Non-Libyan URL Shortener | Hacker News Reader

Non-Libyan URL Shortener

gadaf.fi

180 pointspitdesi76 comments

While it is a funny play on all those .ly domains and the fact that vb.ly got seized by the Libyan government, it is my opinion that yet another URL shortener is a stupid way of protest.

Let me explain: I work with the Urlteam, a group of people that saves shorturl->longurl mappings for a bunch of shorteners. The typical life cycle of small shorteners is this:

- URL shortener opens, gets some praise for weird feature that bit.ly doesn't have.

- People actually don't care about feature and continue to use bit.ly.

- Spammers discover the shortener and abuse it.

- Owner closes the shortener because he can't deal with the spam.

All that remains are some non-functional links.

I created a shortener (for personal control, tracking, etc) and can really, really identify with #3 and #4. I was blocking loads of nonsensical domains each day for weeks before the hosting company pulled the pin and I just gave up and pointed my domain to bit.ly.

FYI, you can prevent new entries from being added to the shortener database without shutting down the shortener altogether.

Yes, that's true and I should've done that but I wanted to keep the service running quickly through that domain and bit.ly pro did that very easily, it "just" meant losing historical links.

Easy to make the wrong decision when you, well-intentioned, set something up with no view to profiting from your time and then get slammed by spammers mercilessly, get no love from your host, etc.

I don't know that I'd be the only one who loses a fair swag of their time and money (work, side projects, etc) either dealing with spam or trying to protect against it. So frustrating.

> it "just" meant losing historical links.

Note that this in a bad idea in general, not just for URL shorteners but also for your personal website and even more for a project or company webseite.

There is a classic article by Tim Berners-Lee on that topic, written in 1998:

"Cool URIs don't change" (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI)

How do spammers successfully abuse shorteners?

I don't know what the parent commenter had in mind, but perhaps bad spam filters don't follow redirects and bad link filters don't filter certain TLDs?

Why would a link filter want to filter whole TLDs? Shouldn't this be based at least on the domain name rather than discriminating whole countries by blocking their TLDs?

I don't know. I could imagine really stupid spam filters looking for strings matching /http:\/\/.*\.(com|net|org)/ or something. Of course that's no one else's fault but the filter.

Most anything that filters out spam domains doesn't follow shortener links to them. Web forum spam is full of shortener links. Stop making shorteners.

Obfuscating spam links. It is much harder to tell a fake/crappy url when it is hidden through a shortening service.

Like other comments have said spammers use it as a form of obfuscation. They even chain URL shorteners to obfuscate things even more.

I work for an anti-spam company. We see a constant stream of spammy short URLs -- peaking at tens of new unique links per second.

Better to just use your own domain with a (free) bit.ly/pro/ account

That sounds like a useful thing to do. Does Urlteam have a website somewhere? A quick search didn't turn up much information.

The "website" is at http://urlte.am , but it only includes a placeholder (the content intended for it currently resides at https://github.com/soult/urlteam-stuff/tree/master/website ). We also have a page at the ArchiveTeam website ( http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam ), but our main communication happens through IRC, #urlteam on efnet.

URL shorteners are evil. It's the digital equivalent of stepping into a car driven by a stranger, blindfolded. You don't know where you're going before you're there. It might not necessarily be a pleasant place.

Plus, they are stupid. What, are we short of space for email? Are links people send each other consuming too much disk? I've barely touched my howevermany squigabytes GMail is giving away these days. I can guarantee that there is no "URL shortening service" that has the longevity of DNS either. If you want any more proof of a bubble, it's that it's possible to operate a business doing this.

We're short of space for twitter messages. And maybe IRC topics.

That's not true either, there aren't many 140-char URLs anyway.

Sure, but the relatively short link to your reply, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2492783, is already 44 characters, so I'm only left with 96 characters on a twitter message.

With bit.ly, the link is much shorter with 21 characters, http://bit.ly/j8IpC8, and I'm left with 119 characters to describe the link in a twitter message.

Oh, and I'll know how many people clicked on my bit.ly link. I've become addicted to that feature.

But that's a circular argument. If there's no enough room to say what you want to say in a Twitter post then write a blog entry or send an email.

The problem is "I need 20 more characters for my Tweet". This is only solved by URL shorterners, at the moment.

Maybe we should try 'tweet compression'? Im sure you could pack a lot more text into 144 characters using the right compression algorithm.

Dammit i missed april fools day to announce my 'tweet compression' service :(

Yes it is pretty much an artificial problem created by an arbitrary limit.

