A controversial developer circumvented one of Mastodon's primary tools for blocking bad actors, all so that his servers could connect to Threads.

Authorized Fetch (also referred to as Secure Mode in Mastodon) was recently circumvented by a stupidly easy solution: just sign your fetch requests with some other domain name.

  • PeriodicallyPedanticEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    It’s about the nature of the network. If it’s just a little bubble where you only see and interact with your friends, it’s probably doable. But nobody seems to want that anymore.

    People want soapboxes like Twitter or Reddit or tiktok or YouTube. Privacy there is a lot more complicated and dubious.

    In this case specifically, I think that the bad servers are spoofing as good servers. Which seems solvable (else cryptography signing things wouldn’t work), but still.