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URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies

ylukem.com

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Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies

#161

Post by wodenokoto »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #66
madars wrote: post #21

Wow! https://preview.tinyurl.com/examplezoom really shows https://zoom.us/j/123456789 link whereas Chrome network inspector confirms the viglink.com redirect. uBlock origin blocks the latter via Dan Pollock’s hosts file and Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list.

As someone who uses a whitelist approach, I am curious whether people ever experience false positives or missing entries with these lists? I have little experince with those lists except for going through one of them once and being shocked at what was in there. The setup I use is customised for me, i.e., Rube Goldberg would be proud. I can view and manipulate all traffic from outside the application and outside the o…

There are many false positives or grey negatives when using those filters.

But it mostly happen during these kinds of redirects where one or more actors wants to be in the redirect loop. This could be URL shorteners or price comparison websites.

uBlock asks if you want a one time exception when a redirect leads you to a blocked url.

Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies

#162

Post by phire »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #143
phire wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > We were testing an AI that could show some basic emotions about internet content, and turns out it was very precise at getting “annoyed” by ads and “unsolicited” third party connections… Holy shit that's such bullshit. They are basically claiming they invented a artificial general intelligence, with feelings, that happens to feel the same way about ads as us. It's basically sentient instead of publishing research…

It's just colorful language for the fact that ads and spyware score high on their model for bad websites.

First: Marketing bullshit is still bullshit.

Even if it's not morally wrong, it makes you look like an idiot who doesn't understand the technology you are selling. In the worst case it might even be used as evidence that your work is a fraud.

There is no benefit; To the lay person, It would sound just as impressive to say "We trained a machine learning model to detect ads and spyware" and that wouldn't immediately set off alarm bells with people familiar with the current state of machine learning.

Second: Talking about fraud, the evidence linked above is pretty strong.

Their alleged AI is somehow detecting test domains that authors of other lists as "ads or spyware". Test domains that aren't linked anywhere on the internet.

In one "smoking gun" example, the test domain doesn't even have a DNS entry. The alleged AI can't even load the domain to scan it.

Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies

#163

Post by danielskogly »

TimLeland wrote: post #87
samb1729 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a shame that T.LY displays only the footer without JavaScript enabled instead of degrading gracefully. Surely a plain HTML form that POSTs should suffice? I'm not sure how much work it would require for you to support this, but it would help cement your place as a good web actor if you're so inclined!

Sorry about that. I honestly didn't think anyone browsed the web without javascript enabled. How common is that? We do offer a simple to use api that you could build on top of to shorten link. Also an extension that offers the ability to shorten a url in one click. API Docs: https://t.ly/docs/ Extension: https://t.ly/extension

I realize you're not using React for t.ly, but the method I outline in this[0] blog post could perhaps be made to work for you if you at any point would like to accommodate users without JS enabled. Yours is the kind of site that this method is best suited for - a relatively simple UI with basic I/O.

The biggest hurdle I've encountered so far, is that Stripe doesn't offer a fully nojs alternative to enable users to make payments, although this would be incredibly easy for them to do, considering that they already offer a hosted checkout[1]. The only thing missing here is a way to get the checkout URL itself from the server side, when the Checkout-session is generated.

[0] https://blog.klungo.no/2020/05/28/using-react-and-redux-to-a...

[1] https://stripe.com/en-no/payments/checkout

Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies

#165

Post by hooande »

If I recall correctly, Viglink does affiliate marketing. Essentially they are setting an affiliate cookie to make money from anything you purchase on Amazon, Walmart.com, Ebay, etc. This cookie will override any other that was already set. So if you clicked a link to a book from a blog post and then clicked on a tinyurl, they would get the affiliate referral money and not the blog.

It's an easy way to make money because it doesn't involve a long sales process with major advertisers. Viglink does all that. tinyurl, bitly, et al are probably making a fair amount given their reach

Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies

#166

Post by sanmak »

I think these guys do this to pay for their servers, infra and salaries if any. One of the business model.

I think we have ton of url shortener available in the market. Difficult to point one which is 100% safe and secure.

Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies

#167

Post by samb1729 »

TimLeland wrote: post #87
samb1729 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a shame that T.LY displays only the footer without JavaScript enabled instead of degrading gracefully. Surely a plain HTML form that POSTs should suffice? I'm not sure how much work it would require for you to support this, but it would help cement your place as a good web actor if you're so inclined!

Sorry about that. I honestly didn't think anyone browsed the web without javascript enabled. How common is that? We do offer a simple to use api that you could build on top of to shorten link. Also an extension that offers the ability to shorten a url in one click. API Docs: https://t.ly/docs/ Extension: https://t.ly/extension

I browse with NoScript blocking JavaScript by default as too many web developers (or their managers) have violated my trust to not do Dodgy Stuff over the years. Unfortunately I don't believe there will ever exist accurate numbers of the true portion of people who browse a subset of the web with JavaScript disabled, at least partially because many of those same folks will prevent the means used to collect the data in the first place.

It's no place for me to dictate how you do your development, so I won't do that. It is however my personal opinion that websites should depend on HTML and CSS, and progressively enhance functionality with sprinkles of JavaScript. The vast majority of websites are not interactive applications, and I think modern web development practices could do with something of a hard reset.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide how things ended up where they are now and whether it's a good thing for them. Personally I think it's comical and horrifying just how much compilation goes on in projects written in that particular interpreted language these days!

Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies

#168

Post by samb1729 »

daniellarusso wrote: post #71
samb1729 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a shame that T.LY displays only the footer without JavaScript enabled instead of degrading gracefully. Surely a plain HTML form that POSTs should suffice? I'm not sure how much work it would require for you to support this, but it would help cement your place as a good web actor if you're so inclined!

Can you instead use the meta refresh tag?

Thorrez is correct in their interpretation of my comment, so I have nothing to add there.

However given your username I'd like to let you know Cobra Kai season 3 recently released and is as silly as ever, in case you haven't already watched!

Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies

#169

Post by legulere »

TimLeland wrote: post #51

This is really interesting. I suppose tiny url gets a kicked back from their ad network for this. I'm the creator of the URL shortener (T.LY) and a Link Unshortener tool. I spend most of my development time fighting bad actors. My goal is to have a legitimate competitor to bitly that people benefit from. We do not set any cookies on redirects but do use cookies for authentication for users. T.LY: https://t.ly/ Link U…

How is your project protected from being bought off by a bad actor?

Re: URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies

#170

Post by usr1106 »

TimLeland wrote: post #87
samb1729 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a shame that T.LY displays only the footer without JavaScript enabled instead of degrading gracefully. Surely a plain HTML form that POSTs should suffice? I'm not sure how much work it would require for you to support this, but it would help cement your place as a good web actor if you're so inclined!

Sorry about that. I honestly didn't think anyone browsed the web without javascript enabled. How common is that? We do offer a simple to use api that you could build on top of to shorten link. Also an extension that offers the ability to shorten a url in one click. API Docs: https://t.ly/docs/ Extension: https://t.ly/extension

> I honestly didn't think anyone browsed the web without javascript enabled.

Not very common in the general population. But there are those (mostly software developers) who prefer to be in control what code they run on their computers. I know one person who does most browsing using lynx. That is certainly extreme, but extensions like NoScript and uMatrix (has gone out of maintenance recently) certainly have their user base.

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