logoalt Hacker News

vel0city01/21/20252 repliesview on HN

The person receiving it chooses to download images or whatever automatically though.

I dunno, I'd still say the problem is at least 50% cloudflare. Why should they make which datacenters have a resource cached be obvious public knowledge? I do agree though, one could still end up inferring this information noisily by sending an attachment, waiting a while, and then somehow querying a lot of DCs and trying to infer times to see if it's cached or not.

Personally, I've never been a fan about so many things like URLs being so public. I get the benefits of things like CDNs and what not and the odds of guessing a snowflake value and what not, but still...all attachments in Discord are public. If you have a URL, you have the attachment. And they're not the only ones with this kind of access model.


Replies

radicality01/21/2025

Isn’t that because the URL parameters are so long that by design they effectively _are_ the password protection for the resource ? They shouldn’t be able to ‘leak’ to unintended recipients.

Personally, like you I’m also not a huge fan of this, but URLs like that basically should be treated as the passwords. Don’t post them publicly / don’t give them out to people you don’t trust.

show 2 replies
badmintonbaseba01/22/2025

> Why should they make which datacenters have a resource cached be obvious public knowledge?

I agree that having it in the header for everyone is maybe too obvious. But you could otherwise infer that from timing.