Episode: 2246
Title: HPR2246: My Custom RSS Comic and Security Feed
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2246/hpr2246.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 23:37:17

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This is HPR episode 2,246 entitled, my custom RSS comic and security feed.
It is hosted by Opera Nero R and in about 7 minutes long and can in an explicit flag.
The summary is, your SS say something.
I talk about my comics only RSS feed.
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So I was listening to a podcast for, let's see, episode 2211, my podcast workflow and it got me thinking about my RSS feeds, which nobody really knows about.
Nobody really uses except for myself and not often enough. So the first one here is a comic script feed and the second one is a security kind of old poor man threat intelligence before it exists at feed.
So that's kind of what the basis of this is and explaining how they work and what they are.
I started noticing that these comic strip feeds had click through comics, meaning that they wouldn't give you the original content inside of the feed, which is quite frustrating when you're trying to do offline management of your feeds and content and you can't pull that content down.
And also because I don't have like having to do a second thing to get my content, I'll just be able to scroll through my content just like any other service.
So not being able to have that content without having to click through one off on all your comic strips is kind of kind of annoying.
So what I'll talk about is how I have that script set up, what it does and briefly how it works.
It merges a bunch of feeds together for the lack of a veteran. Some of them don't even have RSS feeds and if they do, they're stupid click through ones.
And then some of them have direct RSS, but they're again, they're, they might be click through.
So I'll tell you which ones are in the feed. It's extra life, control, all delete.
Penny Arcade, Sinite Happiness, Dilbert JoyTech user friendly and I think that's it.
I've actually ripped all of Penny Arcade for whatever reason.
I was doing something in their script change and he keeps changing the HTML.
So I kind of just at a spike made it archive and ripped the entire subset of all of his comics.
So I have one big directory with all the comics in there from going back from like whatever 2001.
But anyways, with that said, it, it, it, it basically used a bash and she'll bash off curl HTML parser.
Now if you've ever had to parse HTML, it's, it's not really something you can do per se.
It can be quite frustrating when people malform HTML and then you have to work around that.
So if you do use an HTML parser, there might be instances where intentionally or unintentionally that person codes bad has bad code in there or bad HTML and doesn't close tags out right properly.
So guess what your HTML parser is probably going to throw a ball over the place.
So you have to end up using some other regular expression shenanigans within that that script.
So that said, I've actually just kind of stuck with set up bash HTML parsing and it does change probably once every six months or so.
One of them will crap crap out and I kind of have to keep an eye on it.
That said, wow, it really just basic RSS feed with the content on there.
So you don't have to worry about clicking through.
I will say one of them actually has a like hot linking anti hot linking, which means if you're pulling the content from somewhere else, not the actual website as your refer or your your refer or refer thing.
So when you click through a website, say you're on my website and you load an image through my website.
And know that you loaded it through my website because your refer or tag is is is my website.
So if you load an image from no or essentially nowhere, you're dread loading it directly, then you know that person is hot linking and there's various, you know, methods to get around that.
But it's generally frowned upon within the advertising media area because they know you're not on their website.
So if you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on
the site, you're in the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, you're on the site, all of the public are on the site, were on the site, all the public are on the site, I guess.
with doing some kind of thing like that.
But then the next thing, you know,
someone's gonna just strip out the first frame
of the GIF and then have the content there.
So you're always gonna have that person.
But I don't think it's fair to make someone click through
to get content, at least all of the content.
I mean, it's unfair to do on both sides to do that.
But anyways, the second one I'll mention is based
on kind of before there was threat intelligence
kind of sort of thing.
It was kind of a form in threat intelligence.
So it was, it was back basically like two.
Started out as two or three different feeds
and then I started making my own feed, RSS feed for it.
It's kind of outdated.
There's obviously other open source, crowd sourced
based threat intelligence platforms out there.
But it's called security or something like that.
I think this is called feeds to RSS.
And it meshes up a bunch of feeds
and then it removes the tricer, remove the duplicates.
Problem with that is that the content providers
just started disappearing and going paid
with their content.
So I think three, three, two or three of them
started going paid.
And after that, it was just, there's nothing,
nothing I could do and things started kind of falling apart
just threat intelligence started being a commodity
and it kind of fell off the grid.
And now we have a lot of better nowadays.
Open source threat intelligence platforms out there
that are kind of crowd sourced based.
So anyways, I just wanted to mention that
as a quick little episode and then go from there.
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