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

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 236 posts

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

#81

Post by nomel »

fourseventy wrote: post #69
JimDabell wrote: post #57

Cloudflare offered to keep it running and were turned away: https://x.com/elithrar/status/1948451254780526609 Remember this next time you are thinking of depending upon a Google service. They could have kept this going easily but are intentionally breaking it.

Google killing their domains service was the last straw for me. I started moving all of my stuff off of Google since then.

I'm still shocked that my google voice number still functions after all these years. It makes me assume it's main purpose is to actually be an honeypot of some sort, maybe for spam call detection.

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

#83

Post by Cyan488 »

krunck wrote: post #40

Stop MITMing your content. Don't use shorteners. And use reasonable URL patterns on your sites.

I have been using a shortening service with my own domain name - it's really handy, and I figure that if they go down I could always manually configure my own DNS or spin up some self-hosted solution.

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

#84

Post by prophesi »

bo1024 wrote: post #76
ryandrake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If some URL is accessible via the open web, without authentication, then it is not really private.

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.

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

#86

Post by mrj »

nomel wrote: post #81
fourseventy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google killing their domains service was the last straw for me. I started moving all of my stuff off of Google since then.

I'm still shocked that my google voice number still functions after all these years. It makes me assume it's main purpose is to actually be an honeypot of some sort, maybe for spam call detection.

Shhh don't remind them

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

bo1024 wrote: post #76
ryandrake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If some URL is accessible via the open web, without authentication, then it is not really private.

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.

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by hombre_fatal »

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.

Sure, but you have to make executive decisions on the behalf of people who aren't experts.

Making bad actors brute force the key space to find unlisted URLs could be a better scenario for most people.

People also upload unlisted Youtube videos and cloud docs so that they can easily share them with family. It doesn't mean you might as well share content that they thought was private.

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

#89

Post by charcircuit »

DominikPeters wrote: post #18
jedberg wrote: post #6

I have only given this a moment's thought, but why not just publish the URL map as a text file or SQLLite DB? So at least we know where they went? I don't think it would be a privacy issue since the links are all public?

It will include many URLs that are semi-private, like Google Docs that are shared via link.

Then use something like argon2 on the keys, so you have to spend a long time to brute force them all similar to how it is today.

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

#90

Post by whoahwio »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #39
zffr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people wanting to include URL references in things like books, what’s the right approach to take today? I’m genuinely asking. It seems like its hard to trust that any service will remaining running for decades

https://perma.cc/ It is built for the task, and assuming worse case scenario of sunset, it would be ingested into the Wayback Machine. Note that both the Internet Archive and Cloudflare are supporting partners (bottom of page). ( https://doi.org/ is also an option, but not as accessible to a casual user; the DOI Foundation pointed me to https://www.crossref.org/ for adhoc DOI registration, although I have not had tim…

While Perma is solution specifically for this problem, and a good one at that - citing the might of the backing company is a bit ironic here
Post reply on HN