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Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

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Re: Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

#31

Post by inopinatus »

4cao wrote: post #11

> 12. By this time, we had isolated the app and were convinced that this is the one that is fetching the image on startup. We could not find the image anywhere in the app, confirming our theory that it fetches the image but does not display it. The analysis stops right when things start to become interesting. I was hoping there'd be a decompiled code snippet to see what the app in question is actually doing with the…

Evidently the download has been specially crafted and surreptitiously emplaced to globally disseminate a steganographically embedded key that decrypts tailored malware aimed at disrupting the [REDACTED] nuclear weapons programme and for which the app is a weaponised delivery sabot distributed and marketed as part of the same covert operation.

What I'm trying to say is, the image is a plant

Re: Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

#32

Post by user-the-name »

sydd wrote: post #4

Guys can you stop the "hello from Hacker news" comments? its spam.

Never link to issues on bug tracker. This always, without fail, happens. It makes more work for people who are already stressed about trying to solve a problem.

Just don't link to bug trackers, ever.

Re: Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

#33

Post by biased_coin »

4cao wrote: post #11

> 12. By this time, we had isolated the app and were convinced that this is the one that is fetching the image on startup. We could not find the image anywhere in the app, confirming our theory that it fetches the image but does not display it. The analysis stops right when things start to become interesting. I was hoping there'd be a decompiled code snippet to see what the app in question is actually doing with the…

If one were to decompile and check what the app is doing, I'd guess it would still be a good idea to not say so on a public forum. Especially, in cases where there is so much public attention. :)

Re: Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

#34

Post by raverbashing »

cypressious wrote: post #28
raverbashing wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one side, StackOverflow has been a blessing. On the other, it made "Copy Paste Programming" go to eleven. (There was even a C# example the other day that famously broke in a big project but I can't find it) Maybe it would be a case of Stack Overflow linting examples to remove stuff like builtin urls and such. I've seen "developers" complaining that example code with a very explicit >replace this part for your use…

You're probably thinking about some app not being able to start when some other specific app is running because both were using a GUID copied from SO for implementing single-instance apps. Possibly the SO question in question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/522874/615306

It's a good example but I think it's not exactly that. Maybe it was a GUID generation code that would generate the same one for every instance?

> I know it has something to do with some mythical thing called a mutex, rarely can I find someone that bothers to stop and explain what one of these are.

Oh my

Re: Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

#35

Post by WJW »

lxgr wrote: post #5

This seems interesting from a legal point of view as well: Is an app downloading, but never displaying, creative commons content infringing on copyright (by not showing correct attribution and violating the CC terms)? Besides copyright, could this be considered theft of service?

It's difficult to steal something offered for free. You could try to charge them with attempted DDOS or something like that but since wikimedia did not suffer any actual degradation of service. I think that at most you can go for something like "causing harmful traffic through negligence" but you'd need to prove the traffic was actually harmful.

In any case let's not get carried away. 90 million requests for a 70KB file is only 5.8 TB. Wikimedia mentions in their about pages that they are hosted on bare metal servers in various places around the world. Just going on the bandwidth charges of the first provider in the list, that'd be about $30 USD per month if they have the "bulk" pricing or $300 USD per month if they use the list pricing. I don't think that is worth going to court over for the Wikimedia foundation.

Re: Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

#36

Post by simonh »

oefrha wrote: post #23

> To narrow down the app, we decided to observe connections to the image from clients (phones) to our servers. We did this by opening the popular apps one-by-one and noting down the time. After doing this for all the apps, we then ran this query in Hive: SELECT * FROM wmf.webrequest WHERE year=2021 AND month=2 AND day=9 AND parse_media_file_url(uri_path).base_name='/wikipedia/commons/1/16/AsterNovi-belgii-flower-1mb.…

If they have the logs in Elasticsearch or something similar it wouldn't be all that hard.

Re: Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

#37

Post by soneca »

sydd wrote: post #4

Guys can you stop the "hello from Hacker news" comments? its spam.

There was ”Hello to Hacker News” from one of the moderators, to which someone replied ”Hello from Hacker News”. No that much of a spam IMO. And it was from one person, not much all of ”guys” in HN

Re: Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

#38

Post by boomboomsubban »

qeternity wrote: post #21
lxgr wrote: post #5

This seems interesting from a legal point of view as well: Is an app downloading, but never displaying, creative commons content infringing on copyright (by not showing correct attribution and violating the CC terms)? Besides copyright, could this be considered theft of service?

> This seems interesting from a legal point of view as well Is it? If you make a resource freely available to people online, and people access said resource, what's the legal ramification there? It would appear there is no malicious intent which would be necessary to make the case for abuse, and theft of service would be a stretch given that Wikimedia doesn't charge for their service.

It's a violation of the terms of use

>Disrupting the services by placing an undue burden on a Project website or the networks or servers connected with a Project website;

Re: Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

#39

Post by kumukomo »

sydd wrote: post #4

Guys can you stop the "hello from Hacker news" comments? its spam.

No, just f** o* with your childish s**. We are a legion. We do not forget. We do not serve you or anybody else. We bring chaos when and where we want. Wikipedia is just another target for us. Down with the flames. Losers like you are nothing but worthless air to us.

Re: Wikimedia narrows down the app sendin 90M requests to a pic of flower

#40

Post by joadha »

user-the-name wrote: post #32
sydd wrote: post #4

Guys can you stop the "hello from Hacker news" comments? its spam.

Never link to issues on bug tracker. This always, without fail, happens. It makes more work for people who are already stressed about trying to solve a problem. Just don't link to bug trackers, ever.

Nah, if it's a historically or culturally significant issue, I'm definitely linking to it so people can read about it. Just add a warning not to post meaningless garbage in the ticket's thread, if you're that concerned about it.
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