Re: OT - Tips for width constrained text

Joe Attardi wrote:
...


This was also touched on, in the thread linked 'up-thread'..


Aaah.. yes. I had considered such a thing, long ago.

There are the challenges of
- Controlling access (not only having to identify people who
upload material, but storing, and keeping safe, their log-ins)
- Controlling upload size (OK pretty easy - make it a 'GET')
- Ensuring you are not supporting ..spammers (a code that
repeats "Shop at Ass-Hopper" a million times), pornographers
& paedophiles (code that draws ASCII art pictures of some
famous hated figure having sex with babies..) or general
malcontents who simply post malicious code.

One might argue that none of the last point is relevant
to the person who controls the server, but if some court in
..Wherever* decides that a person is offended by something
from a particular server, it can cause hassles for whoever
controls it - probably whichever country the server is coming
from. Server hosts are all too willing to remove a site based
on a single complaint, and the owner getting in contact with
them to argue it being restored.

* I was about to name a particular (randomly chosen) city
in the US, given Americans seem to be one of the most
litigious(?) groups of citizens on the planet at this time, but
it really does not matter. A court anywhere might put
pressure on the hosts of a web site.

As an aside..

For a short, heady time, I actually had an on-line
compiler available to attach to on-line codes, and
compile them directly from a web page (with no
JRE/JDK on local PC). As it happens, my use of
the (never intended to be publicly exposed on-line)
javac utility on the net opened my server to DOS
attacks. Although the immediate fix was pretty simple
(constrain compiles by time), it made me realise
that there was a lot more to the security side of
on-line compiling than I had first realised.

--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.athompson.info/andrew/

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