4 ms·
As always in big tech, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
by knzhou 7y ago
As always in big tech, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
- barney54 7y agoOh, I don’t know. I refuse to use Facebook Messenger and I have yet to be damned (at least to my knowledge)!
- knzhou 7y agoI meant from the perspective of tech employees that have to decide whether to add this kind of monitoring.
- st0le 7y agoHonestly, This is good to prevent malware but I imagine this breaks a bunch of things if for eg. If the link has a limited visit count. The link will "expire" before the recipient gets a chance to view it.
- Nextgrid 7y agoTo be fair, an HTTP GET request should never modify the state of the system - hitting a link should not change anything. If you need to expire links then make the initial link display a form with a submit button (which does a POST) to reveal the content (and expire the link). Legitimate crawlers don’t submit forms so it should be safe.
- mehrdadn 7y ago> To be fair, an HTTP GET request should never modify the state of the system In theory. But that's not how the world I live in seems to work.
- bagacrap 7y agoI think it's pretty common practice. Otherwise search engine web crawlers would be wreaking havoc.
- mehrdadn 7y agoNo, both your logic and premise are incorrect. To give just one example, rate-limiting is clearly widespread stateful practice applied to GET requests, and it doesn't cause web crawlers to wreak havoc on anything.
- journalctl 7y agoSo they might as well don’t; at least then we get some modicum of privacy.
- wutbrodo 7y agoThis is certainly how I feel, but "damned if you do and damned if you don't" doesn't imply that the level of damnedness is equal. The balance between fettering "malicious" speech/activity and preserving privacy seems to be strongly tilting in the mainstream towards the former recently; "tech platforms have a responsibility to heavily police the content on their systems" is apparently a lot more resonant with most people than "tech platforms should preserve the privacy of their users".
- amelius 7y agoWhy not simply ask the user then?
- feanaro 7y agoI have absolutely no problems with the don't. I don't think any central body should be responsible for policing my private conversations and it just seems like a convenient excuse for these companies to perpetuate the surveillance.