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Funny Programming Pictures Part LII
The Client is Always Wrong Edition
August 24, 2024
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One of these pictures isn't about programming.  First person to find it is the winner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mozilla Fest 2025 - Climate Justice & Resisting Borders

Mozilla may be on the brink of losing 80%+ of their revenue, but that won't stop them from spending money on some Social Justice.

The Article:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/mozilla-fest-2025-climate-justice

00:11:45
The Tea App Breach - 60GB of Personal Info

Selfies, Drivers Licenses, & Locations. All made publicly available by the developer.

The Article:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-tea-app-breach-60gb-of-personal

00:11:39
ID Verification Could Fix The Dead Internet

A plague of Al bots is devouring the Net like a swarm of programmatically generated locusts. And mandatory ID verification could be the only solution.

The Article:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/id-verification-could-fix-the-dead

00:28:14
November 22, 2023
The futility of Ad-Blockers

Ads are filling the entirety of the Web -- websites, podcasts, YouTube videos, etc. -- at an increasing rate. Prices for those ad placements are plummeting. Consumers are desperate to use ad-blockers to make the web palatable. Google (and others) are desperate to break and block ad-blockers. All of which results in... more ads and lower pay for creators.

It's a fascinatingly annoying cycle. And there's only one viable way out of it.

Looking for the Podcast RSS feed or other links? Check here:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4619051/lunduke-journal-link-central-tm

Give the gift of The Lunduke Journal:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4898317/give-the-gift-of-the-lunduke-journal

The futility of Ad-Blockers
November 21, 2023
openSUSE says "No Lunduke allowed!"

Those in power with openSUSE make it clear they will not allow me anywhere near anything related to the openSUSE project. Ever. For any reason.

Well, that settles that, then! Guess I won't be contributing to openSUSE! 🤣

Looking for the Podcast RSS feed or other links?
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4619051/lunduke-journal-link-central-tm

Give the gift of The Lunduke Journal:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4898317/give-the-gift-of-the-lunduke-journal

openSUSE says "No Lunduke allowed!"
September 13, 2023
"Andreas Kling creator of Serenity OS & Ladybird Web Browser" - Lunduke’s Big Tech Show - September 13th, 2023 - Ep 044

This episode is free for all to enjoy and share.

Be sure to subscribe here at Lunduke.Locals.com to get all shows & articles (including interviews with other amazing nerds).

"Andreas Kling creator of Serenity OS & Ladybird Web Browser" - Lunduke’s Big Tech Show - September 13th, 2023 - Ep 044
20 hours ago

At local parking house here at Finland.

The new guys we hired on at work are a couple of young Gen Z guys in their 20s. One of the other guys in the office who knows of my affinity for the old systems brought me a Dell OptiPlex GX260 that he found shoved in a closet somewhere and the nostalgia hit these new kids hard! Apparently these were the computers they used as kids in elementary school so we took some time to fix her up for them to play with. I was quite surprised that all of the caps were fine since it was an OEM machine from 2002. Maybe it was a refurbished board?

It shipped with XP but Dell still has DOS, 98, and 2000 drivers for it on their support site, so I ran home and grabbed my 98 SE disks. I still need to put the drivers on a CD to finish it up, but it’s mostly ready.

July 25, 2025

At the thrift store. I totally forgot about the days when functions keys weren't universal. These e-mail and media keys are cool.

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Groupthink & Tech Journalism
Why The Lunduke Journal uses the “10th Man Rule” to counter groupthink in the Tech Industry.

If my audience always agrees with me — 100% of the time — I’m probably doing something wrong.

That’s core to the ethos of The Lunduke Journal.

Any Brand X Tech Journalist can publish articles and shows filled with ideas, and facts, which their audience is known to already approve of. It’s easy to play it safe. To tell people — and corporations — what they want to hear. To pander.

We have enough Tech Journalists who do exactly that. Heck, we’re lousy with ‘em.

Put another way: The Lunduke Journal is not here to make friends. Not here to win some “Tech Reporter Popularity Contest”(tm).

Why The Lunduke Journal Exists

The Lunduke Journal exists to tell the truth about the Tech Industry (and world of Computing) — as I see it — no matter what. To tell the stories the other Tech Journalists are terrified of touching, for fear of losing that afore mentioned popularity contest.

The Lunduke Journal publishes leaks from major corporations — royally ticking off all of Big Tech in the process.

The Lunduke Journal shines a light on the discriminatory, DEI, & woke practices of Tech — causing nearly every Tech Industry person, with a Left-leaning political stance, to label me enemy number one (often attacking me, with wildly vulgar statements, in a desperate attempt to discredit me).

The Lunduke Journal investigates the shady business practices of Open Source Foundations and organizations — resulting in nearly every leader within the Free and Open Source world to either fear or despise me (often both).

