On Mon, Apr 15, 2024 at 04:42:37PM -0400, Stéphane Graber wrote:
> > And if there are issues with the usability of paste.ubuntu.com, uh, we own
> > that service? So let's work with our IS team to make it fit for purpose.
> > (I don't know why it currently requires a login to *view* paste contents;
> > that seems straightforwardly a bug that we should just get sorted.)
> That's because pastebin servers are frequently abused as a way to get
> free mass storage.
> It's not very practical to require login to post to a pastebin as the
> whole point is for a tool like "pastebinit" to work without needing
> user configuration as it's commonly used as a debug tool on cloud
> instances and other random servers random than a user's personal
> system.
> With that in mind, a bunch of folks noticed that you could abuse a
> service like paste.ubuntu.com by pushing large files (base64 encoded
> or the like) and then retrieve them with a very trivial amount of html
> parsing (if no raw option is offered directly).
> There are obviously alternatives to this, but they tend to require a
> bunch more server side logic, basically trying to find the right set
> of restrictions to both poster and reader so that legitimate users can
> use the service normally while abusers get sufficiently annoyed to
> stay away from it.
The current behavior of paste.ubuntu.com, and what I assumed was the driver
for moving away from this as a default, was that it requires a login to VIEW
the contents of the pastebin. AFAICS this is not justifiable on the basis
of preventing abuse with illicit/illegal pastes, that's already addressed by
requiring login on the submission side.
If requiring authentication on the SUBMISSION side is sufficient reason to
change the default pastebin, then that of course isn't something we should
second-guess; we don't need to be reinvesting anonymous ftp servers. But in
that case, I think there should have been a discussion about who the default
behavior is for, because for my part it makes the default behavior much
worse.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
