I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site’s servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn’t know why, exactly.

This isn’t the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.

Is there a reason why the publishing instance is not downloading the preview image, and then submits it with the post to the other instances? This way they would not have to fetch it themselves.

Thing is, Fediverse is not a product

If you have some troubles sticking to a sleep schedule, perhaps an alarm might help get you to bed on time?

@daringfireball I agree with your points overall but you twisted 3 of the 4 examples. On the whole even banal down the middle posts on Mastodon get really aggressive pushback, to say the least, and certainly original or individual thinking is not well received. The last place I would go to have a convo where I can learn something. I'm likewise thinking it's time to pack up and head out.

🚨 Six WebPKI Intermediate CAs are compromised.

This is bigger than Heartbleed, but a client-side issue.

Anything that verifies certificates against public roots, like most TLS clients, is/was affected.

Details, live test, patched versions and workarounds at https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com

Act now.

@cwebber i think what we'll actually see is these folk decomps etc becoming a real source of widespread malware and other exploits, and that will act as an excuse to pass laws that make it effectively illegal to sell CPUs/microcontrollers that can run arbitrary user-supplied code

Thanks for bringing this up. I think in general we need to work on optimisation of Activitypub and Threadiverse implementations of it.

The same way you know the rest of the data hasn’t been tampered with - you don’t. And when you find untrustworthy instances, you defederate from them.

That second solution is what I thought of as doing as I read this. It doesn’t rely on a third party service being up. And that instance has to do that work anyway. So why not just share the results with others?

$SPUNC +0.48 0.89 #TrendingNow #Crypto #BTSE

Either way, the road there from the Rest Stop was cut off, and over the last five centuries, Mistelin has slowly become overwhelmed by the ghosts crowding his domain.

After the Revival, he'll make some kind of deal with Coreas, god of winter, to create a new land of the dead and make Onumbrica slightly less haunted.

@mcc Checked in FF on iOS (I know it’s technically Safari), Linux, and Windows. None are signed in. All have the Certificates in question revoked. (I’d be *very* surprised/alarmed if CRL checks were dependent on signing in anyway.)

@verge Right. And here I am paying for facebook ads like a beginner.