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Comment by Figs | Hacker News Reader

> googleprojectzero.blogspot.my

Why is this linked to on a .my domain? Is this an official mirror, or is there something sketchy going on here?

Blogspot, for reasons that defy logic, redirects visitors to "localized" domains (I assume via Geo-IP). OP is probably from Malaysia.

Not only is it incredibly annoying and breaks things like URL deduplication, it also leaks your origin when you share links. What a great feature!

>Blogspot, for reasons that defy logic, redirects visitors to "localized" domains (I assume via Geo-IP). OP is probably from Malaysia.

Because a whole bunch of countries keep wanting to block stuff. So:

https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711?hl=en

If we receive a request to remove content that violates local law, that content may no longer be available to readers on local domains where those laws apply. Note: Country-specific domains is not a different blog address, but a domain redirect based on the country where you're currently located.

I'm having difficulties understanding this. If Google receives a request to remove content from some specific country, I would assume they are doing this based on Geo-IP rather than based on the domain users enter. It wouldn't really make sense otherwise, as the link to the blocked content would not necessarily need to use the localized domain, so this would be ineffective. It seems like an unimportant implementation detail - one that seems to do more harm than good.

It means countries that want to block certain content can block all the other blogspot.* domains. i.e. blogspot.us is a site that they promise will only ever contain content that's legal in the US, so any country-level firewall in the US should leave that site unblocked, and so on.

That still seems like an odd trade-off. The same logic should apply to things like YouTube and Google+, but they don't have a ccTLD redirect for those sites.

Blogspot is older (and/or maybe put more thought into it early on - a blogging platform is naturally a speech medium whereas YouTube may not have thought of itself in the same terms), country-level firewalls are a lot more sophisticated these days.

Blogspot changes the main tld acording to the location of the viewer. From my home, it's redirected to https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com.ar/2016/06/how-to-com...

HN has a special canonization case for Blogspot, so most of the times you don't see the tld in the HN link. I guess they missed blogspot.my

I suppose it's only for certain countries, no redirection here in El Salvador.

I think it is official but yes it should be changed.

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