Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

social.treehouse.systems

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 264 posts

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#31

Post by ivankuz »

hfo wrote: post #10

I don't get it, can someone explain what is going on here?

By default, when following `` links from site FOO to site BAR, the browser will tell site BAR in the Referrer header[1], that you're coming from the site FOO.

If you add attribute `rel=noreferrer`[2] to the `` tag, the browser will not attach such a header.

It looks like the guys from asahilinux dot org somehow altered the behaviour of their website in cases when Referrer was set to hackernews, so hn added the `rel=noreferrer` to those links.

No idea about the context of the drama though.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#32

Post by sebmellen »

jawns wrote: post #16

As best I can tell from perusing the thread: - The Asahi Linux team was "blocking" links to their site from Hacker News by detecting HN as the referrer and redirecting those users to Google. - HN added the "noreferrer" tag to at least one of the links, which tells the browser to not pass the referrer string. This means the Asahi Linux "block," which relies on the referrer information, does not work. - Asahi Linux tea…

> zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities"

is a hilariously unclear accusation.

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#33

Post by indrora »

georgeg23 wrote: post #9

Hacker News has every right to include noreferrer in its links. The destination site was playing games based on the HN origin, so dang just fixed the bug.

This has been done multiple times by different authors.

All this is because there are a certain number of people who read HN who turn around and go out of their way to abuse the author (outside of HN).

noreferrer was a mistake and such has been said so elsewhere.

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#35

Post by LinuxBender »

jawns wrote: post #16

As best I can tell from perusing the thread: - The Asahi Linux team was "blocking" links to their site from Hacker News by detecting HN as the referrer and redirecting those users to Google. - HN added the "noreferrer" tag to at least one of the links, which tells the browser to not pass the referrer string. This means the Asahi Linux "block," which relies on the referrer information, does not work. - Asahi Linux tea…

FWIW HN sets the Referrer-Policy header [1] to origin [2] and it seems most browsers maybe support it. [3] Perhaps some addons override or spoof it and/or maybe some bots ignore it.

[1] - https://scotthelme.co.uk/a-new-security-header-referrer-poli...

[2] - https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinato...

[3] - https://caniuse.com/referrer-policy

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#37

Post by pseudosavant »

jawns wrote: post #16

As best I can tell from perusing the thread: - The Asahi Linux team was "blocking" links to their site from Hacker News by detecting HN as the referrer and redirecting those users to Google. - HN added the "noreferrer" tag to at least one of the links, which tells the browser to not pass the referrer string. This means the Asahi Linux "block," which relies on the referrer information, does not work. - Asahi Linux tea…

This is enough to make me never touch Asahi Linux. What a childish game for a Linux distro?

How dare someone link to their website without their approval...because that is totally how the internet works?? ffs.

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#38

Post by [deleted] »

nickdothutton wrote: post #21
uberman wrote: post #7

I'm sure there must be some back story here. What are these people's concerns? They seem to believe that HN is a bastion for harassment. Of all the forums I read, this seems the most benign by a large margin.

I found this [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35251905

[deleted]

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#39

Post by [deleted] »

sebmellen wrote: post #32
jawns wrote: post #16

As best I can tell from perusing the thread: - The Asahi Linux team was "blocking" links to their site from Hacker News by detecting HN as the referrer and redirecting those users to Google. - HN added the "noreferrer" tag to at least one of the links, which tells the browser to not pass the referrer string. This means the Asahi Linux "block," which relies on the referrer information, does not work. - Asahi Linux tea…

> zero tolerance for those who defend wielding state violence against any oppressed, scapegoated and subjugated peoples & identities" is a hilariously unclear accusation.

[deleted]

Re: Hacker News evading criticism by selectively adding noreferrer to certain links

#40

Post by birdyrooster »

jawns wrote: post #16

As best I can tell from perusing the thread: - The Asahi Linux team was "blocking" links to their site from Hacker News by detecting HN as the referrer and redirecting those users to Google. - HN added the "noreferrer" tag to at least one of the links, which tells the browser to not pass the referrer string. This means the Asahi Linux "block," which relies on the referrer information, does not work. - Asahi Linux tea…

Also lots of accusations about how our entire site is somehow abusive even though 1) I and many others here have contributed our resources to Asahi and 2) they have not put forth sufficient (any??) evidence. I can imagine how stressful it must be to run a major project like Asahi, but it seems like a bit misguided to cast Hacker News as a net negative source of interest.
Post reply on HN