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Shortest URLs on the Internet

jameswillia.ms

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Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#171

Post by hrrsn »

Macha wrote: post #47
shpx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Google and many other tech companies, internal machines are configured to have go/ work just like you describe. Looks like someone even made a whole company around it https://www.golinks.com/blog/go-links-history/

A problem with this approach is browsers love to resolve it to http://go.com , so Disney may be getting a feed of what Googlers are interested in.

Somewhat related - Microsoft bought corp.com as back in the Windows 2000 days, "corp" was the default/example domain in AD - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/microsoft-buys-corp-com-...

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#173

Post by preisschild »

schoen wrote: post #27
simonjgreen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely nothing wrong with ending with a .0. I suspect you are confused by n.n.n.0/24 being a network address in a /24 network which is obviously very common. However there are way more networks of other sizes that have .0 addresses in them.

We're also arguing that it ought to become usable even in a /24: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas... It only requires changes within the LAN to accomplish this, since distant hosts are already not supposed to assume anything about how networks are or are not subnetted. (For instance, they don't know whether you're on a /24 or not.) You can find some addresses ending a lot of zeroes that al…

I still don't understand why, instead of doing something like this, not just switch to IPv6.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#174

Post by Tistron »

thewebcount wrote: post #5

It’s interesting that Anguilla is the ai domain. I didn’t know that! It’s also a nice little island to take a trip to if you want to go somewhere that’s not too touristy. Beautiful beaches, and at least last time I was there, they didn’t allow cruise ships. So it ended up being a beautiful and quiet getaway. They do, however, drive on the left side of the road, but with North American cars, so it’s a little odd drivi…

Interesting. When I was in Myanmar/Burma some years ago, they drove on the right, but with mostly Japanese cars (made for driving on the left side). It seemed fairly dangerous.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#175

Post by unsafecast »

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…

Freenom used to give these out for free as well (along with everything else in the “High Value” section). I had some that I used to play with, but I haven't checked if I can keep renewing for free.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#177

Post by psychoslave »

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/

Yep, `ping to` was so funny to type. `ping ai` works, just as terse and almoste as easy to remember, but a bit less funny to my mind.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#178

Post by Hendrikto »

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…

> A former U.S. citizen, he gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1998 in protest of U.S. laws on the export of cryptography.

Just to get this right. Makes him sound much more reasonable than protesting taxes.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#179

Post by josefx »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #159
ipaddr wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger question is what percentage of users would like a separate search / location field. Merging them created this problem but now that screens are bigger I think we can afford another textbox.

Good thing that's an option that is trivial to enable under Preferences -> Search -> Search Bar. I suspect most users who are technical enough to appreciate the significance of going to http://ai are able to figure that one out easily enough.

trivial to enable but badly maintained. When I enabled that originally it broke the search bar on the default new tab page.

The default behavior is also nonsensical if you want to access anything on the local network by name.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#180

Post by chedabob »

matttpt wrote: post #57

> Some have A records pointing to the root servers. I’m not sure why this is - I think it might be because no DNS has been configured in the TLD zone for these TLDs. I was also curious about this. It turns out that it's because dig interprets some TLDs as DNS record types (MD, MG, MR, MX) or DNS classes (IN and CH) of the same name! Not sure why, but when given only a type or class (without a domain name), dig actual…

There was a post recently about some of these TLDs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094645
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