What a frustrating article. There was an interesting bug here. It's trivial to explain. It's not a zero-day, this was fixed months before disclosure. Most of the article is basically: "Imagine you were running software with horrific security holes behind this WAF. We even made some examples. It had a flaw. If your entire security posture depended on this WAF, imagine how much damage could have been done. Imagine if AI were involved!"
> So if the web app went a month with no visitors it would cost nothing (except for the file storage fees)?
Yes that's the idea. The public URL for a sprite is served by a (free) load balancer. The sprite is normally suspended, gets resumed when a request comes in, then suspended again. Not sure on the exact timeouts, they probably don't suspend immediately after a response is sent.
Sprites pricing is based on usage, not reserved capacity, so depending on what you're doing I think it can actually be cheaper than Shellbox. You'll have to stay below 1GB of memory and have the CPU be mostly idle, which I'm not sure common workloads will.
An alternative is Lettermint[1] which has much more gradual (and slightly lower, but with a less generous free plan) pricing. It's also pretty new (I think it launched last year) but more fully featured. I haven't used it but it seems good.
+1 I feel like Remails should try to have a more flexible pricing as well (I would love it if they can have 1000 mails per x euros or similar to lettermint pricing), it seems decent but remails has a higher free tier than lettermint so I hope that remails can revamp its pricing to include middle points (similar to lettermint in this instance) while still being price competitive.
> I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. But are now hundreds of MB.
This is Android, but: 13+ years ago I had an HTC Desire. I was really struggling with internal storage space, regularly uninstalling and replacing apps just to be able to update others. Eventually I moved to custom ROMs just because they allowed some apps to be moved to the SD card.
I remember the biggest problem was WhatsApp, which was somehow over 7MB while the average was closer to 1MB.
On my current phone WhatsApp is 231MB. It's still pretty high up in the rankings, but doesn't stand out, and barely any apps are below that then-huge 7MB.
On Android most apps started bundling androidx/jetpack compat libraries that help deal with various API versions, and generally make the development much, _much_ easier. These days apps will also bundle the entire new Android UI framework (Compose) while in the past all the UI code was using framework classes.
Other than that, some popular and useful libraries will bundle native libs (for example for sql), and some ad/analytics/corporate SDKs will use native libs to share code between platforms and for obfuscation. These corporate SDKs (like Zendesk) will also notoriously break Android minification tools, because why bother
One of the struggles on my first android phone was fitting updates for the multiple google docs apps since they were all getting bigger and didn't share their redundant data. That phone had about 150MB for apps.
It's sad the laziness that happens when there's no pushback. The devs gain barely anything from leaving things this bloated, but barely anything isn't zero so now a million people have to deal with big files and wasted RAM.
> Some of our most popular products
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