Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.e

Also Zalack@kbin.social

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Sorry you’re right that I wasn’t being precise with my terminology. It’s not a DDOS but it could be used to slow down targeted features, take up some HTTP connections, inflate the target’s DB, and waste CPU cycles, so it shares some characteristics of one.

    In general, you want to be very very careful of implementing features that allow untrusted parties to supply potentially unbounded resources to your server.

    And yeah, it would be trivial to write a set of scripts that pretend to be a lemmy instance and supply an endless number of fake communities to the target server. The nice thing about this attack vector is that it’s also not bound by the normal rate limiting since it’s the target server making the requests. There are definitely a bunch of ways lemmy could mitigate such an attack, but the current approach of “list communities current users are subscribed to” seems like a decent first approach.






  • Zalack@startrek.websitetoMemes@lemmy.mlWinning is relative
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    1 year ago

    This reminded me of an old joke:

    Two economists are walking down the street with their friend when they come across a fresh, streaming pile of dog shit. The first economist jokingly tells the other “I’ll give you a million dollars if you eat that pile of dog shit”. To his surprise, the second economist grabs it off the ground and eats it without hesitation. A deal is a deal so the first economist hands over a million dollars.

    A few minutes later they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist, wanting to give his peer a taste of his own medicine, says he’ll give the first economist a million dollars if he eats it. The first economist agrees and does so, winning him a million dollars.

    Their friend, rather confused, asks what the point of all this was, the first economist gave the second economist a million dollars, and then the second economist gave it right back. All they’ve accomplished is to eat two piles of shit.

    The two economists look rather taken aback. “Well sure,” they say, “but we’ve grown the economy by two million dollars!”





  • Zalack@startrek.websitetoMemes@lemmy.mlI like a good UX
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    1 year ago

    That’s not an issue with FOSS vs proprietary, but with large corporations needing to be broken up.

    FOSS isn’t immune to that, its a known thing that large corporations can use their dominance of a market segment to infiltrate even totally open standards and make demands with the threat of leaving the standard (and therefore resigning it to becoming irrelevant).

    This is especially true of web standards. Chromium is FOSS, yet Google can use its absolute dominance in the market place to force through changes to things like HTTP standards (also FOSS). My understanding is Microsoft and Google both have strong-armed stuff into C++ in the past as well