Hacker News Reader

ericselinon Why FreeSewing with its users migrated to statichost.eu

FreeSwewing is an awesome project by Joost De Cock! You should totally check it out if you're into sewing. And if you're into digital sovereignty tou should totally check out statichost.eu (disclaimer: I'm the founder :)

TL;DR takeaway for HN techies: when executing resource-intensive workloads on Node.js, pay attention to its max heap size. It can be increased with the `--max-old-space-size` option, e.g. via the env var `NODE_OPTIONS="--max-old-space-size=16384"`.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Based on what I've seen, there's no way to get that project into the PSL. I would recommend you to have the content available at projectcontent.com if the main site is project.com, though. :)

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

The thing is, for users, having a separate domain wouldn't have made any difference without the PSL. And you cannot get on there before you're big enough - which I'd say is roughly at the same time as you start grabbing the attention of scammers.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Sure, and sorry for being so unclear. The point of my post was meant to be a) Google has this enormous cannon, is this "right"? And b) they will use it to kill anything bigger than a mosquito.

But you're right, complaining about big tech surveillance didn't help with making that point at all.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Ok, I see. You mean the possibility of users impersonating statichost.eu itself. That is actually a good point, and the exact reason why user subdomains are required to have a dash in them. Edit: Also, only ASCII is allowed. :)

I guess control-panel.statichost.eu is still possible, of course, but that already seems like a pretty long shot.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Author here. What kind of security negligence are you referring to? What would be a specific attack vector that I left open?

Regarding the PSL - and I can't believe I'm writing this again: you cannot get on there before your service is big enough and "the request authentically merits such widespread inclusion"[1]. So it's kind of a chicken and egg situation.

Regarding the best practice of hosting user content on a separate domain: this has basically two implications: 1. Cookie scope of my own assets (e.g. dashboard), which one should limit in any case and which I'm of course doing. So this is not an issue. 2. Blacklisting, which is what all of this has been about. I did pay the price here. This has nothing to do with security, though.

I'm sorry to be so frank, but you don't know anything about me or my security practices and your claim of negligence is extremely unfounded.

[1] https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/wiki/Guidelines#validat...

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Thank you for this hacker-minded and sharp comment! <3 Seriously, not all comments on here are as fun to read for me as the author and fellow hacker.

And for what it's worth, it feels great to actually pay for something Google provides!

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Many commenters are implying that there is a security issue here, and that I'm putting everyone in danger. That is quite frankly a pretty absurd claim to just casually make. I'm of course very curious to hear more details on what the security risk here actually would be?

Do you think I'm reading/writing sensitive data to/from subdomain-wide cookies?

Also, yes, the PSL is a great tool to mitigate (in practice eliminate) the problem of cross-domain cookies between mutually untrusting parties. But getting on that list is non-trivial and they (voluntary maintainers) even explicitly state that you can forget getting on there before your service is big enough.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Author here. I understand that my post and what I'm trying to say is unclear. And that there are too many different aspects to all this.

What I'm trying to say in the post specifically about Google is that I personally think that they have too much power. They can and will shut down a whole domain for four billion users. That is too much power no matter the intentions, in my opinion. I can agree that the intentions are good and that the net effect is positive on the whole, though.

On the "different aspects" side of things, I'm not sure I agree with the _works_ claim you make. I guess it depends on what your definition of works is, but having a blacklist as you tool to fight bad guys is not something that works very well in my opinion. Yes, specifically my own assets would not have been impacted, had I used a separate domain earlier. But the point still stands.

The fact that it took so long to move user content off the main domain is of course on me. I'm taking some heat here for saying this is more important than one (including me) might think. But nonetheless, let it be a lesson for those of you out there who think that moving that forum / upload functionality / wiki / CMS to its own domain (not subdomain) can be done tomorrow instead of today.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

So the problem here is that Alice on alice.statichost.page might set a cookie for the `.statichost.page` domain if she's careless (which is sometimes the case with Alice). This cookie can then be read by Mallory on mallory.statichost.eu. Or the other way around, if Mallory wants to try to trick Alice into reading his cookie. How this can be prevented without the PSL is something I'm very interested to hear more about.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/wiki/Guidelines#validat...

