I dont get a mention??? I demand a recount
I even pointed out the exact part of their “hack” that didnt add up
2 Likes
You know what’s funny, after reading that, that method is exactly how I “stole” 2p2 with a 20 liner script.
2 Likes
It’s hilarious that they weren’t stripping meta data from images and videos, and surprising that nobody noticed it (I think?) until now.
It even ordered its posts by number in the site’s URLs, so that anyone could have easily, programmatically downloaded the site’s millions of posts.
lololol
I dunno, I think it would be pretty damn hard to castrate a bunch of wild hippos.
4 Likes
Umm, this is pretty standard and not a big deal at all? Even Discourse does it that way, for example:
URL for your post:
unstuckpolitics .com/t/official-dark-winter-lc-thread-2021-will-be-better-right-right/2980/3785
URL for zz’s post you’re replying to:
unstuckpolitics. com/t/official-dark-winter-lc-thread-2021-will-be-better-right-right/2980/3784
Not going to check but I think vBulletin has a similar scheme.
Discourse does include a text path but other sites take steps to prevent it:
Services like Twitter, by contrast, randomize the URLs of posts so they can’t be guessed. And while they offer APIs that give developers access to tweets en masse, they carefully restrict access to those APIs
For stuff like a small site using post numbers in the url as a key makes sense and is fine. But it looks like they did this for every single resource on their site, which gives scrapers an incredibly easy job.
This is such a typical case of hackers trying to make something out to be more complicated and cool than it really is. A kiddie script could have done this.
Fair enough.
And this is something I thought of after I posted. Basically, consecutive numbering makes the scraper’s code simpler and easier to write, but anything that’s visible on the web is scrapeable pretty much by definition. It’s not rocket science.
Exactly. Set up an integer counter and off you go. You don’t even need to navigate around a hierarchy.
Yeah hippos are scary as fuck and will kill you in seconds
Fucking Jaws.
That must have been Hippo Bolt then
4 Likes
The few times I ever saw Steve Irwin genuinely scared were from two animals - hippos and komodo dragons. And he’d run right up to the dragons, but would stay several hundred yards away from hippos.
They definitely propel themselves off the bottom. I read that before also.
2 Likes
When I scraped websites I was very thankful when urls were like this. Randomization was a pain.
So they still have all the data they claimed to (e.g., user data and posting histories), but it was easier to get than they suggested? I want to make sure I can still giggle about all the Parler users being busted.
From that article it seems like yea they do have all the data and the hack claim that was made previously started circulating as a rumor on reddit and the hacker never bothered to clarify that it was false.
I mean as soon as I read that twilio thing my bullshit detectors went apeshit. It sounded so off.
1 Like
Come on! How hard could it be?