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Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

ebay.c.uk

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Re: Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

#31

Post by TheDong »

dmart wrote: post #25
TheDong wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://t.co/ is very well known. Probably the most used single-character domain in existence :) Unrelated, but I've never understood why t.co counts against your tweet length.. for example, if you tweeted "ebay.c.uk", it would count for length( http://t.co/xxxxxxxxxx ) characters (15 characters even though you only typed 9).

According to Twitter, t.co is mandatory in order to prevent phishing and calculate link popularity: https://support.twitter.com/articles/109623

I'm not asking why they use t.co. I'm asking why it counts against my tweet length. If I want to tweet 140 characters and they interpret some of them as a link, why can I no longer tweet my 140 characters because something on their system turned it into 150 characters? They could shorten it while still using my url's length for accounting. They already let you tweet more than 140 bytes due to unicode so it's clearly not a technical reason such as a char(140) db column.

They very well could simply take min(len(t.co/url), len(orig_url)) without breaking any past tweets or changing the 140 character limit's spirit. It would just behave more logically.

Re: Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

#32

Post by Yelwis »

xg15 wrote: post #27

So, does this mean, I can buy com.uk and edu.uk now?

    Error for "com.uk".

    This domain cannot be registered because it contravenes the Nominet UK
    naming rules.  The reason is:
      third-level domains may not be identical to a top-level domain.

    WHOIS lookup made at 00:32:52 13-Apr-2015
But edu.uk is available for the owner of edu.co.uk.

Other 2-3 letter domains seem to have been squatted (I tried several ISO codes and some newer generic TLDs).

Re: Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

#33

Post by calebegg »

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #24
TheDong wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://t.co/ is very well known. Probably the most used single-character domain in existence :) Unrelated, but I've never understood why t.co counts against your tweet length.. for example, if you tweeted "ebay.c.uk", it would count for length( http://t.co/xxxxxxxxxx ) characters (15 characters even though you only typed 9).

Related: http://qntm.org/twit

> This was the case as of 2011-08-16 [...] I'll let them know about it tomorrow and I expect it'll be rectified in a day or two

Quite optimistic :-) especially since the situation has gotten worse by two characters since then.

Re: Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

#35

Post by Yelwis »

MatthewWilkes wrote: post #4
cbd1984 wrote: post #3

Interesting that they would allow such an odd domain to be registered in the first place. It seems like a big security hole.

Why is that interesting? c.uk is a registered domain, the WHOIS for subdomains correctly states that it can't be registered.

Because .UK only allowed registrations at the third level for decades, i.e. example.co.uk, example.ac.uk etc. I think it's also the most-used CCTLD.

Then they introduced second level domains, but they're still rarely used at present. ebay.uk and google.uk are registered, but don't do anything yet.

Re: Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

#36

Post by ryanlol »

mmahemoff wrote: post #29
AshleysBrain wrote: post #5

I didn't know single letter domains were allowed? For example none of a.com, b.com, c.com etc. work - do other gTLD allow single letter domains then?

q, x, and z are the only registered .com domains. Go figure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom... Of those, x is currently timing out, q redirects to some kind of customer-only login wall, and z is the winner as the only normal public-facing website on a single-letter .com. I wonder if eBay still owns x.com, having been Elon Musk's PayPal precursor. If so, it's a staggering oversight to lea…

Registrant Organization: PayPal Inc. Admin Organization: eBay Inc.

Yes they do. Although, I do recall x.com being online not too long ago.

Re: Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

#37

Post by 0x0 »

mmahemoff wrote: post #29
AshleysBrain wrote: post #5

I didn't know single letter domains were allowed? For example none of a.com, b.com, c.com etc. work - do other gTLD allow single letter domains then?

q, x, and z are the only registered .com domains. Go figure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom... Of those, x is currently timing out, q redirects to some kind of customer-only login wall, and z is the winner as the only normal public-facing website on a single-letter .com. I wonder if eBay still owns x.com, having been Elon Musk's PayPal precursor. If so, it's a staggering oversight to lea…

I ended up on x.com when i was looking for paypal api documentation, it must have been just a year or so ago.

Re: Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

#38

Post by glitch »

TheDong wrote: post #31
dmart wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Twitter, t.co is mandatory in order to prevent phishing and calculate link popularity: https://support.twitter.com/articles/109623

I'm not asking why they use t.co. I'm asking why it counts against my tweet length. If I want to tweet 140 characters and they interpret some of them as a link, why can I no longer tweet my 140 characters because something on their system turned it into 150 characters? They could shorten it while still using my url's length for accounting. They already let you tweet more than 140 bytes due to unicode so it's clearly…

(1) Keeping it simple and consistent and (2) they want to ensure that as much relevant traffic goes through t.co as possible. If you want to lock people into t.co URLs, there's no reason for them to play games otherwise unless it truly starts eating into the character count. It's an avenue for profit through data mining. Also, the notion of blocking phishing sites is also there, but the real reason is data mining. They want as much desired, relevant data as possible about the URLs people are using on their service — where they're going, when they're going there, who's going there, etc., etc., etc. In the data, there is money. It's also about other untaped potential in being the middle man (e.g., injected ads) — not that they'll necessarily do such a thing, but from their perspective it's good to be in the position to exploit as many avenues of profit as possible.

Re: Is it an accident? No, it's a wildcard subdomain

#39

Post by TheDong »

glitch wrote: post #38
TheDong wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not asking why they use t.co. I'm asking why it counts against my tweet length. If I want to tweet 140 characters and they interpret some of them as a link, why can I no longer tweet my 140 characters because something on their system turned it into 150 characters? They could shorten it while still using my url's length for accounting. They already let you tweet more than 140 bytes due to unicode so it's clearly…

(1) Keeping it simple and consistent and (2) they want to ensure that as much relevant traffic goes through t.co as possible. If you want to lock people into t.co URLs, there's no reason for them to play games otherwise unless it truly starts eating into the character count. It's an avenue for profit through data mining. Also, the notion of blocking phishing sites is also there, but the real reason is data mining. Th…

You misunderstood. I meant that they could use the minimum of those two lengths when checking the length of your tweet while still turning it into a t.co url either way. All traffic still goes through t.co. The behavior is identical to today except that it's simpler and consistent because it doesn't make my 140 character tweet invalid.
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