, but it looks like some others were equally entertained.

@libertarian tool: Let’s try a dangerous Geek-to-English translation: The pages were programmed so that a variable encoded into the URL was used as the display headline. You just supply your custom Nasty Phrase as the variable, and voila!

Neat trick for 1995. For it to be used on that kind of website in 2011 is dereliction of duty.

@libertarian tool: Ivan E. Rection. Well-played. His officemate is Heywood Jablowmi.

@Dodgerblue: Did you see the video of Anthony Weiner thanking the GOP for going after Click and Clack? He mentioned some of their “employees” who would lose their jobs. The video is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on the House floor.

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