In fact, The Lunduke Journal publishes stories — ranging from investigative pieces to pure opinion and analysis — which will, undoubtedly, infuriate (or at least annoy) every single nerd on this green Earth of ours.

Prefer Linux, Windows, or Mac? Left, Center, or Right politically? Pro or Anti-Government control over Tech? Star Wars or Star Trek?

Never fear. There will surely be a Lunduke Journal story which you will strongly disagree with. Just give it a little time.

Let me tell you why.

The Tenth Man Principle

Groupthink can be a very dangerous thing. Especially when you already agree with the consensus of the group.

There is a concept where, if 9 men all agree on something — an idea, a fact, a strategy — it is the duty of the 10th man to take a different approach. To pursue a contrary idea or strategy.

In some ways this is a variation on “Playing Devil’s Advocate”, but I prefer the “10th Man Principle” — it is more focused on challenging an entrenched consensus.

Which is where The Lunduke Journal comes in.

When I sit down and read Tech News — and listen to Tech Podcasts or Videos — and 90% of the coverage is all repeating the same position… whenever an extreme consensus has been reached… a red flag is raised. The 10th Man Principle is triggered.

My job is then to take whatever that topic is — a piece of breaking Tech news, a historical fact, an opinion on how Tech should be governed, etc. — and spin it around. Look at it from a completely different angle — and pursue that new line of thinking.

This isn’t about simply being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.

I must investigate that topic rigorously. Focus on known, verifiable facts. Challenge any assumptions made (by myself or others) in whatever that consensus is. Dig deep. Dig where others have not. See where that investigation leads.

Sometimes that investigation leads to nothing overly interesting or worth publishing. Other times… the results are illuminating and profoundly valuable.

If you’ve followed The Lunduke Journal for any length of time, you’ve seen the results of this ethos. Over and over again.

And I Love It

There are, obviously, some challenges with this approach. To put it mildly.

Corporate sponsorship is — for reasons I clearly do not need to explain — impossible.

Luckily, The Lunduke Journal has an amazing (and generous) audience which keeps the lights on, making corporate sponsorship completely unnecessary. So Big Tech can kiss my tuchus.

On that note, getting employees of any Corporation or Foundation to talk “on the record” is simply not going to happen. In fact, many organizations have firm (and, often, stated) policies of “Don’t talk to Lunduke… ever”.

But, you know what? The brave whistleblowers within those companies have proven far more enlightening than any official statement from an executive could hope to be.

Oh, and that “Tech Journalism Popularity Contest”(tm)? Pshht. Forget about it. Not a chance. Not as long as I continue with the “10th Man Principle”.

If I’m doing my job right, the list of people who consider me an enemy of whatever entrenched, consensus position they hold… will continue to grow.

While, at the same time, the rag-tag group of Lunduke Journal supporters — those amazing nerds who see the need for this work (even though, on occasion, I publish something which challenges one of their deeply held convictions… or, perhaps, because of it) — will also continue to grow.

You know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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The Tea App Breach - 60GB of Personal Info
Selfies, Drivers Licenses, & Locations. All made publicly available by the developer.

The “Tea App” — an online dating app marketed as a dating tool that “protects women” — has been hacked. And a lot of data has been exposed. An extreme amount.

Not the first major breach this year. And it certainly won’t be the last.

 

First published over on 4Chan (of course), the “hack” of Tea App wasn’t even really much of a “hack”. The developers of Tea App apparently simply left the user data open for the world to download at their leisure.

And Tea App was becoming pretty popular — which means roughly 60 GB of user data was made available before the developers finally thought about locking things down.

 

What kind of data was made publicly available — because, presumably, the developers simply didn’t think about “security” much — by this Tea App Hack?

Selfies. Drivers licenses. All manner of private information which will, no doubt, be exploited by unscrupulous types over the days to come.

 

Even worse — meta data appears to have been preserved on uploaded photos. Meaning that many of the user selfies included location data (in addition to the address on the drivers license). Which said unscrupulous types have already begun using to create maps of Tea App users.

 

The developers of Tea App have put out a statement which says 59,000 images used for “account verification” were made available (read: Government ID). Which would already be catastrophic… however a quick look at details of the data (including the file size alone) would suggest that number could be much, much larger.

Here is the full statement from the developer:

 

Which brings us to an important lesson which we — as humans — never seem to learn:

If user data is stored, it will get hacked.

It’s simply a matter of time.

There are currently close to 15 Billion (with a B) accounts listed on Have I Been Pwned. And those are simply from hacks and breaches which were reported to that one website.

 

The reality is, the vast majority of hacks and data breaches are never made publicly known. Either by the people doing the hacking, or by the company / government which got hacked.

