HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF reader recounts a year at an ed-tech company whose 'Run Locally' button let any website, or anyone on the same network, send arbitrary C code to a student's Windows PC. The vendor patched it quietly and kept …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
MartyPC, an open-source project written in Rust, emulates early IBM-compatible PCs with cycle-accurate timing, mimicking original hardware quirks rather than just running old software. The emulator runs across major oper…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Three Intel engineers quit in 1974 and 1975, built a chip for under $400,000, and accidentally created one of computing's longest survivors. The Zilog Z80, designed to out-Intel Intel, still powers Texas Instruments calc…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In 1984 Ken Sakamura launched TRON, a vertically integrated OS family with its own CPU and a 1.5 million character encoding. The desktop variant died after a 1989 US trade report named it a barrier, while the embedded va…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF's latest Error'd roundup collects software that fails at failing: Chromium logs a negative frame latency of -0.18 ms, a weather app reports negative infinity degrees during an eclipse, and an ownCloud API e…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF reader spotted a chip datasheet documenting a "Super User Fantastic Feature Enable Register", acronym SUFFER, at offset 0x0120. The column reflects on embedded life, where bad datasheets disagree with reality…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Chinese startup LandSpace has landed the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket on land after delivering a satellite to orbit, a first for a Chinese company. The methane-fueled booster touched down 250km from its launchpad. …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Matlab script built to reconstruct experiment logs uses a switch inside a loop where the state counter itself gets reset mid-trial. Comments admit the author cannot tell which trigger is correct, so whole trials get de…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Historian Jill Lepore's Guardian long read, adapted from her book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, argues that today's data-driven politics was predicted and warned about decades ago. She follows Simulmatics, L…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A long read traces Finger from a 1971 Stanford time-sharing tool to its modern small-web revival. The protocol on port 79 powered the first microblog and served the first IoT device. It survived the Morris worm, and clie…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A SharePoint to SQL Server migration went sideways when a developer mapped a SQL Server float column to .NET float instead of double. SharePoint stores Number fields as doubles, so large 10-digit customer numbers lost th…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Fabien Sanglard dissects the 1996 Quake shareware CD-ROM, which shipped encrypted versions of id's entire catalogue. Cracking group GNOMON needed only 39 days, because the unlock tool on the disc generated the serial loc…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Desktopcolors.com catalogs every solid background color ever shipped by desktop operating systems, from Windows 1.0's dithered cyan to KDE Plasma 6's Breeze blue. The open-source archive currently holds 194 colors across…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Chris Staecker restored a well-preserved Digi-Comp I, a mechanical educational toy computer released in 1963 by E.S.R. Programmed by sliding tubes on rails that trigger spring-loaded levers via a manual clock switch, the…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In a new Daily WTF feature, editor Remy Porter argues no ticket-tracking tool is truly good, and ranks Jira among the worst. A reader named Klinsten shares a workflow diagram so tangled, with transition labels mixing Dut…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Calgary writer Brennan Kenneth Brown argues the largely retired job title 'webmaster' deserves a comeback, not as an AI orchestrator but as anyone who builds and runs their own site by hand. His essay traces the term fro…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has drawn a line between pull request descriptions and comments in source code. One is a sales pitch aimed at the reviewer, the other is lasting documentation for whoever comes next. The di…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Ukrainian military intelligence says it recovered an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX 16GB module from the wreckage of a Russian S-71M Monochrome cruise missile, suggesting AI-assisted targeting. Nvidia left Russia in 2022, before …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The latest Error'd column on The Daily WTF collects reader-submitted software blunders: a jackpot ad full of zeroes, a SignUpGenius dialog declaring success an illusion, a PHP crash leaking through redaction, and The Reg…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A PHP developer inherited a project where repeated curl requests were properly initialized and executed but their results were never stored or used. The code block appeared copy-pasted throughout the codebase, with param…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Twitch has introduced a
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Dr. Tim King, whose Tripos multitasking system became AmigaDOS, has died at the end of July. A Cambridge PhD holder and founder of Perihelion, King shaped early microcomputer OS design and remains a pivotal figure in Ami…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A new developer at a software company discovers her manager has forbidden branching and pull requests, claiming they waste time and violate CI principles. Her teammates quietly ignore this rule and work with branches any…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
TinySol, a hand-written assembly solitaire for DOS, squeezes full gameplay into just 3 KB. The minimal version runs on IBM 5150 hardware with CGA/EGA/VGA support; a 3.5 KB build adds mouse and save features. It fits insi…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A detailed historical account of how Rust's RangeFrom type evolved from its 2014 introduction through 2026, examining the deliberate overflow behavior, documented boundary quirks, and recent API stabilization via RFC 355…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In 1954, Eiichi Goto invented the parametron, a ferrite-core resonant circuit that encoded bits in the phase of an oscillation. It powered a whole family of Japanese computers — slow by any measure, but cheap, reliable, …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Developer Jggonz has released os8088, a single-floppy OS for 8088 IBM PCs and clones with a slick Macintosh-style GUI, preemptive multitasking, and loadable software. It would have been sensational in 1984; arriving in 2…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF highlights a concurrency API where a Status property carries an XML doc comment solemnly declaring it private so consumers cannot break everything — while the property itself is declared fully public with g…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Network engineer Anurag Bhatia pieces together the history of transit-free (Tier 1) networks from 1997 to today, combining old Route Views and RIPE RIS BGP dumps with the Wikipedia Tier 1 page's edit history — and docume…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Dennis Ritchie's page of Unix curiosities explains where 'values of β will give rise to dom!' came from, why 'You are not expected to understand this' was an apology rather than arrogance, and how a missing inverter wire…