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Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

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Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#181

Post by ShamelessC »

hlandau wrote: post #145

Worth pointing out that t.co has always been an instance of an annoying and seemingly unjustified practice I named "nonsemantic redirect". Rather than legitimately redirecting using an HTTP Location header, it instead is an HTML page with a META refresh tag on it. You don't see this with curl/wget because they use user agent sniffing. If they don't think you're a browser they _will_ give you a Location header. To see…

Could you explain what the intended/expected outcome is for this? What is accomplished by doing that?

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#182

Post by yohannesk »

kens wrote: post #15

I can confirm. NYT shows a five-second redirect delay: "wget https://t.co/4fs609qwWt ". It redirects to gov.uk immediately: "wget https://t.co/iigzas6QBx "

Is there some cache going on? On my first attempt, there is a 5 second delay. When I try it second time immediately it works without the 5 second delay. But if I try again after an hour, 5 second delay again!

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#183

Post by spiderfarmer »

ShamelessC wrote: post #181
hlandau wrote: post #145

Worth pointing out that t.co has always been an instance of an annoying and seemingly unjustified practice I named "nonsemantic redirect". Rather than legitimately redirecting using an HTTP Location header, it instead is an HTML page with a META refresh tag on it. You don't see this with curl/wget because they use user agent sniffing. If they don't think you're a browser they _will_ give you a Location header. To see…

Could you explain what the intended/expected outcome is for this? What is accomplished by doing that?

Cookies?

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#184

Post by spiderfarmer »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #179
ilikehurdles wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing this makes me wonder if it's some sort of server-side header bidding ad server gone haywire, rather than something nefarious. Why would they only delay browser agents otherwise?

Probably a phishing/malware scan gone wrong then. NYTimes has Twitterbot in its robots.txt which might be related? Even if it's deliberate, I don't see how people can complain. Google has outright blocked Breitbart for years. They prevent results from that domain from appearing at all unless you specifically force it with site: and apparently HN does the same. Politically motivated censorship and restricting "reach"…

Does the value Breitbart adds to the internet outweigh the negatives of turning people into dangerous fascists by weaponizing misinformation? No.

Does the value added by sources like the NYT outweigh the negatives of being occasionally biased or outright wrong? Yes.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#185

Post by em-bee »

rhaksw wrote: post #91
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That also requires additional effort on the spammers’ part. Increasing cost of attacks is an effective defense strategy.

Increasing cost of attacks is effective against good faith people, not spammers. Even Cory Doctorow made this case in "Como is Infosec" [1]. The only problem with Cory's argument is, he points people to the SC Principles [2]. The SCP contain exceptions for not notifying about "spam, phishing or malware." But anything can be considered spam, and transparency-with-exceptions has always been platforms' position. They've…

platforms that use secretive moderation lend themselves to spammers

how is that? i can understand it not being useful, but how would it help spammers?

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#186

Post by dalore »

ShamelessC wrote: post #181
hlandau wrote: post #145

Worth pointing out that t.co has always been an instance of an annoying and seemingly unjustified practice I named "nonsemantic redirect". Rather than legitimately redirecting using an HTTP Location header, it instead is an HTML page with a META refresh tag on it. You don't see this with curl/wget because they use user agent sniffing. If they don't think you're a browser they _will_ give you a Location header. To see…

Could you explain what the intended/expected outcome is for this? What is accomplished by doing that?

Crawlers and tools will get the right location http header but browsers and users will get the delay.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#187

Post by adamckay »

mutant_glofish wrote: post #60
chasing wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It's under no obligation to be politically balanced. And obviously, I'm under no obligation to not voice my concern about that.

> And obviously, I'm under no obligation to not voice my concern about that.

Except... You are...

The guidelines [1] of the site outline that most discussion of politics is off-topic as it most often doesn't gratify one's intellectual curiosity. It's rather explicit, too: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.".

1- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#188

Post by hrrsn »

yohannesk wrote: post #182
kens wrote: post #15

I can confirm. NYT shows a five-second redirect delay: "wget https://t.co/4fs609qwWt ". It redirects to gov.uk immediately: "wget https://t.co/iigzas6QBx "

Is there some cache going on? On my first attempt, there is a 5 second delay. When I try it second time immediately it works without the 5 second delay. But if I try again after an hour, 5 second delay again!

Safari seems to be caching it for me, but I can reproduce the delay every time with curl - so long as the user agent doesn't include the string "curl".

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#189

Post by rhaksw »

em-bee wrote: post #185
rhaksw wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing cost of attacks is effective against good faith people, not spammers. Even Cory Doctorow made this case in "Como is Infosec" [1]. The only problem with Cory's argument is, he points people to the SC Principles [2]. The SCP contain exceptions for not notifying about "spam, phishing or malware." But anything can be considered spam, and transparency-with-exceptions has always been platforms' position. They've…

platforms that use secretive moderation lend themselves to spammers how is that? i can understand it not being useful, but how would it help spammers?

Spammers game the system while good-faith users get edged out. Spammers are determined actors who perceive threats everywhere, whereas good-faith users never imagine that a platform would secretly remove their content. Today, you see low quality content on social media, not because the world is dumb, but because the people who get their message out know the secret tricks.

Secret suppression is extremely common [1].

Many of today's content moderators say exceptions for shadowbans are needed [2]. They think lying to users promotes reality. That's bologna.

[1] https://www.removednews.com/p/hate-online-censorship-its-way...

[2] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1689887293002379264

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#190

Post by archo »

prawn wrote: post #143
archo wrote: post #131

Many words about site moderation have been posted in the thread.. Who here has actually moderate(s|d) a forum/chat site?

I have, for about 20 years. I empathise with @dang's methods and explanations here. e.g., don't disclose a blocklist, use shadowbanning, don't get dragged down by pedantic responses to explanations. You're often one person against many trolls finding grey areas for sport, or spammers (automated or otherwise) probing defences.

I am in total agreement with you, keeping the noise/damage of nefarious scammers, spammers, hacker/pranksters,

attempting to penetrating the site requires ALL the tools in the toolbox.

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