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Tesseract dev injects malicious code into browser to illegally DDOS the dbzer0 instance (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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As part of the devs farewell message on their site, they have included malicious code to make each visitor sends 2,000 requests to the dbzer0 servers in an attempt to DDOS and take the instance offline.

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[–] 7 points 2 months ago (8 children)

I did not follow this drama, and I don't know about this list everyone is mentioning. Is this something that hides specific users posts and comments from the Tesseract UI ?

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    Basically, yes.

    Tesseract was downloading at runtime an obfuscated blocklist of users and instances. One that the dev didn't tell anyone about, and didn't give an option to disable/modify.

    db0 was trying to update Tesseract and was unaware that the whole dbzer0 instance was blocked in this way. And because the Tesseract dev is a spherical bastard, rather than saying "this is blocked", it said there was an API mismatch, which sent db0 down a troubleshooting rabbit hole that ended with him blowing the whistle on the whole thing.

    And you can see how mature and wise the developer is for how he responded.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Why are they dropping support for Tesseract after Lemmy 1.0?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    don't want to maintain a solution from a bastard that clearly is untrustworthy.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    If you fork it, the fork doesn't belong to them. You can do what you want with it.

    Besides, if they don't want to maintain it, why don't they stop maintaining it right now? What does Lemmy 1.0 have to do with it?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    just because we found two things he did doesn't mean there aren't other surprises.

    for all we know at this point, he's implemented a backdoor into instances that use it.

    if you're an instance admin using tesseract and you're reading this right now, you should probably drop it asap.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Small point of order, there was an option to disable it, but it was extremely hidden and buried in the advanced settings area and called "enabling toxic mode". Also, this only disabled the runtime policy. There was no way for end users to disable the instance list that was in the source code itself.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    I only learned out about it when someone posted an stl badge of honor to the 3d printing community and during my "what is this even about" investigation found that I was on it.

    But yeah, BSOD summed it up pretty well.

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