Hello World!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It was a server-side block, from Cloudflare (security rule specifically). I’m very familiar with it, having used the same service over a decade. They are able to tweak the overall security level, or specific WAF rules for the endpoint in Cloudflare. They also have analytics that will show them exactly how many cancellation requests would be blocked. The fact that they totally ignored these details in my ticket, is concerning.



  • On a related note… I went to cancel a membership a few weeks back, and the site displayed a message “you don’t have an active membership to cancel”. I thought it was strange, so I checked out the network requests being made, and turned out the cancel API call was getting blocked for “security reasons”. Nothing else on the site was blocked for me, just the cancellation endpoint.

    I opened a ticket, and it took them nearly 2 weeks to respond, and there was zero acknowledgement on why cancellation would be blocked.

    Not sure if it’s a purposeful dark pattern, but it sure seems like it!





  • It isn’t how it works today. I’m talking about sometime in the distant (or near) future. Surely at some point AI will have the capabilities on par with at least a low level hacker.

    Or, if you still think that’s a stretch, just imagine all the ways perfectly legitimate software can cost companies money. Not through malicious design, but just by mistakes.






  • Interesting article, thanks for sharing!

    I’ve run a (nowhere near as popular) public API for just about 10 years now. Definitely relate to the bit where he mentions people simply retrying the same request when they get an error. 😂

    I get a lot of students using the API for learning projects, which is great! But it also means my rate limiting is more often protecting my server from accidental infinite loops, rather than anything purposely abusive.