
AOL: still providing insanity after all these years - protomyth
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/08/22/huh/
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aphyr
AOL does a lot of weird things. Last year, jrecursive actually observed that
their servers would make an HTTP GET for any URL passed over an AIM
conversation. Looks like that doesn't happen any more, though.

~~~
pjscott
The moral of that story is, don't do anything in response to a GET request
that you don't want randomly triggered by bots. That's what POST and PUT are
for.

~~~
baddox
Of course, there's nothing stopping AOL from doing a POST or PUT request
either, or a DELETE for that matter.

~~~
nkassis
Using CSRF token should protect against that and is good practice.

~~~
aphyr
CSRF won't protect against traffic sniffing; only third parties constructing
URLs.

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asadpanda
Well the user searched news not the general web. Not sure how big of an issue
this is. AOL site delivers their search results from google anyways.

~~~
rachelbythebay
Sure, they did do a news search, but it also fails at that. How do any of
those results fulfill that request? My post did not contain the word "AOL" at
all. My only post with that particular sequence of characters before this
morning was one from April 21st which talked about the decline of empires,
Netscape being eaten, and all of that as seen in Coders at Work.

People are going to do web searches for things which make no sense to
technical types. We can either roll our eyes at them (or worse), or we can
accept them as a quirk of the human condition and create systems which will
provide an acceptable experience even though they don't "get" the web the way
we do.

I'm not sure, but I think the latter one might be far more profitable.

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aswanson
AOL continuously highjacks my default browser search (firefox, I search from
the field these days) to their annoying wrapper-over-google search engine. The
inanity is widespread.

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mcclung
The first non-ad result for me is mail.aol.com, as it should be.

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lurkinggrue
AOL is still in business?

~~~
drgath
Very much so. If you are the average HN reader, odds are likely you visit AOL
sites on a daily basis. Also, the stock is up 88% over the last 12-months.

But, I feel like they've given up on being anything other than an SEO /
blogging / display advertising sweat-shop. Although it seems to be working for
them.

~~~
pkill17
Much higher than 88%; past year AOL has seen over 150% increase in its stock
price.

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1345686369846&chddm=98923&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:GOOG&cmptdms=0&q=NYSE:AOL&ntsp=0)

