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Comment by bornfreddy | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like it is meant to deal with multimedia mostly?

But anyway, just rename .txt to .html and you're done.

I imagine that might help with automated tos rate limiting, but eventually someone at Cloudflare will probably cut them off. It's plain text, but it's basically serving a distributed database. And a hint at their scale is "100TB of “Access Denied” served up monthly.

Cloudflare just seems to be trying to limit the free tier to "caching website html for the purpose of showing it to humans". They have pricing and plans for things other than that.

Simple but will it will break all sorts of automation down the line? All the other adlists are txt and I don't know how they would handle other file types, even if the content is unchanged.

Determining file type from the file name suffix is a fool's game and always was.

I hear you there. I'm more thinking someone probably hard coded txt file extension somewhere so something is likely to fall apart in simply handling that file.

Is it? Seems superior to arbitrary magic numbers or headers, and God forbid full naive parsing, in most ways.

I doubt there is any solution that is both robust and simple. In a sense, it is the same problem as that which ad blockers are attempting to solve.

Whats wrong with storing and delivering the intended content type as metadata, whether thats headers or filesystem metadata like in Mac OS X?

Transmitting in-band (headers) seems ripe for arbitrary complexity. Someone out there would write a Turing-complete header DSL. And then someone else would write an incompatible alternative implementation.

At least file extension is limited and externally visible (and thus accountable) to third party behavior, which should limit the worst complexity excesses.

Is filesystem metadata actually different (theoretically) from extension? Or just data in a different format?

Extension seems a nice balance between simplicity / brevity and utility, albeit as a hint, not a commandment.

Fun stuff like embedding data into jpgs or pngs.

Then CF replaces the html with their Browser Integrity Check. How does the app deal with the list becoming real 'Checking your browser" html?

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