Re:Leaking URLs to the Clown
by miki123211 on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @02:33AM
(#40785172)
Nothing is ever truly 100% private, but certain things are "private enough".
A password can be leaked just as well as any URL, particularly if the password needs to be periodically sent to a downstream server to do the feed polling, and hence stored in plaintext.
URLs generally have less protection than a password because that's how we design a lot of our systems (and this is a property of our systems and not of the URLs themselves), but the protection they do have is often enough.
You protect podcast feeds for revenue, not privacy. The negligible loss of revenue you're going to experience if somebody hacks into a feed reader isn't worth inventing a new protocol. You need to protect against abusive sharing of URLs by authorized users anyway, usually by having a system that forces the url to be re-generated when it's getting too many visits, so if one of these databases becomes fully public, the problem is already solved anyway.
A password can be leaked just as well as any URL, particularly if the password needs to be periodically sent to a downstream server to do the feed polling, and hence stored in plaintext.
URLs generally have less protection than a password because that's how we design a lot of our systems (and this is a property of our systems and not of the URLs themselves), but the protection they do have is often enough.
You protect podcast feeds for revenue, not privacy. The negligible loss of revenue you're going to experience if somebody hacks into a feed reader isn't worth inventing a new protocol. You need to protect against abusive sharing of URLs by authorized users anyway, usually by having a system that forces the url to be re-generated when it's getting too many visits, so if one of these databases becomes fully public, the problem is already solved anyway.