Having worked at nyt I worked on nyt_cookie.so an Apache module for parsing and forwarding some of the early tracking systems . So back on the topic over hacks . The source for it was in a cvs repo hosted on this guys second office laptop , running FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE . So one it was 2009 and 3.2 was incredibly old ; as was the laptop . One day the laptops disk dies and no one had backups of the repo . Nyt_cookie.so was kept on the prod web servers for another 4 or 5 years before it was abandoned. We used to binpatch the binary to fix it up .