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500 Internal error at YouTube

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Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#31

Post by grogenaut »

drdoom wrote: post #24

We have been doing this in all of our web applications for over a decade now. Essentially, whenever there is an error, we don't just display the error message as-is. All the technical or trace info it contains seems to scare users. So, we simply encrypt it and display a base64-encoded version of it. It also gets saved into a log file. Users are more comfortable with this way: they simply copy/paste the text to us and…

What happens if there's an error in the crypto handling system? Edit: Not a troll, I'm seriously interested in "minimum required functional systems" in the case.

Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#32

Post by drdoom »

grogenaut wrote: post #31
drdoom wrote: post #24

We have been doing this in all of our web applications for over a decade now. Essentially, whenever there is an error, we don't just display the error message as-is. All the technical or trace info it contains seems to scare users. So, we simply encrypt it and display a base64-encoded version of it. It also gets saved into a log file. Users are more comfortable with this way: they simply copy/paste the text to us and…

What happens if there's an error in the crypto handling system? Edit: Not a troll, I'm seriously interested in "minimum required functional systems" in the case.

There is no other dependency in the encoder/decoder functions so there is no point of failure there. Those functions were developed a long time ago and have not changed. They work with any stream of data and automatically chop off the input after the first few hundred characters. This contains more than enough info for the developers to see exactly what caused the error.

In any case, even if, as you say, if the crypto handling system failed, and it returned nothing, there was no critical information that was lost. Only information on an error message, which you will hear from the user anyway.

Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#36

Post by grogenaut »

drdoom wrote: post #32
grogenaut wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if there's an error in the crypto handling system? Edit: Not a troll, I'm seriously interested in "minimum required functional systems" in the case.

There is no other dependency in the encoder/decoder functions so there is no point of failure there. Those functions were developed a long time ago and have not changed. They work with any stream of data and automatically chop off the input after the first few hundred characters. This contains more than enough info for the developers to see exactly what caused the error. In any case, even if, as you say, if the crypt…

Aah, I was thinking you might be encoding stack traces or equivalents which you'd want to protect a lot more than the head of user submitted data which the user chooses to re-submit through a seperate channel that is about as secure (esp for the purposes (email)) as the original channel. A hard coded key would be fine for this imho as you don't have to protect the user from the user's own data.

Cool idea btw.

Re: 500 Internal error at YouTube

#39

Post by hundchenkatze »

j_s wrote: post #34
ge0 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21681084/decoding-youtube...

Dang, did you type that all in manually from the image? Ouch!

Nah, I don't think so. The SO post contains a link to this HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7210750 and it contains a link to what looks like a paste bin of sorts. http://paste.pm/raw/dme but paste.pm is apparently down.
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