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A URL Lengthener

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Re: A URL Lengthener

#141

Post by naugtur »

jstrieb wrote: post #42
lurkerasdfh8 wrote: post #17

fun fact. in the browser wars of 1993(?) i looked at the specs from netscape (mozilla dady for the young folks) and microsoft (what w3c? ha!) and netscape release a browser spec that said "X must support up to Y", as in "url must be up to 1024 chars", "cookies must be up to 1mb", etc... then microsoft release IE4 (or 6?) web spec. It was literally a copy of netscape's but with "up to" replaced with "at least". and fr…

I spent some time looking at similar specs for more recent browsers, but wasn't able to find anything useful. This was for a proof-of-concept I made that stores entire web pages in URLs (creatively named "URL Pages") by base64-encoding them and putting them in the URL fragment (the part after the "#"). https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages The URLs this thing generates get pretty damn big sometimes, since I never got a…

I needed to send data over GET in 2012/2013 and built my own tiny LZW-alike compression to squeeze as much as possible into the 100kb which seemed to be the safe limit for non-ie browsers at the time

Re: A URL Lengthener

#142

Post by naugtur »

naugtur wrote: post #141
jstrieb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent some time looking at similar specs for more recent browsers, but wasn't able to find anything useful. This was for a proof-of-concept I made that stores entire web pages in URLs (creatively named "URL Pages") by base64-encoding them and putting them in the URL fragment (the part after the "#"). https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages The URLs this thing generates get pretty damn big sometimes, since I never got a…

I needed to send data over GET in 2012/2013 and built my own tiny LZW-alike compression to squeeze as much as possible into the 100kb which seemed to be the safe limit for non-ie browsers at the time

Here's the repo https://github.com/naugtur/ripper/

Re: A URL Lengthener

#147

Post by annoyingnoob »

Scraper? Honeypot?

I guess my tinfoil hat is too tight. While its cool and funny I inherently don't trust things like this.

Edit: the concern is about data collection and profiling over time, it could essentially be an advertising model, you get an idea of things a particular cookie/IP/fingerprint does. depending one what is in your original link, all kinds of ids and data can be sitting in the url alone. Does a link to my social media account potentially expose my PII?

Re: A URL Lengthener

#148

Post by kristopolous »

gus_massa wrote: post #57

Somewhat related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511735 (45 points | March 28, 2019 | 32 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24229085 (17 points | 8 months | 7 comments)

The multiple efforts thing is a lesson I should learn but refuse to do.

It just feels so spammy. I don't want to touch that world intentionally but it works.

It gets worse

I had two similar services, one that used a page's meta information to create URL stubs so that the link would have the semantic meaning in it instead of say "id=27158278". It'd also (this is about 10 years ago) fill in opengraph holes if found and present the social media card generators with more complete information.

It also had a JavaScript plugin that would fill in title tags to your anchor links so that you could hover over a link and get the destination page's title.

I thought it was really useful but I literally got nothing but either silence or criticism. It was really demotivating. I just abandoned it.

It sucks to create something that you believe in, that you like, that you find value in and get nothing but hot bottles of shit from everyone else. Nothing constructive, just demoralizing abuse. I've tried so hard to never be that person. The receiving end of that is awful. It's never ok. (I should make a list of "never events" in open source/programming (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_event) not in engineering negligence but human empathy negligence.)

Anyways, then I had another project (also about 10 years ago) where I registered a bunch of news sounding sites, like say, themercurystar.com and as a url "shortener" it created absurd sensationalist news headlines as the "shortened" URL from a grammar generator. So for instance, you may get a url like themercurystar.com/arts/current/henry-kissinger-sings-dances-on-broadway-in-bye-bye-birdie or /taylor-swift-proves-hodge-conjecture-pnas etc.

It was complete with the opengraph of a stock image and a repurposing of the generative title with more filler to make it like look real, redirecting the crawlers to a fake shell page to satisfy the meta content and redirecting the humans to the actual link to be shortened.

That one was probably too good. I found it hilarious but apparently I was the only one in on the joke.

So failure again. Ah well.

They're still great and I'd gladly launch them again.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#149

Post by potatoman22 »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #147

Scraper? Honeypot? I guess my tinfoil hat is too tight. While its cool and funny I inherently don't trust things like this. Edit: the concern is about data collection and profiling over time, it could essentially be an advertising model, you get an idea of things a particular cookie/IP/fingerprint does. depending one what is in your original link, all kinds of ids and data can be sitting in the url alone. Does a link…

Why not?

Re: A URL Lengthener

#150

Post by gouggoug »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #147

Scraper? Honeypot? I guess my tinfoil hat is too tight. While its cool and funny I inherently don't trust things like this. Edit: the concern is about data collection and profiling over time, it could essentially be an advertising model, you get an idea of things a particular cookie/IP/fingerprint does. depending one what is in your original link, all kinds of ids and data can be sitting in the url alone. Does a link…

What exactly do you not trust here? What bad could come out of you typing a URL in this website?
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