why do error messages go like “install failure error 0001” instead of telling the user what’s wrong

Question

why do error messages go like “install failure error 0001” instead of telling the user what’s wrong

In: 1812

Answer 1

There’s a bunch of possible reasons, but at my work we deliberately have opaque error messages for anything that is publicly available – to make the system harder to reverse engineer / make it harder for anybody with bad intentions to understand what’s happening when they make a failed request.

Our internal systems tend to have much more useful error messages because they’re only ever seen by other staff members.

It’s also entirely possible that a weird error message is just because it’s a bug that nobody thought of, so there’s no error handling for it.