In short, I’ve always hated it. But today, it actually made my day. One of our Dutch Students at the office found out a local telco had set up an online SMS application. Curious as they were, they copied the code, adjusted it a bit, and found out they could send messages themselves as well. Free. To more destinations than the telco originally intended. He showed some people the site, and we all liked the idea.

So, I started wondering what they did. After taking a look at the original sourcecode myself, and comparing it with what they made, it really made me laugh. (It made me think about a certain “webdesigner” we had back in NL, he made similar assumptions). Anyway, it seems the telco did all checks in Javascript. Everything. Clientside. In this case a picture will say more than words, so take a look at this. That’s why client-side checks suck bigtime. Keep in mind the telco put this “new” version of their site online just this morning.

In the end, I think it took me longer to “scramble up” that picture than it did to create a simple shellscript, able to send SMS using their server :)