Category: Articles

Sometimes a good intentioned security practice can go horribly wrong. The company my wife works had a training session on some new material in a new system. To start training everyone’s password was reset with an eleven character temporary password. Upon logging in users were met with a simple screen asking them to change their password to one of their liking.

It was your typical password change form. One box on the top for your old password and then two below for the new one. But as everyone tried to change their password they were meant with error after error.

My girlfriend was smart enough to count the stars in the password field. Whoever had come up with the magic eleven number had apparently forgotten that the change password form only takes ten characters. With no way to continue and nobody around to fix the problem she and all of her co-workers spent a good part of the day filling out various packets with ‘could not view training material.’

And now, as a result of these overbearing and poorly implemented security protocols, everyone’s password is stuck on the same temporary one until someone who can count can fix it.

Awhile back I posted an article and code to upload files to YouTube. It wasn’t a full example but nonetheless I thought it would give a programmer a healthy leg up if attempting the same thing. An exhaustive search showed nothing of the like on the net so I published it for the world to see.

For the world to see, not for the world to copy and paste to sell for $110 as it’s own.

I was the victim of copytheft. Someone had taken my code line for line and attempted to sell it as their own work. He was caught in the process as the same Google search that produced the code he stole also showed his boss he’s a plagiarist and not a programmer. It would be different if he used my code as the framework for a more functional piece and left me attribution. But this was a line for line copy with my information removed.

Copyright law in the US is fairly clear on the matter. Anything you write down automatically becomes your copyright. Unless you have permission from the author, using it for commercial purposes is illegal.

It’s just something that really chaps me. Any programmer is welcome to use my code to learn from or as a stepping stone to something bigger but not to just blatantly copy and paste it and sell it as your own. If your not sure you can always ask.