It's Thanksgiving Day in the US. Yesterday, we looked at a classic "encryption" story, and today, we should all be thankful that we don't have to support this encryption code. Original --Remy

Richard's company builds, hosts, and maintains a variety of small- and mid-sized web-based applications for their clients. Recently, one of their clients asked Richard to help audit a fraudulent transaction, which meant that Richard needed to dig through the code to see how to decrypt bank account numbers stored in the database. The search led him to H88493247329(), the method responsible for encrypting customer data. After spending a minute to add linebreaks and rename the variables, Richard asked his coworker why he obfuscated the code. His coworker scoffed, you should always encrypt your encryption functions -- it's completely insecure otherwise

Is it that time of year already? Here in the US, we're prepping for the Thanksgiving holiday, so let's take a trip way back into the archives, and learn about the life of a moderately-paid-consultant. Original --Remy

Paul B always thought of himself as a moderately-paid consultant. With no real overhead, a policy against ties when meeting with prospective clients, and a general pickiness about the projects he'll take on, his rates tend to be pretty low. One company that looked right up his alley was a mid-sized manufacturing company that wanted a custom webshop. They went to the highly-paid consultants in town, but weren't too happy with the six-figure price tag. Paul's quote was in the five-figure range, which he felt was pretty moderate given that it was a several month project. Of course, the company wasn't too happy with his quote either, so they searched high and low for a three- or four-figure price. They eventually found one overseas.

Despite losing the bid, Paul never bothered unsubscribing from the company's mailing list - there was always something exciting about learning the latest in gimbal clamps and engine nozzle extensions. About a year and a half later, he received an exciting newsletter announcing that the webshop was finally live. Out of curiosity, he created an account to check things out. A few days later, he received an apology for lost orders - they didn't know who had ordered what, so they sent it to everyone who had signed up. And then came the "data breach" email — everyone's personal data (which, for Paul, was just his throw-away email) was now in the hands of some hackers. You get what you pay for never rang so true.

A fair bit of "bad code" requires at least a passing understanding of the language in question, or the domain involved. But bad comments transcend programming languages. Vilx sends us this one, which comes from code which is definitely running in production.

// WARNING!!! Special case for [external API] testing.
// DO NOT LET THIS PIECE OF CODE FIND IT'S WAY TO PRODUCTION

Octavia (previously) didn't just inherit a C# application with dodgy approaches to string handling. It's also an application with questionable understandings of CSS.

CSS is far from perfect, and offers a lot of pitfalls and traps. There's a reason the "impossibility" of vertically centering text is a punchline. It's so flexibly declarative that, in many cases, there are many ways to achieve the same styling result, and it's difficult to pick out the correct one. But one would hope that developers could at least avoid the obviously terrible ones.

Octavia inherited a decade old pile of C#, and the code quality was pretty much what one would expect from a decade old pile that hadn't seen any real refactoring: nothing but spaghetti. Worse, it also had an "inner platform" problem, as everything they put in their API could conceivably be called by their customers' own "customizations".

One small block caught her eye, as suspicious:

Long-lived projects can have… interesting little corners. Choices made 13 years ago can stick around, either because they work well enough, or because, well, every change breaks somebody's workflow.

Today's anonymous submitter was poking around the code base of a large, long-lived JavaScript framework. In a file, not modified since 2007, but still included in the product, they found this function.