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I still think ICQ was the greatest application name ever.


> A feature known as the Download Monitor plug-in created a webpage with the clear URL which provided a link to the live version, which bypassed the need for authentication. This rendered the protections on the ‘future’ function of WordPress redundant as it bypassed the required authentication needed to gain access to the pre-uploaded document.

WordPress is a nice piece of software, but the plugin situation is getting worse and worse. (Too many pending updates, premium features and constant upselling, selling of plugins to new sketchy owners...)


The main issue is that there isn't any governance to the plugin store. Once you have a plugin in there, you have free reign to do whatever you want with it. Getting it in there is a PITA though. For example, a library author and I created a plugin, but they wouldn't let me submit it because I wasn't the other author, and they wouldn't let him submit it because he wasn't me. True story.


TBF there is some scrutiny on existing plugins, the team is just extremely understaffed (it’s ran by volunteers after all). I got involved in a plugin that ended up getting de-listed for some minor ToS violations after several years of being “fine”, they re-reviewed the plugin with the same rigor as a new submission.


Kudos to these volunteers, but as long as one single company continues to insist on owning all the resources of the plugin and theme directories, I don't think they deserve to continue profiting from volunteer labor.


Agreed. My experience was pre-Matt drama, and even then the boundary between wp.org and Automattic was quite unclear.


There's also the fact that Matt Mullenweg (the guy who owns automattic) has made hostile takeovers of plugin pages before


> WordPress is a nice piece of software, but the plugin situation is getting worse and worse

The plugin situation is a mess largely because Wordpress isn't a nice piece of software.

It's popular, and functionally it's great, but the codebase is really showing its age. Wordpress has never properly rearchitected because it would break plugins on a scale that would endanger its dominance.


> the codebase is really showing its age.

It's not age, it started very, very bad. If they'd fixed the horrible schema and the code a decade and a half ago, plugins would have been a lot easier to write (and a lot safer.)


Well, agreed, I just didn't want to completely shit on it.


There's a whole industry of people selling solutions to WordPress's failings, all of whom have strong incentives for it not be properly improved.


My favorite current plugin woe is where it completely changes what it does but keeps the same name and it's all a part of its 'update'


To an outsider, its entire plugin ecosystem is so odd. Like the conversation about “nulled” plugins, where someone removes license-checking code from GPL-licensed plugins and then redistributes them, and whether that’s moral, or even legal, which of course it is, because that’s the entire point of the GPL.


> which provided a link to the live version

Even if that is the case, the backend must validate.


It feels like we're actually living in the Universal Paperclips universe.


FYI: A couple of the images down in the article are not loading (And later some seem to be incorrectly formatted). I'm especially looking forward to the exploded button.


D'oh. Thank you for letting me know. All fixed now. Hopefully "exploded button" wasn't too misleading (more of an exploded view of the design).


bro your images are giant. every load of the page is transferring 40ish MB. back_panel_back_render.png is 11.3 MB. replace those with smaller versions and click to link to the larger.. but I do see both cloudfront and cloudflare headers so not sure why these aren't being cached by them


Thanks for letting me know, I will have to fix this soon. This was the first post as part of a new blogging setup I'm using and clearly I'm missing some of my old processes (like image resizing).


They are photographic images saved as PNG, which is lossless and intended for digitally created images with large areas of pixels with the exact same value. Please use a format intended for photographic images. Splashflag.png is 4.5 MB, it's 10.5 MB as an uncompressed BMP file, but only 600 KB as a JPEG with indistinguishable quality loss.


They probably need the origin server to set the right cache headers, otherwise the cdn would get blamed for stale images


If you want more than samples, he's compiled a lot of 1-2 hour genre specific mixes here: https://www.mixcloud.com/Ishkur/

Plus the one 15 hour mix across genres: https://www.mixcloud.com/Ishkur/the-longplay-15/



I still play sections of that 15 hour mix a few times a week. The 50-70 minute mark has the chillest electronica groove. Feels like just driving around a cyberscape.

He talked so much shit in his guide that I was really looking forward to listening to the 15 hour mix to make fun of his taste but... it's hard! Dude's got decent taste!


Yes, the previous company I worked at redirected the Oracle download pages to a custom page explaining the problem and offering alternatives. That was nice.


How bad was the problem that they had to set up a browser extension for this specific problem? It's not something DNS alone can fix due to HSTS


The german C64 magazine "64er" had an application which allowed "easy" entry of assembly applications by means of a hex encoding and used a checksum on each line to prevent bugs from typos. Still an incredible chore.


It was called "checksummer" which is a funny pun on check sum and "summer" which is the German word for buzzer. Oh, I should add that it made an annoying buzzer sound when you made a mistake.


Private Slack, WhatsApp and Signal groups are the most valuable to me.


Ditto Signal. In my local city some Burning Man regulars created a giant Signal group for sharing parties and events. Nearly a thousand members in the same city who post about something to do any night of the week. It's lovely. To join you just need somebody within the group to vet you and you're in.

Group chats reign supreme once you are in good ones.


I'm still running a self-hosted Fever instance, it still didn't break down with newer PHP versions.

Using Reeder Classic as an RSS client. Also something threatened by unwanted updates.


My best Mullholland Drive experience: A couple of years ago a local arthouse cinema showed the movie again. It was brilliant, just like I remembered it.

After the showing, the projectionist came into the room and apologized for the confusing movie: "I must have mixed up the reels..."

She didn't.


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