Live data from Hacker News

A URL Lengthener

aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com

271–280 of 313 posts

Re: A URL Lengthener

#271
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure this is something they have considered as their own analytics program uses onclick to track outbound traffic - I assume it's a mix of speed, reliability and the ability to track without javascript. Plus, if it was done on OnClick there would definitely be an add-on to disable the tracking on all browsers.

There are some privacy reasons for it. A direct link from a search page will let websites see the search terms that users entered in to navigate there. Google still knows everything so it doesn't protect you from them, but websites are more in the dark what users were doing before clicking the link.

And then Google aggregates that back to sides that use Google analytics so that they get both sides of the users

Re: A URL Lengthener

#273
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would Microsoft, Google and Facebook otherwise be able to track when and what you click?! Think of the hit to their revenue!

They can use onclick and leave the href attribute alone.

Then they can't track if you share the link!

Re: A URL Lengthener

#277

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 was on a 12-person failed project, the kind of which you owe millions to the govt. We had a problem with the search, we couldn’t get performance. I told my boss: “See, they wrote ‘The old search responded in 2 seconds. The new search must take at least the same time.’ We could almost add a sleep(2000) before starting the search.” He went with it. They dealt to drop the requirement on the performance of the search o…

Don't ever go to https://i.reddit.com/r/maliciouscompliance

You only have so many hours in your day.

Way back when, we used to remind people to be careful what they wished for in case they got it.

Re: A URL Lengthener

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what to do about them JavaScript disabling varmints then?

That’s what hyperlink auditing with the ping attribute is for: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#hyperlink-... You put a `ping` attribute on a link, and when the user follows the link, the browser sends a request to the ping URL notifying it of the action. Firefox disables it by default, which doesn’t seem like much of a privacy win considering JavaScript is enabled by default and can polyfill this fu…

Giving Javascript the ability to make requests without asking the user via dialog for each one—if we must allow it at all—was a mistake.
Post reply on HN