1046: The Pi Updates are insane

Scott Tolinski (0:01)

What's up, everyone? It's another Syntax Weekly. We're coming at you with a whole ton of stuff. Yes, last week was a wild week for updates. Tons of stuff got updated. We're going to be talking about both software libraries as well as AI stuff, what got updated, what got released, what all the new hotness is, stuff with Pi, Svelte kit, OpenAI release stuff, effect, all kinds of crazy stuff. My name is Scott Tolinski, I'm a developer from Denver, with me as always is Wes Bos and CJ Reynolds. What's up, guys?

Wes Bos (0:32)

Man, hell of a week. Stoked to talk about everything that's going on because some super exciting stuff.

Scott Tolinski (0:39)

Yes, super duper exciting.

Man, guys, I'm so excited to get into all of it. I know CJ, you had something up first, which was example.com. I need to get schooled on what the heck this thing is because I saw this in the show notes here. I got no idea what you're talking about.

CJ Reynolds (0:57)

Yeah, let's get into it. So if you're not familiar, example.com is actually a live website, and I believe it's owned by the IANA, the same people that handle domain name registry, like the top tier one, not individual companies, but in charge of all that. But they host example.com, and it's supposed to be used in things like documentation, and you've probably seen before, like if you're looking at DevDocs, or I don't know, something, it has a link to example.com when it's talking about websites, or URLs, or whatever else, or you might see a fake email, like user at example.com. Well, example.com is a real domain, and they keep it live for those very purposes, for use in testing, and documentation, and monitoring, and stuff like that. But it finally got a facelift. I would show you what it looked like before, but the web archive is currently down, so I can't. But it was pretty simple before, now it has multiple languages listed, it's nothing crazy. I will say that I first learned about this from Oliver Dunk.

So they actually reached out to the IANA, asking what happened, why is there new content?

And they replied to his email that it's a placeholder that really no one should be accessing, but people still do. So, they actually updated what it looks like, to help with that and clear up confusion if somebody actually goes to it. It's really funny. Wes is the top comment here. How many CIs did this break? Because people probably use example.com maybe even as like a health checkpoint or like...

Wes Bos (2:40)

I'm sure people like curl it and then check the like byte output to like as like a sanity check that they are getting the real internet. Yeah, that's and I wonder how many it broke for them and is it I can't get to it right now if I visit it if I visit example.com it just says like DNS issues which maybe they broke something they broke it in Canada no www just example.com yeah straight up example.com DNS probe error they don't want you to have it in Canada issue here yes unfortunately so I thought this was fun because I know I've been to example.com a lot because I create a lot of tutorials over the years and so yeah but I think it would be hilarious if they just start publishing all the emails that get sent to example.com that's you know that would be a fun blog is like everybody's everybody is sending all of their test data to example.com that's exactly that's they say if you need to put in a domain name for something don't put in something assuming it's not going to go somewhere because we've all been there where you accidentally switch your prod keys or something and then you're sending real emails and so what you do in that case is you use example.com knowing that that email will never go anywhere but they should just as a as a joke or as like a data collection endpoint maybe they can go full agentic just start publishing everything that people send to example.com.

CJ Reynolds (4:06)

Yeah that's it exactly so I went to Defcon this year I'll have to find the paper because I don't remember the exact domains but there there was a hacker that did a presentation they bought a couple of innocuous domains very similar to example.com but they actually listen to all of the incoming emails and they reported like the number of API keys the number of like just random stuff people were sending to these domains that they thought nobody was actually listening at. Yeah. So yeah be very careful of the domains you use and tests and stuff like that for your internal secret data.