alt Hacker NewsA great example of Hyrum's Law:
"With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody."
combined with failure to follow Postel's Law:
"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept."
Replies
That's true, but sort of misses the spirit of Hyrum's law (which is that the world is filled with obscure edge cases).
In this case the broken resolver was the one in the GNU C Library, hardly an obscure situation!
The news here is sort of buried in the story. Basically Cloudflare just didn't test this. Literally every datacenter in the world was going to fail on this change, probably including their own.
Obligatory xkcd for Hyrum's Law: https://xkcd.com/1172
Postel's law is considered more and more harmful as the industry evolved.