> We will thus hold back the banning of the url for now [...]
If on the other hand it's really just some benign leftover example code downloading the image and not doing anything with it later as has been suggested and is indeed the most likely, there'd be no harm in confirming that's the case.
They went to great lengths with their investigation, and this would be the obvious final step to wrap it up. Posting a couple of the relevant .smali lines wouldn't have to reveal the name of the app in question (which at this point can be identified by anyone sufficiently motivated anyway).
What I'm trying to say is, the image is a plant
To address your frustration at the analysis stopping there: What do you expect someone who is likely more versed in web dev and their unique distributed systems to do? Do you expect them to have the expertise to decompile an app from a third party, an app popular enough to cause this much traffic? And if they did, would it be worthwhile when their only concern is limiting/lowering that traffic?
Jokes are funny.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289
> I agree with what people have already said, but I think there's one more point to add: people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are. We have a tendency to think, "This idea of mine is hilarious! And different! Surely this witticism is the exception." And we are usually wrong. When you have N people all doing that, there's a lot of noise.
> I try to gently point this out to people who complain when their attempt at humor has been downvoted by the community. It's not that we don't like humor. We just don't like banal attempts at humor, which becomes noise. Or, put in a less charitable fashion, "You're not as funny as you think you are."
I don't expect anyone to do anything. As a person reading this story, I just commented on the fact that it would be interesting to know more details as to how the app ended up making these requests in the first place.
I was just expressing my personal opinion that if I went this far investigating the situation, that's what I'd like to find out as well.
> [...] when their only concern is limiting/lowering that traffic?
If that were their only concern, they could have just (quoting my previous comment):
>> block[ed] the request URL/UA string pair, which was also an option
However:
>> since they already traced the culprit with a lot of effort [...] the logical ultimate step to conclude their investigation should be to see what the code does
Like everything else, this is just my personal opinion of course.
> your frustrations
> your frustration
Not really sure where this comes from but it's really unnecessary.
I'm glad for Wikimedia that they resolved the issue, and shared the details, which make for an interesting read.
What's curious is that many folks claim the subthreads of their comment as a personal fiefdom, taking umbrage at any remark they deem unworthy of the continuation, the self-appointed gatekeepers of repartee.
Specifically, though, I don't think this is a valid complaint:
> there really isn't any need to explain this to me
since it follows from:
> how does anything you wrote relate to anything I wrote?
which is, rhetorical or otherwise, and notwithstanding the pilgarlic territoriality, a clear request for an explanation, which rob74 has elegantly supplied, and to which I'd append only one additional observation, viz. that the image is a plant
It's also okay to not get a joke, you can simply move on with your life.
The analysis stops right when things start to become interesting. I was hoping there'd be a decompiled code snippet to see what the app in question is actually doing with the image, since it's not displaying it.