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Comment by ANTSANTS | Hacker News Reader

Not much to see here, folks. Someone took an old leak of the source code and commented out a few lines for a giggle. Only moot and the developers know what the site looks like now, but given the significant addition of functionality in the past few years, it's pretty much impossible that that would be the only difference in the source.

The original leak, from 2010 at least, possibly older: http://pastebin.com/4JVjS02b

4chan was hacked the other day, so the current source code could have been leaked, but if it was, this sure isn't it.

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Noted. I have added "(2010)" to the title.

A diff that compares the old leaked source to the "new" one: http://pastebin.com/KkeLzb6q.

Wouldn't the ideal solution for 4Chan be an external data/processing server that dials in to the hosting server to dump out static files? That way the location of the external server remains, at least partially, a mystery, even after the main box is hacked?

Why? 4chan is not a high target. There is no reason to over engineer it. Mostly it will be prepubescent teenagers throwing a fit and bombarding the server with bandwidth.

The hack of earlier today was due to an obsession over a female 4chan moderator. That should say enough.

CloudFlare was hacked with the sole intention of taking over 4chan.org's domain. They're a huge target.

Okay lets say they are a massive target. There is still a monetary issues.

4chan is a cultural and ideological landmark on the American internet. Not only are their clones, but "Cloning 4chan" is almost a business in and of itself. And they fail. 4chan's month to month profits are barely to not-at-all existent. In a purely dollars and cents way, 4chan is a failure.

So their is very little monetary motivation for discovering the secrets of the 4chan's operation.

Security is a trade off of Financial Risk vs Financial Investment. There is no Financial Risk in 4chan being hacked. They have no user accounts, they have no financial data. They have no overly complex-secret-sauce-search algorithm.

The only thing to 'steal' is a collection of Japanese/American Pop cultural referential gif, jpg, and webm files.

They have tens of thousands of "passes" (basically accounts) and the payment information associated with them.

There's nothing static about 4Chan. My guess is that the performance issues would be terrifying.

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