Yet another Hacker News

64 points maxim-fin 3 hours ago 34 comments

They send all typed into editor input to codepen.dev almost immediately (you would see in 1-2 sec after you typed your secret that it appears in respective Network/Response tab) even before one saved it. I tested this with a unique marker: after typing it into index.html, CodePen ran a build with "save:false", and the marker then appeared verbatim in the HTML served from the generated "*.codepen.dev preview". Thus, if you ever entered some secrets in there by mistake consider them compromized even if you did not publish/save the pen

keepo404 2 hours ago | parent

because this is how autocomplete logic works i guess? Frontend cannot guess language and completions for you

embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent

Well, except for the cases when you happen to have the entire VM for your language running in the same tab where you program lives, and they both are all JS.

Probably harder, and wouldn't work equally well for everyone, but it would be possible to have "guess language and autocomplete" entirely client-side, especially when it comes to JavaScript of all languages.

odo1242 1 hour ago | parent

It seems like the main disadvantage would be that you have to load all the autocomplete data / model weights on the client-side and your webpage might be CPU/memory limited

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | parent

> main disadvantage would be that you have to load all the autocomplete data / model weights on the client-side

Not sure what "model weights" you're talking about, but yes, that is the trade-off. Although complete autocomplete data for the entirely of the JavaScript APIs would be what, in an efficient format, easily below 1MB at least.

maxim-fin 2 hours ago | parent

No autocomplete involved there.

giancarlostoro 6 minutes ago | parent

Yeah I remember CodePen refreshing for me plenty of times.

bashy 2 hours ago | parent

Sent to them to render the preview pane. Same as pasting secrets anywhere on a browser.

Wait until you find out copying content on a computer might sent it over Wi-Fi/Bluetooth for sharing on other devices.

maxim-fin 2 hours ago | parent

Yes, that is for rendering Edit: and as "kypro" pointed out also for saving the current work but if you you quit (or crash) without saving the pen there is no way to recover unsaved work regardless

tvink 2 hours ago | parent

You're gonna be shocked how many input fields do this for various UX features :)

embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent

HotJar and similar services are (were?) popular as well, and those record your mouse pointer movements and clicks as well, then displays that as an overlay over the application, so it's essentially a "screen recording" of your session of the application.

maxim-fin 36 minutes ago | parent

Not sure if they are still popular but in the past they may have really slowed down the site

glub 32 minutes ago | parent

Now it's an entire industry. They call it "bot protection"

nusl 1 hour ago | parent

Shopify does this. If you ever go to purchase a product on a Shopify 'site, and enter eg your e-mail address, it'll save it even if you decide to cancel and close the tab. Sometimes you receive spam from companies along the lines of marketing or "we noticed you didn't complete your purchase" type crap. Shit is rly invasive.

Boss0565 59 minutes ago | parent

Have you checked to see if it’s stored in localstorage

masfuerte 54 minutes ago | parent

If they are sending you emails the address is not just in localstorage.

weezing 51 minutes ago | parent

Simplelogin is a godsend for this cancer

davidmurdoch 14 minutes ago | parent

They can only send the marketing emails if you have the "send me marketing emails" checkbox checked when you type in your email address. Dark pattern, yeah.

maxim-fin 48 minutes ago | parent

Yes, but codepen is for frontend devs. And devs are more likely to accidentally leak secrets because, well, they have them

Edit: accidantlay -> accidentally

pdyc 2 hours ago | parent

i made my own html playground that is browser only and shares preview via url hash because of these useless shenanigans of codepen, its not as featureful but i mostly use it for sharing single page html files

https://easyanalytica.com/tools/html-playground/

cph123 2 hours ago | parent

For basic previewing I like to use https://htmledit.squarefree.com which has been online for years and does it all client side.

nseskin 2 hours ago | parent

There’s a detailed discussion of the same issue here https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1rj1oac/i_planted_f...

maxim-fin 51 minutes ago | parent

Indeed, it looks like CodePen v1 was sending data to codepen.io, cpwebassets.codepen.io, and cdpn.io. Now v2 sends to codepen.dev

midnitewarrior 1 hour ago | parent

Look into https://www.fullstory.com/ , many major websites use this, it's basically a real-time video view of the user's browser screen. You can see where they move their mouse, how quickly they are typing, each character one at a time.

I worked for a company that would have phone support for users, and we'd be watching their screens giving gentle suggestions to them as they were using our app for how to do what they needed to do. We never offered up what we were doing, but given users' poor descriptions of what they were doing, FullStory was an amazing customer service tool.

VoidWhisperer 48 minutes ago | parent

Something like this would've been incredibly useful at my previous job - we often had to put together how a user triggered an issue using a combination of logs and analytics to track what actions they took..

maxim-fin 22 minutes ago | parent

interesting!

giancarlostoro 7 minutes ago | parent

Elastic has something like this too, as does Splunk iirc. Idk how all three compare I just know they can track DOM events type of stuff and recreate a flow video.

maxim-fin 29 minutes ago | parent

CodePen does not disclose this in neither ToS nor in Privacy Policy, only in Builds documentation they say: “As you work on CodePen, your Pens are constantly running through the CodePen Compiler”

kypro 23 minutes ago | parent

This is so it can restore any unsaved changes.

I take no opinion on whether this is good or bad, but I can see how from a UX perspective it's nice not to lose 10 minutes of work because your browser crashes or something.

maxim-fin 19 minutes ago | parent

Yes, absolutely, there are good reasons for that. The point is that any secrets typed/pasted in there should be considered compromized

giancarlostoro 9 minutes ago | parent

Pretty sure it always autosaved so this makes sense to me? I always assume it would send my data over to their backend, its code that ends up there regardless?