Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
scalewithlee.substack.com
Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
1–10 of 370 posts
Re: Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
#2[deleted]
Re: Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
#3[dead]
Re: Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
#4This isn't a "security vs usability" trade-off as the author implies. This has nothing to do with security at all.
/etc/hosts
See, HN didn't complain. Does this mean I have hacked into the site? No, Substack (or Cloudflare, wherever the problem is) is run by people who have no idea how text input works.
Re: Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
#5I ran into a similar issue with OpenRouter last night. OpenRouter is a “switchboard” style service that provides a single endpoint from which you can use many different LLMs. It’s great, but last night I started to try using it to see what models are good at processing raw HTML in various ways.
It turns out OpenRouter’s API is protected by Cloudflare and something about specific raw chunks of HTML and JavaScript in the POST request body cause it to block many, though not all, requests. Going direct to OpenAI or Anthropic with the same prompts is fine. I wouldn’t mind but these are billable requests to commercial models and not OpenRouter’s free models (which I expect to be heavily protected from abuse).
Re: Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
#6This isn't a "security vs usability" trade-off as the author implies. This has nothing to do with security at all. /etc/hosts See, HN didn't complain. Does this mean I have hacked into the site? No, Substack (or Cloudflare, wherever the problem is) is run by people who have no idea how text input works.
My thought exactly - this isn't an example of balance between "security vs usability" - this is just wrong behaviour.
Re: Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
#7Does it block `/etc//hosts` or `/etc/./hosts`? This is a ridiculous kind of whack-a-mole that's doomed to failure. The people who wrote these should realize that hackers are smarter and more determined than they are and you should only rely on proven security, like not executing untrusted input.
Re: Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
#8This isn't a "security vs usability" trade-off as the author implies. This has nothing to do with security at all. /etc/hosts See, HN didn't complain. Does this mean I have hacked into the site? No, Substack (or Cloudflare, wherever the problem is) is run by people who have no idea how text input works.
This is like banning quotes from your website to 'solve' SQL injection...
Re: Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
#9[flagged]
Re: Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor
#10It's something I ran into quite a few times in my career. It's a weird call to get if the client can't save their cms site, due to typing something harmless. I think worst was when there was a dropdown that I defined which had a value in the mod rules that was not allowed.