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How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

rachelbythebay.com

21–30 of 158 posts

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#22
Title implies that this article thirdly explains how to waste annoying sysadmins, which is an entertaining prospect.

Are we talking about not putting annoying sysadmins to good use? Or are we talking about, you know, makin sure they don’t cause nobody no trouble again, boss?

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#23
post #12
post #8

It's an open source project, with a good discussion of the technical issues on GitHub[1]. Probably linked to certain user behaviors, like having hundreds of tabs open, but surely also contingent on the complexity of wedging a browser in iOS. Like maneuvering an excavator into a sandbox. [1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/12113

Also, when I saw the headline, I had to think of all the LLM scrapers and bots (soon to be running directly on your AIphone!) roaming the Interwebs.

Just yesterday I blocked the bots from my blog using this[1]. Of course whether these bots respect robots.txt nowadays is a different question altogether

[1]: https://github.com/fardog/fardog.io/commit/b2e3eac838ea25209...

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#24
I remember something similar with Internet Explorer back in the day, where it would ask for the favicon (which we didn’t have setup at the time) so our 404 page would be returned, which then seemed to trigger another request for a favicon. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#26
post #8

It's an open source project, with a good discussion of the technical issues on GitHub[1]. Probably linked to certain user behaviors, like having hundreds of tabs open, but surely also contingent on the complexity of wedging a browser in iOS. Like maneuvering an excavator into a sandbox. [1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/12113

I thought all browsers on iOS were using the apple browser engine and ditto for Android. That is, they are just skins

Yea, that's basically it on iOS, although there is a bunch ux, so it's not nothing

On android, browsers can ship their own engines, and they do. There is actually some freedom on android.

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#27

It's not part of individual directories. That would be stupid. Having a path-specific favicon actually sounds like a feature.

> Having a path-specific favicon actually sounds like a feature.

Can you provide at least a couple of use-cases for a path specific favicons?

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#28
post #8

It's an open source project, with a good discussion of the technical issues on GitHub[1]. Probably linked to certain user behaviors, like having hundreds of tabs open, but surely also contingent on the complexity of wedging a browser in iOS. Like maneuvering an excavator into a sandbox. [1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/12113

I also wonder how these requests "beat the shit out of the web server." It's requesting the feed and the favicon, both of which could be cached by a CDN. Even if they aren't, how much traffic are you gonna see from this compared to some other page trending on HN? Wasteful, sure, but hardly that big a deal

Re: How to waste bandwidth, battery power, and annoy sysadmins

#29
post #9

Oh hey, I wrote that last issue linked! What crazy Deja vu. Here’s me discovering the issue that led me to find some wild behavior. Basically Firefox loaded favicons 4x the number of tabs opened to that website. It would do this every time I opened or closed any tab. https://aggressivelyparaphrasing.me/2022/12/12/why-does-my-l... It was resolved a while back so maybe it’s similar symptoms but different root cause, or…

Wordpress handles 404s really slowly? I'm kind of surprised it works at all then, as at least in my logs there's a very steady stream of bots probing it for vulnerabilities by trying random URLs.
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