The Web Is Full Of Geniuses Sharing Their Genius

There’s a natural progression many people follow when they get on the internet.

1. First develop an interest in learning how to do more with your computer.
2. Through the help of Google and tutorials written by idiots, aquire basic skills.
3. Spread your “knowledge” via blogging, forums or articles so that others can learn stupid ways to do things too.

This inbred circle of retardation means there’s millions of idiots breeding new idiots with their very limited grasp on how things work, completely ignoring why things work, and of course spreading insecure and downright dangerous practices.

They’re enabled by the very low entry barrier for “genius” on the internet – a computer and an internet connection.

If you want to learn, buy a book.  There’s about a million of them at Amazon.  If you want to share knowledge, actually aquire some first.

Take Einstein over here for an example.  The site is a blog about using and developing the internet.  The article is a feature of Google Analytics some people might not have been aware of.  So far, so good.  The article’s written by a fluent English speaker which is always a refreshing change.

So what’s my beef with it?  Einstein, a web developer of some sort (possibly the imaginary kind) used BMP for the image format.  The result?  Nearly a megabyte of slow-assed images that could total “a few kilobytes” if they were saved as PNG or GIF.

If you want to at least sound like you’re not a retard calling himself a web developer, take the time to learn one of the fundamentals of web development – when and what image format to use.  Your first hint that BMP has no place on a web page should be when you realise it’s not even discussed as a possibility.

Web development and programming are probably the two most internet-retarded industries in existance.  There’s a constant stream of horrible and down right dangerous tutorials floating around to “help” people learning program.

A quick glance at Pixel2Life’s php tutorial index quickly confirms my belief that the internet is dominated by dumbasses.  First P2L themselves – do you know why people hate and block ads?  Because jerkoffs hide them in content.  You guys win a prize for the most well-concealed advertising I’ve ever had the misfortune to see.

Once you get past the deceptively formatted and positioned advertisements you see a bunch of tutorials.

Like this idiot – create a link exchange thingy – go learn about “SQL injection” you retard.  Anyone who uses this morons code is going to have a site with the really desirable ablility to be destroyed in seconds by anyone who doesn’t like it. 

Then you have this chump who teaches you how to make a month list using PHP.  He bothers me for two reasons.  First he talks about single vs double quote marks being used for “arrays”.  They’re used for “strings”, the array in question is an array of “strings”.

After that he teaches you an excessively silly method.  First, shove month names in an array, then iterate through the array to generate a month list.  No problem with that, except with his brilliant code sample you’re going to be doing that for each month field you want – creating an array and looping through it each time.  Someone who’s not an idiot would have suggested people create one single array holding the month names, and then iterate through that single array each time you want a month list.

Another example of why humanity is doomed – this chump teaches you how to make the most easily bypassed flavour of CAPTCHA in existance.

First a quick “wtf is captcha” – it’s those lame images you see with random letters/numbers jumbled around and you have to enter the correct code to validate you’re some sort of human.

The problem with the Einstein Approach To CAPTCHA is it’s very easy to break.

How to break it:

1.   The image consists of 3 colours.  The background, the lines and the text.  Step 1 is to strip out the lines by simple colour comparison.  You can even determine what colour the text is programatically – it’s the one that occurs the least.
2. Now you have a single colour background with text.  Using a simple algorithm you can determine the dimension of each letter and isolate them (tightly cropped) into their own bitmaps.
3. The font, font size and weight are not manipulated at all.  There’s also no real distortion or warping.  Write a simple php script that generates each upper and lowercase letter and number and saves them as a graphic.
4. Decode the captcha by comparing the bitmaps for the letters you identified in the CAPTCHA against each letter/number until you find a match.  You can do this most efficiently by checking the width/height and file size first, if they don’t match then you can move on.  After that a simple pixel-by-pixel check that skips as soon as different pixels are found will identify the characters in the CAPTCHA image.
5. That’s all, you’re free to spam any website that uses this tutorial, or other versions of the stupid man’s approach to CAPTCHA.

Another great way to open your site up to malicious activities is to take the idiot’s guide to “tell a friend” scripts.  How about you read up on email injection before you get web hosts blacklisted because of your stupidity?

C# and Visual Basic tutorials are just as bad – once you’re away from MSDN the chances of an example actually compiling, and following any sort of best practices, and having even rudimentary security precautions, are slim.