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Shortest URLs on the Internet

jameswillia.ms

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Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#141

Post by daniel-cussen »

Minor49er wrote: post #121
bdn_ wrote: post #11

At one point of time, ` http://to ` resolved to a "It works!" page [1]. I've always thought it would be cool to have a URL shortener with links such as ` https://to/library ` or something similar. Oh, how much fun running your own TLD would be... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319211308/http://to/

Many years ago, there used to be http://www.tk/ . They would let you register free domains (which I think technically were actually subdomains, but I'm really not sure). You could point these to anywhere online and it would maintain your [whatever].tk URL in the address bar. I remember hosting some pages on Geocities and using .tk to make it look "authentic" since it appeared to be self-hosted, which was 1337. It see…

> It seems that the service now redirects to a site called Freenom where you can still get .tk names, but they appear to be priced based on the length and whether or not the domain contains known words or phrases (though some free ones are apparently still available if you don't mind having a gibberish name)

I consider that virtuous, and smart. Short domains must cost more than long domains. They're more valuable. Words must cost more than gibberish. But there were domains available, right? Didn't have to bang out twenty minutes finding something you liked that wasn't taken?

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#142

Post by sleepy_keita »

Quick question: my systemd-resolved doesn't want to resolve `ai.` (`dig ai.` results in a SERVFAIL, but doing `dig ai. @8.8.8.8` works fine). Anyone have this problem? I already checked upstream resolvers and they work with the bare TLD, any hints to how I can get systemd-resolved to resolve this?

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#143

Post by jrockway »

bdn_ wrote: post #61
johnasmith wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote myself a Chrome extension that does this, using http://l/foo style links, and using Chrome's sync to share across devices. Works well enough but limited to desktops. Some large orgs maintain internal shorteners, like http://go links at Google.

I recall seeing go link stickers around Google's Mountain View campus in the early 2010s! That was the first time I had seen something done like that, "overriding" an entire TLD zone (not that `.go` is in use, anyway) to serve custom content. Do you happen to know how Google, or any other places, do this? I assume a custom DNS resolver being forced on clients through a network could do this, or maybe hosts files for…

It's important to note that http://go/ and http://go./ are different things. The former means "consult my search path", the latter means "lookup the apex record of the go TLD". When you write "example.com", you really mean "example.com.", for example. Someone decided that browsers should save you a byte, and now every URL is ambiguous, causing all sorts of problems. (For example, if your search path is "corp.company.com" and you type "example.com" into your URL bar, you should be taken to "example.com.corp.company.com" before trying "example.com", but that turns out not to be what anyone wants, so you're pretty much screwed if you DO want that behavior. As always, the core of the Internet is duct tape and chewing gum.)

This often bites people when they wonder why they blow up their DNS servers with traffic from services that contact addresses like "foo.default". With a search path of "search default.svc.cluster.local svc.cluster.local cluster.local" in resolv.conf, the app is actually looking up foo.default, foo.default.default.svc.cluster.local, foo.default.cluster.local, and foo.default.svc.cluster.local, etc. every single time. Hard-code "foo.default.svc.cluster.local." in the app config, and you eliminate requests for the names that can't possibly exist, and save the load (and latency) of handling them.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#144

Post by Cyberdog »

AviationAtom wrote: post #99
zfxfr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience if you give people any email address with a custom domain people will usually be confused and ask you to repeat even if it's very clear and easy to remember. Last time i gave my mail which is something like :myname@LLL.fr i was asked : are you sure ?

I usually get: "@gmail.com?" "No, no. Not everyone has to use Gmail!"

My favorite is when someone is trying to ask you for your email address but asks it as "What's your Gmail?"

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#145

Post by twbarr »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #63

I used to have an email address with a three-letter username @eh.net, which was actually surprisingly annoying to use. If you ever gave the address to someone they'd be very confused at how short it is.

I never had problems with [initials]@[short university name].edu, but my current email address, of the form n@nnn.nn, causes all sorts of problems with filters. My newest favorite bug was Adobe's password rules which demanded that the part of my email address before the @ not appear in the password.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#146

Post by lelandfe »

oarmstrong wrote: post #14
derefr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does 1.1 resolve to 1.0.0.1? I don't recall this being in any of the documents about CIDRs. Are browsers implicitly mapping IPv4 addresses temporarily into IPv6 addresses during parsing, such that "1.1" becomes "1::1", and then gets IPv6 abbreviated-form expansion applied to it?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Addressing > IPv4 addresses may be represented in any notation expressing a 32-bit integer value. I remember reading a man page that explained this really succinctly but I cannot remember which one it was. A tool like ping I believe.

> When fewer than four numbers are specified in the address in dotted notation, the last value is treated as an integer of as many bytes as are required to fill out the address to four octets. Thus, the address 127.65530 is equivalent to 127.0.255.250

Wow, it actually works: http://127.65530

TIL

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#147

Post by unixpickle »

dn3500 wrote: post #79

http://ai is an interesting case. It was there from the early days of the web, back when you could type "ai" into the mozilla url bar and it would take you there. Today firefox "helps" you out and changes what you typed into something else because it knows better than you do what web site you want. It's run by a character named Vince Cate who moved to Anguilla to protest taxes or something. He was from the US and gav…

Apparently my router's built-in DNS server doesn't like the domain name `ai.` or `ai`. Switching to Google's fixes the issue for me.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#148

Post by zhte415 »

lelandfe wrote: post #146
oarmstrong wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Addressing > IPv4 addresses may be represented in any notation expressing a 32-bit integer value. I remember reading a man page that explained this really succinctly but I cannot remember which one it was. A tool like ping I believe.

> When fewer than four numbers are specified in the address in dotted notation, the last value is treated as an integer of as many bytes as are required to fill out the address to four octets. Thus, the address 127.65530 is equivalent to 127.0.255.250 Wow, it actually works: http://127.65530 TIL

This was a thing in late 90s spam.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#150

Post by brighamyoung »

dn3500 wrote: post #79

http://ai is an interesting case. It was there from the early days of the web, back when you could type "ai" into the mozilla url bar and it would take you there. Today firefox "helps" you out and changes what you typed into something else because it knows better than you do what web site you want. It's run by a character named Vince Cate who moved to Anguilla to protest taxes or something. He was from the US and gav…

I bet he has a great big house, but guess what he doesn't have? Anything to do! Boring! That's what I'm paying the extra 1.5k a month for! Fun shit!

California forever and goodbye!!!

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