Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online

Re:Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site Aft... by chauhankiran on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @03:19AM (#15539802)

Wow! Thanks. But, I do not understand the <script> tag in homepage contains lots of ![]+[].

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Re:Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site Aft... by alain_gilbert on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @03:24AM (#15539825)

I think it's just a way to document.write his email address, so no bot/crawler can directly see it.

Edit: It evaluate to `document.write('HIS_EMAIL at gmail')`

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Re:Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site Aft... by pennaMan on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @07:15AM (#15540740)

If the browser can do it what's stoping a headless browser bot from evaluating it all the same? Is it just to lower the attack surface?

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Re:Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site Aft... by poooogles on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @07:53AM (#15540890)

>If the browser can do it what's stoping a headless browser bot from evaluating it all the same?

The vast majority of crawlers aren't that smart, headless browsers used to be painfully slow so no one used them.

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Re:Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site Aft... by contravariant on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @09:35AM (#15541386)

Evaluating all javascript to see if it eventually writes an email address is not a good idea.

In fact doing so probably violates the halting problem somehow.

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