[fragmede]

Every website operator employee worth their salary in this area would have told the site's operator this beforehand, and could have avoided this incident. Hell, even ChatGPT could tell you that by now. The word that comes to mind is incompetence on someone's part, but I don't know of the details on particularly who was the incompetent one in this situation. Thankfully, they've learned a lesson about the situation and ideally won't make the same mistake again going forwards.

[trod1234]

I disagree, as a professional in this field for over a decade.

For this to be a legitimately backed statement, professional's would have needed to know about the PSL. This is largely unmet.

For it to be met, there would need to be documentation in the form of RFC's and whitepapers in industry working groups which would be needed. This didn't happen.

M3AAWG only has two blog post mentions, and that's only after the great layoffs of 2023, and only that its being used by volunteers and needs support. No discussion about organization, what its being used for, process/due process, etc.

It wholly lacks the needed outreach to professionals in order to make such a statement and have it be true.

[fragmede]

I mean, it's a very big field, and it's easy enough for me to armchair quarterback and call it a skill issue without being vulnerable and putting my own credentials into question. There's a whole big world of things to know about making and running websites, and I'll readily admit I don't know everything. I don't do a lot of CSS or website SEO or run ad campaigns, so someone experienced there will run circles around me.

Putting user generated content on its own domain is more on the security side of things to know about running a website, and our industry doesn't regulate who's allowed to build websites. Everyone's got their own set of different best practices.

Regardless of the exact date that GitHub moved which kinds of user generated content (UGC) over to which domain/domains, I do expect a curious webdev in 2025 to have used GitHub and to have wondered enough about it to ask what's up with stuff coming from eg raw.githubusercontent.com at some point in their web browsing career to ask Google about it. They should have walked away with the idea that they're putting UGC on a separate domain intentionally for security stuff, even if they never hear mention of the PSL or how exactly it works and is implemented. The /r/webdev post you'll find links to a GitHub blog post that gives a lot of detail as to why they did that, and that doesn't mention the PSL once.

It's fair to point out the PSL isn't common knowledge. I would agree that it isn't. I don't think it's necessary, however. All it takes is being a user of GitHub and a modicum of curiosity. I expect anyone that call themselves a webdev in 2025 to be able to explain to me what git and GitHub is and why they're different. They don't need to know where git came from but I don't think I'm being unreasonable in asking that much. From there, I expect someone to be able to make up an answer as to why there's raw.githubusercontent.com during an interview and mumble something about security, even if they can't give specific details about cookies and phishing and how that all works.

It's possible I'm being unreasonable here but I don't think I am. This isn't knowledge that takes attending W3C meetings about web browser standards to have come across. Regardless of if I am or not though, everyone who's come across this thread should now know that UGC goes in its own domain, even if they can't give details as to why.

[trod1234]

I agree this isn't knowledge that takes a lot. The problem is these companies don't explain why they do what they do, in fact a lot of security stuff along these lines in the past has been tight-lipped secrecy bound stuff. You can wonder, but the answer isn't out there unless you know an insider willing to break a broadly worded NDA (not gonna happen, and some are quite broad).

The idea to segment certain types of traffic to different domains isn't that new. For example segmenting certain mail servers by marketing or transactional types into subdomains was done as far back as 2010, but it wasn't explained in whitepapers until around 2016 or 2017, where there was already gathered irrefutable evidence that reputational systems had been put in place and the rules for those damaged people running small email servers who were being illegitimately blocked from delivery; for years with no recourse or disclosure just imposed cost.

Once they published the whitepapers on that, professionals were on board because they specified what they were looking for, and how it should function. Basic Engineering stuff that people who manage and build these systems need to know to interoperate.

These things need professional outreach that standardizes it in some form or another, that's not a one-off blog post imo, and that must fully specify function, requirement, feedback mechanisms, and expectations of how its supposed to work; basic engineering stuff.

The PSL is just the same thing all over again. Big Tech just starts doing something silently that directly imposes cost on others, they don't say what they are doing. Then when it becomes too costly they try to offload it to others calling for support, though if they only do halfsies in a blog post buried in noise, they are only looking for plausible deniability.

The benefit in doing this is in anti-competitive behavior.

Incidentally, while separating subdomains for email servers has been standard practice for awhile now, recently these companies once again changed the reputational weights for things, and they aren't talking. Now its a whole domain as a single reputational namespace not just breakage at the subdomain (bb.aa.com.). No outreach on that as far as I've seen.

There are ways to do things correctly, and then there are ways to do things anti-competitively and coercively. The incentives matched to the outcomes point to which one that happens to be.

How you do something is more important than that you did something in these cases.

If you as a company don't do professional outreach about such changes or standards, and you arbitrarily choose to require something that isn't properly disclosed punishing everyone that hasn't received disclosure; that in my mind is a fair and reasonable case for either gross negligence (for general intent to prove malice) or tortuous interference with third-party companies businesses.

That question which you mentioned about asking in an interview (iirc) was actually asked in an Ignite interview, but was cut out from the recordings later, and the answer was we can't talk about what other departments are doing. They may have followed-up on that elsewhere but I never saw anything related to it.

It is critically important to know the reasons why things are structured a certain way or happen; in order to be able to interoperate. This is and has been known and repeated many times since the adoption of OSI & TCP in the 80s/90s with regards to interoperability of systems.

Blindly copying what others do is a recipe for disaster and isn't justifiable in terms of cost, and competent professional's don't roll the dice like that on large projects of that caliber of expense.

This stuff isn't straight forward either. Like knowing where the reputational namespace stops, what the ramp-up time (dm/dt) is for volume metrics to warm up a server at each provider, and objective indicators associated with when you go above that arbitrarily designed rate. (hint: non-deterministic hidden states) If it takes a month to perfectly warm a new server up without reputational consequences by an insider that knows, that's extra cost imposed on the company by that platform (whom you are competing against for email services).

No disclosure means starting over every time trying to guess at what they are doing, and having breakage later when they change things.

> reddit...

A lot of professionals no longer use reddit anymore because its a bot filled echo chamber that wastes valuable time.

Moderators there often remove posts regularly for simple disagreement, conflicts of interest, or to remove access to detailed solutions or methodology.

For an example of all that's wrong there, look to that CodingBootCamp reddit. There's a guy that's a moderator there that's been, in all probability, using a bot to destroy a competitors reputation and harass them for years, attacking the owners, execs, and going so far as to harass and stalk their children; while violating the Moderator Code of Contact. Crazy and toxic stuff. ---

You can't ever meet professional standards if you don't communicate or properly disclose interop requirements when complex systems are involved.

[fragmede]

Thank you for your well thought out reply. At the end of the day, what I was getting at is that there's a reason why people in our industry get paid what they do, especially when you could hire a random nobody who's new to the game who doesn't know what they're doing for way cheaper. You're right in pointing out that there's anti-competitive consolidation going on and that's not great.