Re: [dev] Re: Why HTTP is so bad?

From: Christoph Lohmann <20h_AT_r-36.net>
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 08:51:31 +0200

Greetings.

On Thu, 23 May 2013 08:51:31 +0200 Leon Winter <lwi_AT_ring0.de> wrote:
> Thorsten Glaser <tg_AT_mirbsd.de> wrote:
>
> > Doing anything else (well, file download is also okay),
> > such as this XMLRPC crap, or even tunneling, over HTTP
> > instead of just using plain TCP is probably the thing
> > the original poster disagreed with. Me too, btw… it’s
> > an illness of the age of the “webdesigner” ☹
>
> For a special kind of hell, visit UPnP which is SOAP/XML on top of HTTP
> on top of UDP which is broadcasted.
> Less horrifying would be BOSH which is XMPP over HTTP.

Well, that’s SSDP (*Simple* Service Discovery Protocol), which is a mal‐
formed and over‐complex HTTP request in a multicast UDP packet. Then UP‐
nP is used to contact the returned devices.

UPnP has been infiltrating our life first primarly because home router
vendors were not able to standardize on a way to open up NAT ports. Mi‐
crosoft used this and their *best* engineers to produce this overcomplex
crap protocol.

Nowadays a new threat already arrived and with the standard Microsoft
(as a representative for the worst corporate) intelligence it’s meant to
just occupy ROM space without being used: UPnP AV (DLNA), which is used
to control media devices and play music. The major flaw is this [0].
It’s only requiring MPEG2, JPEG and LPCM for devices to be thrown onto
the market.

Conclusion: Never let big corporations handle any standardisation. They
will ruin it as best as they can.

Just in case, the alternative for any automatic discovery is mDNS (mul‐
ticast DNS), which was ruined by Mr. Poettering due to this inability to
produce modular Unix software. Avahi is fucking brick and should be re‐
moved from everywhere. It requires separate APIs, enforces the dbus
syphilis and is like systemd a crime against humanity. Please people,
before you advocate any multicast stuff, do some productive printing
with the products you advertise. Avahi is *really* doing the discovery
to the network on every request, which means a latency of some seconds.
So whoever made this timeout that long and even thought of a timeout be‐
ing a solution to a computer problem which should just work has to jus‐
tify in front of court for the wasted life quality this caused. Torture
and jail! No reeducation!


Sincerely,

Christoph Lohmann

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Living_Network_Alliance#Media_formats_and_transport_model
Received on Thu May 23 2013 - 08:51:31 CEST

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