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Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

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Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#161

Post by rs186 »

spankalee wrote: post #151

As an ex-Googler, the problem here is clear and common, and it's not the infrastructure cost: it's ownership. No one wants to own this product. - The code could be partially frozen, but large scale changes are constantly being made throughout the google3 codebase, and someone needs to be on the hook for approving certain changes or helping core teams when something goes wrong. If a service it uses is deprecated, then…

Many good points, but if you don't mind me asking: if you were at Google, would you be willing to be the lead of that archive team, knowing that you'll be stuck at this position for the next 10 years, with the possibility of your team being downsized/eliminated when the wind blows slightly in the other direction?

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#162

Post by acheron »

edent wrote: post #46
bugsMarathon88 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Gosh! It is a pity Google doesn't hire any smart people who know how to build a throttling system. Still, they're a tiny and cash-starved company so we can't expect too much of them.

Must not be any questions about that in Leetcode.

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#163

Post by quesera »

b112 wrote: post #122
quesera wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern webservers are very, very fast on modern CPUs. I hear Google has some CPU infrastructure? I don't know if GCP has a free tier like AWS does, but 10kQPS is likely within the capability of a free EC2 instance running nginx with a static redirect map. Maybe splurge for the one with a full GB of RAM? No problem.

You could deprecate the service, and archive the links as static html. 200bytes of text for an html redirect (not js). You can serve immense volumes of traffic from static html. One hardware server alone could so easily do the job. Your attack surface is also tiny without a back end interpreter. People will chime in with redundancy, but the point is Google could stop maintaining the ingress, and still not be douches…

Exactly. I've seen goo.gl URLs in printed books. Obviously in old blog posts too. And in government websites. Nonprofit communications. Everywhere.

Why break this??

Sure, deprecate the service. Add no new entries. This is a good idea anyway, link shorteners are bad for the internet.

But breaking all the existing goo.gl URLs seems bizarrely hostile, and completely unnecessary. It would take so little to keep them up.

You don't even need HTML files. The full set of static redirects can be configured into the webserver. No deployment hassles. The filesystem can be RO to further reduce attack surface.

Google is acting like they are a one-person startup here.

Since they are not a one-person startup, I do wonder if we're missing the real issue. Like legal exposure, or implication in some kind of activity that they don't want to be a part of, and it's safer/simpler to just delete everything instead of trying to detect and remove all of the exposure-creating entries.

Of maybe that's what they're telling themselves, even if it's not real.

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#165

Post by QuantumGood »

edent wrote: post #2

About 60k academic citations about to die - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo... Countless books with irrevocably broken references - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sc... And for what? The cost of keeping a few TB online and a little bit of CPU power? An absolute act of cultural vandalism.

When they began offering this, their rep for ending services was already so bad I refused to consider goo.gl. Amazing for how many years now they have introduced then ended services with large user bases. Gmail being in "beta" for five years was, weirdly, to me, a sign they might stick with it.

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#166

Post by justinmayer »

edent wrote: post #2

About 60k academic citations about to die - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo... Countless books with irrevocably broken references - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sc... And for what? The cost of keeping a few TB online and a little bit of CPU power? An absolute act of cultural vandalism.

In the first segment of the very first episode of the Abstractions podcast, we talked about Google killing its goo.gl URL obfuscation service and why it is such a craven abdication of responsibility. Have a listen, if you’re curious:

Overcast link to relevant chapter: https://overcast.fm/+BOOFexNLJ8/02:33

Original episode link: https://shows.arrowloop.com/@abstractions/episodes/001-the-r...

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#167

Post by progbits »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #12
edent wrote: post #2

About 60k academic citations about to die - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo... Countless books with irrevocably broken references - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sc... And for what? The cost of keeping a few TB online and a little bit of CPU power? An absolute act of cultural vandalism.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Goo.gl https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl/ (1.66B work items remaining as of this comment) How to run an ArchiveTeam warrior: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior (edit: i see jaydenmilne commented about this further down thread, mea culpa)

They appear to be doing ~37k items per minute, with 1.6B remaining that is roughly 30 days left. So that's just barely enough to do it in time.

Going to run the warrior over the weekend to help out a bit.

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#168

Post by wobfan »

prophesi wrote: post #84
bo1024 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by accessible without authentication? My server will serve example.com/64-byte-random-code if you request it, but if you don’t know the code, I won’t serve it.

Obfuscation may hint that it's intended to be private, but it's certainly not authentication. And the keyspace for these goog.le short URL's are much smaller than a 64byte alphanumeric code.

I mean, going by that argument a username + password is also just obfuscation. Generating a unique 64 byte code is even more secure than this, IF it's handled correctly.

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#170

Post by hadrien01 »

jaydenmilne wrote: post #4

ArchiveTeam is trying to brute force the entire URL space before its too late. You can run a Virtualbox VM/docker image (ArchiveTeam Warrior) to help (unique IPs are needed). I've been running it for a couple months and found a million. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

After a while I started to get "Google asks for a login" errors. Should I just keep going? There's no indication on what I should do on the ArchiveTeam wiki
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