"Projects that are smaller in scale or are temporary or seasonal in nature will likely be declined. Examples of this might be private-use, sandbox, test, lab, beta, or other exploratory nature changes or requests. It should be expected that despite whatever site or service referred a requestor to seek addition of their domain(s) to the list, projects not serving more then thousands of users are quite likely to be declined."

Maybe the rules have changed, or maybe you were lucky? :)

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Please note that this tool (PSL) is not available until you have a significant user base. Which probably means a significant amount of spam as well.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Fair enough! :)

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Since there's a lot of discussion about the Public Suffix list, let me point out that it's not just a webform where you can add any domain. There's a whole approval process where one very important criterion is that the domain to be added has a large enough user base. When you have a large enough user base, you generally have scammers as well. That's what happened here.

It basically goes: growing user base -> growing amount of malicious content -> ability to submit domain to PSL. In that order, more or less.

In terms of security, for me, there's no issue with being on the same domain as my users. My cookies are scoped to my own subdomain, and HTTPS only. For me, being blocked was the only problem, one that I can honestly admit was way bigger than I thought.

Hence, the PSA. :)

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

The thing is, you cannot just add any domain to the PSL. You need a significant amount of users before they will include your domain. Before recently, there really was no point in even submitting, since the domain would have been rejected as too small. An increase in user base, increase in malicious content and the ability to add your domain to the PSL all happen sort of simultaneously.

I'm also trusting my users to not expose their cookies for the whole *.statichost.eu domain. And all "production" sites use a custom domain anyway, which avoids all of this anyway.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

I respectfully disagree with your premise. In this specific case, yes, "Google does good thing" in a sense. That is not why I'm saying Google has too much power. "Too much" is relative and whether they do good or bad debatable, of course, but it's hard to argue that they don't have a gigantic influence on the whole internet, no? :)

Helping people avoid potentially devastating mistakes is of course a good thing.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

You are right, it would still affect all users. Until the pending PSL inclusion is complete, that is. But it now separates my own resources, such as the website and dashboard of statichost.eu from that.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

(Author here) This is all true. The main assumption from my part is that anything remotely important or even sensitive should be and is hosted on a domain that is _not_ companysubdomain.domain.com but instead www.company.com.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

That is a great point. When I see these sites I'm always seeing a dozen red flags, and maybe the biggest one is that it's showing a "NatWest" banking site or something and is hosted on "portal-abc.statichost.eu". But the whole point is of course saving users from coming to harm, and if it did - great!

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

You are right, of course. I'm not sure if those of you who disagree with me think that Safe Browsing did its job (which it did!), that Safe Browsing is a good thing (which it maybe is, but which I slightly disagree with), or that it's ok that Google monitors everything everyone does.

The last point is actually the one I'm trying to make.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

I'm not saying that Google or Safe Browsing in particular did anything wrong per se. My point is primarily that Google has too much power over the internet. I know that in this case what actually happened is because of me not putting enough effort into fending off bad guys.

The new separate domain is pending inclusion in the PSL, yes.

Edit: the "effort" I'm talking about above refers to more real time moderation of content.

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

This is of course true! It just takes an incident like this to get ones head out of ones ass and actually do it. :)

ericselinon Google Safe Browsing incident

Good question, it probably shouldn't be legal. Enforcing the law on these behemoths is another problem, though... :)

ericselinon A formula for responsive font-size

While I agree with most of the comments that font-size for body text should ideally be 1rem (and certainly clamped), what about headings? When I think about different font sizes I think about headings, where it absolutely makes sense to have a much larger size on wide (/"desktop") screens.

ericselinon Show HN: Statichost.eu – privacy-first static site hosting

Thank you! Simple is indeed one of the goals.

Currently, a particular site exists as static files on one specific server, with some failover mechanisms in place. So mainly availability is achieved by having enough server resources and having a minimum amount of moving parts :)

The tricky thing to solve for with HA is TLS termination. It is probably the most complicated thing (and for sure the most computationally intense thing) a static HTTP server does. I haven't done any testing, but my hypothesis is that TLS termination is what will start failing first. Barring DNS-based tactics (mitigation, not cure, in my opinion) you just have to accept that this is your single point of failure.

But a great question! Keeping our sites online is of course something we're working on all the time.

And yes, it was all fine before the cloud! Alas, a single server was (much?) more stable in the early days than a single instance/node/pod is today...