I used to help nonprofits and small businesses build websites. Process always went like 1. buy domain, 2. buy a shared hosting provider that one-click-installs Wordpress, 3. use a theme to begin editing the website. Often, I would also use the email included with that hosting provider for the firm.
ALL of that goes through cpanel, for every shared hosting provider I can ever remember using. Even if the stuff happening on those servers didn't use perl, cpanel itself -- the admin of everything provided for that domain by the hosting provider -- it's a huge surface area.
I still deploy a bunch of simple sites, built around the CGI::Application framework.
I understand how they work, I'm familiar with HTML::Template, and related modules, so I can hack up a quick interactive/dynamic site in a couple of hours.
They're no longer things I'd run on the public internet, but for quick internal things it's very easy to deploy a container with a perl backend.
I don't see it as fetishizing byte count. I think of it as a proxy measure for how complicated or uncomplicated the exploit might be. They could just as well have said "we can do it in 3 lines of python" or "the Shannon entropy of the script implementing the exploit is really small" and I would have interpreted it similarly.
Where do you see this "fetishizing" happening most often? It's a strange thing to counter-fetishize about.
> I think of it as a proxy measure for how complicated or uncomplicated the exploit might be.
From a Busy Beaver, 256-bytes compo, or Dwitter perspective, 732 bytes isn’t really that meaningful.
And the sample exploit is even optimizing the byte size by using zlib compression, which doesn’t make much sense for the purpose. It just emphasizes the byte count fetishization.
Again, I think the point is that compressed size is a reasonable measure of the inherent complexity of a program. I'm a crap mathematician, but I believe that is a fundamental concept in information theory.
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