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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

#41

Post by glitch »

TheDong wrote: post #39
glitch wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

They could do something along those lines, but that would not be "keeping things simple". Plus, there is not significant motivation for them to do it — plain and simple. They could, but so far it's not worth the time/money investment. Every little feature, every little bit of work added and layered onto things has an associated cost/benefit to it. Simply put, it's not worth it to them at this present time.

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

#42

Post by ytjohn »

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…

The 140 character limit isn't just an arbitrary number to see how creative people can be within it. Many people forget or never knew that twitter started out with its 140 character limit because of SMS limitations. SMS limits messages to 160 characters, and twitter reserves 20 of those. The final result of your message, including URLs has to fit within 140 characters to reach any SMS bound audience in a single message.

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

#43

Post by abraham »

TheDong wrote: post #9
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?

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).

Because your tweet is no longer "ebay.c.uk", Twitter changes is to to "http://t.co/xxxxxxxxxx" which takes additional charactors that what you entered.

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

#44

Post by function_seven »

ytjohn wrote: post #42
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…

The 140 character limit isn't just an arbitrary number to see how creative people can be within it. Many people forget or never knew that twitter started out with its 140 character limit because of SMS limitations. SMS limits messages to 160 characters, and twitter reserves 20 of those. The final result of your message, including URLs has to fit within 140 characters to reach any SMS bound audience in a single messag…

But that's not the case now. The SMS limit is 160 7-byte characters, basically ASCII. But as parent noted, "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.".

So why do they do it here?

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

#48

Post by MatthewWilkes »

GSimon wrote: post #30
ars wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he means what do you find unusual about it. It seems like an ordinary name to me. Is it that it seems too easy to typo?

> No, he means what do you find unusual about it > It seems like a big security hole.

The problem with c.uk. being an allowed domain is, I agree, very dodgy. This thread is about the WHOIS returning that it's not responsible for foo.c.uk. though which is absolutely what I'd expect.

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

#49

Post by MatthewWilkes »

MrSourz wrote: post #20
0x0 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct registrations under .uk (and not just .co.uk, .org.uk etc) were only opened last year.

That explains it; I was completely baffled. I wonder how much of a bidding war there was for this domain.

The owner of the .co.uk has first dibs, so in this case there was no bidding war.
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