Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 269 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#241

Post by johncolanduoni »

sitkack wrote: post #238
johncolanduoni wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A trillion dollar company (that loves huge vanity projects) gave up on maintaining a browser because it was too much work and just ship a Chrome fork now. I won’t defend Mozilla’s allocation of their resources, but even if they put it all into the “right” Firefox features the web platform is too complex and too much of a moving target for a company with mere centi-million revenues.

They are also firing as many senior folks as possible. You should revisit what ever argument you are trying to make.

Microsoft? Were they firing as many senior folks as possible in 2018 when they announced they would give up on EdgeHTML and Chakra? Or in early 2020 when it actually came together? That’s not my recollection of the FAANG-ish job market at the time these decisions were made.

If you meant Mozilla, they’re a total indefensible trashfire for sure. But I’m not convinced they could have succeeded with their resources.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#242

Post by johncolanduoni »

adastra22 wrote: post #195
johncolanduoni wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internal apps on non-private IP addresses occasionally use this. There is a standard called Private Network Access[1] that requires these requests to have preflights like CORS requests. Only Chrome has implemented it so far. [1]: https://wicg.github.io/private-network-access/

Why though? What is the use case that demands this? It'd better be a real pressing need because the security risks are immense and obvious. This is a backdoor to every network firewall.

It’s more that it wasn’t prevented back when the web was first coming together, because security wasn’t on almost anyone’s minds at all. There wasn’t a hole added at some point; it’s just that browsers didn’t specifically block domains that resolve to public IPs from accessing domains that resolve to private IPs.

Realistically, it’s a backdoor to every network firewall that has existed for the entire era in which browsers were used in “secured” internal networks also connected to the internet. Everyone has either designed with it in mind, or gotten lucky that nobody tried to use it on them for like 30 years. I think it’s good to put away this footgun, but there’s no useful blame to assign here.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#243

Post by jpeggtulsa »

karel-3d wrote: post #63

It's coming from a F5 script, which is a company that sells anti-bot protection amid other things. (It's coming from obfuscated script at /TSPD, which is a F5 thing.) https://www.f5.com/

Isn't F5 the company that makes nginx?

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#244

Post by Dylan16807 »

qingcharles wrote: post #209
gmueckl wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to deal with the DS-160 multiple times over the year. I don't think you give justice to how bad this website really is. I have started to notice that these "timeouts" are very random. At the worst times, the session "times out" immediately after login. These random logouts happens more frequently during certain times of the day and seems to follow a semi-predictable pattern. It is almost certainly tied to syste…

One thing a developer sat in DC or SV with a 5G iPhone 16 doesn't realize too, is that if you are visiting these web sites with a phone plan that has a tiny monthly data allowance then this bloat can blow out an entire month in one sitting. I worked with people on parole that were given free phones to use for job applications, finding their way around etc, and they would only get 3GB data a month. Some of the sites t…

> You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.

Sure, I'll do my best to try it. I'll approximate the throttle by limiting chrome to 128kbps, 500ms delay, and 5% packet loss for fun.

With a fresh incognito session, google responds to "here to 4th street" in 10 seconds, and when I click to open maps it needs just under two minutes to load. Then I can click on the transit option and it needs another 10 seconds to update.

Not too bad for a cold cache. If I do it again with a hot cache it only takes 20 seconds to go through the whole process. And I expect the app to be similar to the hot cache situation. Even with 64kbps I'd expect reasonable results. Do any cell providers throttle worse than that?

I agree with your argument about bloat in general, but google in particular has a lot of good engineering resources and tries to work well on bad connections.

Also I would be in favor of some spectrum licensing rules that say you can't throttle below 1Mbps...

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#245

Post by tos1 »

Filligree wrote: post #173
LarMachinarum wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… or you can instead phase out those browsers who try to force blocker restrictions i.e. spyware on you (e.g. chrome and such), and use one of the browsers where you can use the full-featured (not "lite") uBlock Origin instead, e.g. Firefox.

Firefox might be an okay browser, but that would imply supporting Mozilla. I've been meaning to switch to Vivaldi. Just as soon as the onboarding dialog stops crashing.

I'm curious: What's your reasons for not wanting to support Mozilla?

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#246

Post by M95D »

noja wrote: post #67
M95D wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't handle it. Anyway, there's no way to know what a website does on the server site. Even a completely static website could be sending the server logs somewhere. There are options to not load JS, images, XMLHttpRequests, frames, cookies, for each site, but it doesn't list individual files.

Then why use it? They're number one.

No other extension is giving me control like uMatrix does, even considering it's limits.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#247

Post by M95D »

rapnie wrote: post #148
M95D wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But uBlockOrigin UI is so much worse... Besides, uMatrix works fine. It's that kind of program that doesn't need any updates.

I would really like an intuitive UI for people who don't want to do 'a project' to get their config tight.

But it is intuitive... I don't know what you mean.

You can't manage a whitelist with a single big red on/off button, if that's what you want.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#248

Post by akimbostrawman »

M95D wrote: post #247
rapnie wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would really like an intuitive UI for people who don't want to do 'a project' to get their config tight.

But it is intuitive... I don't know what you mean. You can't manage a whitelist with a single big red on/off button, if that's what you want.

You technically can, that is what community website rule Recipe are for.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#249

Post by Filligree »

Rastonbury wrote: post #218
Filligree wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox might be an okay browser, but that would imply supporting Mozilla. I've been meaning to switch to Vivaldi. Just as soon as the onboarding dialog stops crashing.

I wonder how bad does Mozilla have to be that you have to continue using Chrome without ublock?

Worse than it is now, I suppose.

Re: Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

#250

Post by Filligree »

tos1 wrote: post #245
Filligree wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox might be an okay browser, but that would imply supporting Mozilla. I've been meaning to switch to Vivaldi. Just as soon as the onboarding dialog stops crashing.

I'm curious: What's your reasons for not wanting to support Mozilla?

I disagree with their politics, I'm concerned by the multiple privacy incidents, and I generally refuse to support them until they refocus on Firefox instead of all the other stuff they're doing.

If they worked only on Firefox, I'd have nothing against them. As it stands, I can't even donate to Firefox if I want to.

Post reply on HN