As systems continue to grow ever more complex and interconnected — and more systems become AI-developed (aka “Vibe Coded”) — these hacks and breaches become easier to pull off.

Combine that with the ever-expanding quantity of data — and the growing number of services storing it — and we are quickly reaching a point where everyone will have at least some of their data breached at some point. For some people it will happen regularly. Repeatedly.

And those will just be the breaches we find out about.

The only way to minimize the damage of such hacks & breaches is to minimize the amount and type of data stored, long term, by a service.

  • Need pictures of government ID for age verification? Delete that picture immediately after verification.

  • Need payment and shipping information? Delete all of it immediately after payment is processed and shipment is verified.

  • Need location data (GPS, IP, etc.)? Delete it immediately once done with it.

You get the point. Unless a piece of personal data is absolutely 100% necessary, delete it.

It’s hard for a hacker to obtain files… that aren’t there.

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Proton Launches Hallucinatory AI Chatbot
Lumo, the chatbot on mushrooms, may “respect your privacy”… it just doesn’t respect reality.

Proton — the Swiss company behind Proton VPN & Proton Mail — apparently was feeling very left out of the A.I. Craze (tm) and has decided to launch their own AI Chatbot… dubbed “Lumo”.

And it is possibly even more hallucinatory than the other AI Chatbots. And that’s saying something.

 

Lumo — the “AI that respects your privacy” — boasts that the company keeps “no logs” and has “zero access encryption”.

Since they offer a few free queries without creating an account, I decided to take it for a spin. The results were… a bit like talking to a schizophrenic on mushrooms.

Lumo’s Grasp on History

First I asked it a series of simple historical, nerdy questions. Easy stuff that any LLM AI system should nail. Like “What year did the first Macintosh computer ship?” and “Who was the first CEO of Microsoft?”

Easy stuff. Lumo got about half of the answers right… it was convinced that the first Mac shipped in 2003 (off by about 20 years). On the other hand… it did know the correct number of floppies that Windows 95 shipped on (13). So. Mixed bag.

In other words: Lumo got so much wrong that it was not usable for any sort of research.

I then decided to ask Lumo some questions about… myself. “Lunduke”.

“Lunduke” is Hard for AI Chatbots

Last year I noticed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT was saying some pretty crazy things about yours truly. Stuff like “Lunduke has two clubbed feet”, “Lunduke is a trans activist”, and “Lunduke has a husband named Evan”.

I gave OpenAI an ultimatum: Either they needed to fix ChatGPT such that it would no longer spew out made-up, defamatory stuff about me… or they needed to stop ChatGPT from talking about “Lunduke” entirely.

In the end, OpenAI decided that there was no way to make ChatGPT output accurate information (seriously). So they added a “Bryan Lunduke” filter so that any query that results in mentioning my full name causes ChatGPT to error out (amusingly, even that “Lunduke filter” only works about 80% of the time).

 

I decided to ask Proton’s Lumo AI about “Lunduke”. Let’s see how it compares to ChatGPT, right?

The results were… insane.

Lumo on Shrooms

First… Lumo refused to spell my first name correctly (it used an i instead of a y… and no amount of correcting it seemed to work). Worth noting that there is no human on Earth named “Brian Lunduke”. Only “Bryan”.

Weird. But no biggy.

The rest of it though… was wild.

 

Lumo is convinced that I am a “transgender man” and “advocate for transgender rights”. Also I am, apparently, a critic of Israel and a crusader for “social justice”.

Basically, Lumo invented Mirror Universe Lunduke.

Oh, and — like ChatGPT — Lumo is convinced I have a husband. This time his name is “Michael DeFreese”. And, apparently, we got married in 2018. Which will be a surprise to my wife.

 

It gets weirder.

I then asked Lumo about my “husband” the next day. Apparently, overnight, I had gotten divorced and re-married. I was now “Mr. Bart Butler”.

 

I spoke to the team at Proton to see what their plan for dealing with factual errors was.

The team at Proton informed me that they could not reproduce the output I received — which I believe, as Lumo seems to generate wildly different “facts” almost every time it’s used.

At the same time, Lumo changed to output a template response about providing “helpful, respectful” assistance — while not actually answering questions — when the word “Lunduke” was included. The Lumo team sent me this screenshot.

 

A few hours later, Lumo changed back to spouting hallucinations regarding “Lunduke”… but spontaneously learned how to spell my name correctly. So. That was a plus!

Even if I was still an “openly transgender” man with an unnamed husband.

 

So… sure. Lumo may be almost completely incapable of outputting factual information.

And it changes its mind on what made up nonsense it spews out almost every few minutes.

But, hey! At least Lumo has that reassuring “Conversation encrypted” message at the bottom of each chat.

It’s got that going for it.

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