💾 Archived View for wirthslaw.flounder.online › gemlog › 2021-12-22-misleading-titles.gmi captured on 2024-08-24 at 23:45:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Misleading Titles

I came across this article on my feed a couple of days ago.

How cut-and-pasted programming is putting the internet and society at risk

Since this is a topic that is quite relevant to my line of work, I read it eagerly. What a disappointment!

Firstly, the words in the title do not appear anywhere in the article. It could be referenced indirectly by one of the included links but I did not bother to find out. So the content of the article does not really support the serious allegation made by its title.
The article is about the recent Log4j vulnerabilities issue. That is not an example of copy-paste programming at all.
The writer highlights a comment - made in response to another article - which is a rant about “lazy” developers who “will not RTFM”. That is not how security vulnerabilities work.
The writer ends the section with “Well, he might say that, but as an unskilled programmer I couldn’t possibly comment.” But that did not stop you from writing a misleading article, did it?

Software developers do plenty to shoot themselves in the foot. And the industry as a whole could do better as far as security is concerned. But this article just comes across as a cheap shot by a careless writer.