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Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

blakewatson.com

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Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#122
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who has pentested a few PHP codebases over the years, rather than as a developer, It's a bit like C. That is, it's an absolute footgun in the wrong hands, and a lesser footgun in experienced hands. For experienced devs following best practices and using modern frameworks it's "mostly fine", and that's the side of things that's been improved over the years, but most of the old rakes are still there…

> but most of the old rakes are still there to be stood on. I don't think that's necessarily true -- a lot of features have been deprecated and removed.

Most notably, in 5.4.0 (in 2012!) they removed register_globals and magic_quotes. (Which had both been deprecated and off-by-default for a while before, I believe.)

The former was notoriously insecure, as what it did was promote anything passed in as a cookie, GET, or POST variable into a global-scoped variable inside your script. Since PHP didn't require any sort of declaring-your-variables-before-using-them, it was pretty easy to wind up with scripts written in a way that would allow this an unwise amount of access to the script's internals.

The latter automatically escaped special characters with backslashes in all the aforementioned user-provided variables so you could pass them straight into mysql queries. It was, however, optional and so caused errors because code got written relying on it and then ran on servers with it disabled, allowing SQL injection attacks... or double-escaping things in code written the other way around.

But these days are long behind us!

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#124
post #71

I like this. That said, I doubt we'll ever escape towards subscription-based social media models due to the prohibitive costs of CDNs, bandwidth, and storage for video/images. But I suppose it's a question of ends: do we want everyone on social media?

If you can live without video and images, you could comfortably host even a very large forum (on the order of the top 10% of subreddits by volume) with only a $5/month VPS, as long as you made it serve static pages and were judicious with your tech stack. The cost of hosting text alone wasn't prohibitive 20 years ago, and it's even less so today.

Video and images could he links too

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#125

I do not want to hijack the thread, but I can't help but look at this and think at how many things I seem to have gotten wrong with communick. Both of them seem to have a similar purpose: to be a place to offer a bunch of services that can work as alternatives to the Big platforms, and to charge a modest but fair price for it. Everything else, I seem to have gotten wrong. I was convinced that issues of network effect…

I think this stuff isn't the easiest discover. "Do your market research" excludes what people might buy if presented to them. Plus the see it 7 times to buy effect. I am tempted to buy this, partly having seen on HN before, and partly for one feature - the DNS. In my case it would stop me buying domain names for toy projects, just anotherllmthing.myname.omg.lol. The silly TLD is sort of a bonus, it forces me to show it as an MVP!. Although this scratch is somewhat itched for free by Netlify and Vercel, so...

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it tries to not break backwards compatibility and spoiler: past web people had horrible standards.

Today's web people have horrible standards, too. Who ships an entire browser to ship an application?

That's nothing, next they'll ship the entire world's knowledge to ship an application :-). Looks at LLMs.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#127

[flagged]

Do you equate freedom of speech with "abuse, harassment, and harm"? Were these activities you wanted to perform in order to sign up?

>Do you equate freedom of speech with "abuse, harassment, and harm"?

Almost anything in CURRENT_YEAR can be interpreted as "abuse, harassment, and harm" by someone. Is saying "fuck Christianity and fuck White men" abusive, harassing, or harmful? What if Christians and White men interpret that as harmful? Will they take that down?

>Were these activities you wanted to perform in order to sign up?

Again, something as benign as "men cannot get pregnant" was a non-issue fifteen years ago. Now, that makes you a transphobic neo-Nazi.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#128
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, JS does less with it’s stdlib, which I think means a lot of people end up using mostly decent packages from npm instead of writing extra garbage themselves.

[flagged]

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