Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by d33 2582 days ago
It's pretty easy to measure how many projects your library is tied to and scale the service up. Yes, ideally it would have a large pool of servers to test against, but I think it's a good idea to abstract the problem away and then work on it.

EDIT: it looks like I'm getting downvoted for this opinion - could any of the downvoters also reply as to why it's a bad idea?
2 comments
martin_a 2582 days ago
Did not downvote you, but I think you might have missed the point: If the package is widely in use, one could change the host that is pinged/whatever. People probably don't look in depth at such packages and will just update it. This leads to probably MASSIVE traffic to endpoints which are not expecting this.

That is pretty much what happend with this dubious WordPress plugin developers that changed their "license check" or keep-alive check or whatever to do some hundred thousand (or so) "checks" to their competitors website per hour.

link
dsl 2582 days ago
> It's pretty easy to measure how many projects your library is tied to and scale the service up.

You are being downvoted because the author pointed at random services not under his control. So if a mobile app with million of users deployed this, an innocent third party that has nothing to do with the author would be hit with millions of requests they didn't ask for.

link