Comment by tlavoie
5 years ago
Your compression workaround reminded me of an issue I ran into a while back.
My team at work uses a reporting tool for vulnerability assessments and pen-tests; basically you can import a bunch of data files, review it in the web app, and generate a report.
I would run into cases where I couldn't upload one of my data files. The web app is JS-heavy, lots of things going on in the background without much visible feedback. It turns out that the programmers had implemented the upload as this async task with a hard-coded timeout for completion, and they likely wrote it while they had great network speed.
I'm on DSL, and generally, it gets the job done. However, upload speed is only 1Mbit/s, so with a big file, my upload would time out. It's hard-coded remember, so it didn't matter that it was still functioning when it got clobbered.
It occurred to me that some file formats, like WAR or Office documents, are basically Zip archives under the hood, so I put my large XML file into one, and tried that.... and it worked! Something on the back-end quietly unzipped my upload and imported the file it contained.
Funnier is that when I mentioned it to the devs, this behaviour was not something they expected. Probably built into a library they use.
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