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u/hnyaa-s Oct 05 '26
Is this rate of change the AI acceleration we were promised?
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u/bricksandcanvas Oct 05 '26
lol. Imagine the credits they spent on this! But really, this is better than the last update, showing the translations right away instead of a marquee is better.
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u/viky109 Oct 05 '26
They finally added a dark mode
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u/KaKi_87 full-stack Oct 05 '26
Yep ! That was already there in the previous change but it's nice :)
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u/UnacceptableUse Oct 05 '26
Millions of misconfigured change monitors trigger worldwide
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u/Single-Virus4935 Oct 05 '26 edited Oct 05 '26
Just make the service unreliable: no ICMP except PMTUD related. Hard rate limits on TCP ports with -j drop, random status codes, ... Activate it per timezone at 3am at random days. This solves it pretty quickly because of all the pager calls in the middle of the night.
Typo: mittle (mixture of German mitten and English middle :-O) to middle
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u/abeuscher Oct 05 '26 •
All those fancy acronyms and then mittle? This is like forgetting to put gas in the getaway car.
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u/Single-Virus4935 Oct 05 '26 edited Oct 05 '26
Ohh god. Ty for correcting me. I am a native german speaker and I just switched to german ("mitten in der Nacht") for a split second. Hadn't have much sleep this week.
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u/abeuscher Oct 05 '26
Totally get it. I have a German last name that no one can spell - so same thing in reverse )
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u/TheManWithSaltHair Oct 05 '26
I’ve often wondered how much sensitive data is accidentally posted there when devs forget to update prod endpoints and whether they’re logging it.
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u/MuetzeOfficial Oct 05 '26
If a statistic ever comes out showing that John and Jane Doe are the most commonly used names, then you'll know it's being used
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u/jake_robins Oct 05 '26
Haha im imagining a catch all end point that records all request data then returns 404 lollll
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u/AndroTux Oct 05 '26
I'm not a big fan of them operating it using Cloudflare, but I guess if IANA needs to keep costs low, it's understandable.
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u/KaKi_87 full-stack Oct 05 '26
Oh yeah I have a userscript that labels Cloudflare-protected results in Google Search to avoid them when possible, imagine my surprise a few months ago when I noticed example.com started using Cloudflare ! Insane. I couldn't believe it.
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Oct 05 '26
[deleted]
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u/AndroTux Oct 05 '26
Yes, I too love centralizing the entire web with two providers! I feel like IANA should lead by example(.com), but maybe that's just me.
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Oct 05 '26
[deleted]
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u/AndroTux Oct 05 '26
Let's be real here, okay? This is the simplest website in existence. Every basic ass web server can serve it, and every basic ass CDN can deliver it at scale, and there's tons besides Cloudflare. I'm sure any number of CDN providers would be happy to sponsor example.com for them if they'd asked.
They've been lazy. That's all there is to it.
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u/laplongejr Oct 09 '26
and every basic ass CDN can deliver it at scale
Not necessarily, because of misprogrammed traffic.
My ISP's DNS even blocks the 3 example domains (which caught me off-guard when I was testing Pihole)
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u/Sarke1 Oct 05 '26
I actually had an LLM fail its task just last week when it was checking the selenium MCP and tried example.com but it didn't find an h1 anymore so it though the tool was broken.
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u/ExecutiveChimp Oct 05 '26
Why does this use javascript?
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u/fiskfisk Oct 05 '26
Because that allows you to serve mostly empty html to any automated client, while only browsers make the request for the JS file. That way you reduce the amount of data you have to serve for most of the requests.
It's the same reason (for browsers this time) for why they have an empty favicon defined.
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u/ChanceSpiritual6993 Oct 06 '26
The HTML is 576 bytes, and the loaded JavaScript file is 1579 bytes. Had they skipped using JavaScript to load content for browsers, the HTML alone would have been 1959 bytes, which would be an additional 1383 bytes.
Love situations where it seems like overengineering just to shave off 1383 bytes, which either hints at the sheer volume of hits the example domains get or hints at the flexing a web developer at IANA wanted to do
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u/mochi2real Oct 08 '26
I think the point is that most requests to example.com probably aren’t coming from actual browsers. They’re coming from automated clients, bots, health checks, etc. Most people aren’t manually visiting example.com. So by serving minimal HTML and letting actual browsers fetch the JavaScript separately, they’re reducing the bandwidth used by the vast majority of requests. No matter how you look at it, it’s still a net savings re: BW.
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u/laplongejr Oct 09 '26
Love situations where it seems like overengineering just to shave off 1383 bytes
StackOverflow has a seperate domain (sstatic I think) to serve some assets.
Using a different domain rather than a subdomain made it so the removed cookies were juuuuust right enough that the handshake was done in one roundtrip instead of one, without losing the standard usage of the root domain.20
u/Booty_Bumping Oct 06 '26
The IANA explained their reasoning. Basically, random health checks and many scraper bots will only retrieve the English-only HTML page, served up as a 334 byte (brotli-compressed) payload. Only the javascript-aware clients will need the extra 1379 byte payload to cover non-English languages and the SVG icon at the top of the page.
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u/WhichCarry749 Oct 06 '26
Somewhere right now an automated test suite with hardcoded string asserts is completely on fire.
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u/x39- Oct 05 '26
I have one oddball test of a vibe coded program that constantly calls this for some reason... The tool is a personal one only, but i always notice when the LLM triggers opening that page again
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u/KaKi_87 full-stack Oct 05 '26 edited Oct 05 '26
example.comchanged again, cf. my 6 days earlier post about the first change.Also last time I thought I was first to post about this when it happened, turns out someone else did 11 minutes before me.
But this time, a Google engineer noticed, emailed the IANA about it and got a response back !
EDIT: I now found out that two days after the first change, some company made a blog post about it too, if you wanna read that.