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.