It would be better if Twitter offered their own way to shorten URLs (or have a separate limit for URL length), so that you could still see where the link pointed before clicking on it.

If you use the Tweet button, either embedded in a page or installed as a bookmarklet, it will run through Twitter's own shortener. A long version of the URL will then be displayed in the Twitter UI.

You should block me from redirecting a link to itself.

http://gadaf.fi/5j

And probably block cycles too.

Isn't that impossible? You can redirect to a page (under your control) that redirects to itself, if your goal is to get the user stuck in a redirect loop. Until their browser decides enough is enough, that is.

You can have the service test the link for redirects (using HEAD requests), and have a max depth to be safe. Then if a URL occurs twice, or the max depth is reached, mark as invalid.

"browser decides enough is enough"

IIRC from reading the sources, both FF and Chrome had a limit of 30 hardcoded - after this many redirects they would give up and say "uh, it's a redirect loop".

Nice try, but Chrome is smarter than that. "This webpage has a redirect loop. The webpage at http://gadaf.fi/5j has resulted in too many redirects..."

Or just use j.mp, it's the same as bit.ly just without the dependence on the Libya TLD.

And it's shorter! Although I've started using goo.gl since they offer similar analytic data on your shortlinks and, well, it's powered by Google's infrastructure.

Oh, nice! I didn't know that google's shortener had been launched for general use (it used to be google reader specific).

Both funny and poignant. It is interesting to consider how many popular web services use .ly domain names and are hence tied to Libya (albeit far removed).

I tip my hat to the genius who came up with this.

He's nothing compared to the genius behind http://arseh.at/

One minor problem being that it takes the "short" out of "URL shortener."

Decent for making a point, but those characters are a precious commodity on Twitter.

Slightly unrelated, but given the current sanctions, you can't renew a .ly domain name right now as a US business, correct? Bit.ly's domain name expires early next year, last time I checked.

do you have a source? i have some .ly domains to renew and have been considering what to do with them

I'll confess, I hadn't looked into my assumption further until now. Details of the US sanctions against Libya can be found here (look for the Executive Order 13566 PDF):

http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/p...

The .ly registrar Libyan Spider has been fairly communicative and open with its customers. Their CEO Hadi Naser says they are a 'private company run by ordinary citizens that have no affiliation with the government' and that 'purchasing the .ly domains supports Libyan citizens, not the government'. A 10 percent fee goes to a nongovernmental organization in Libya that mantains the .ly network:

http://www.businessinsider.com/ly-registrar-our-servers-have... http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-libyan-con...

There was some prior disruption of service when Softlayer, their ISP outside of Libya raised some sanction related concerns, but that appears to have been resolved later:

http://libyanspider.com/m/announcements.php?id=20

Why not host your own?

I've been using Yourls (http://yourls.org/) for a while now. It works very well. I bought a short domain, installed Yourls in under 5 min and have been happily using it ever since. It even works with Tweetdeck to auto shorten URL's and has a couple of bookmarklets to make things easy. It's locked down for private / non-spammer use and is under my full control.

> Why not host your own?

I second that. Here is an alternative to yourls.org.

http://www.gentlesource.com/short-url-script/

I know this is kind of a joke, kind of a way to bring publicity to whats happening in Lybia, but if the bit.ly domain disappears you can always just rewrite "bit.ly" to "j.mp" and the short URLs will keep working.

Then again, this presumes that the company is still running (which we can't really put a ton of faith in), which is why i use http://isshort.com (shameless plug) to find publisher-provided short URLs where possible.

Hate to nit pick but isn't it Gaddafi, or Qaddafi?

Edit: So it is, although the correct spelling is already taken.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/09/how-many-dif... or any of those! :)

And the corresponding regexp ;)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5365283/regular-expressio...

I like the spelling Gadaffi, but here are atleast 112 different ways to spell his full name:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/09/how-many-dif...

Yes well. Looking at that list there seems to be something of a consensus on the -afi. Also just because 112 different spellings have been used, doesn't mean all 112 spellings are correct.

Anyway it's a fun idea and I'm just nit picking.

Define correctness in this context.

Well, I'm not really up for a tedious discussion over semantics; my initial post was actually a genuine query because I have never seen it spelt otherwise than Gaddafi or Qaddafi. Evidently it's actually a linguistic can of worms.

If I had to say, I guess correct would be the closest phonetic spelling to the Arabic, and as I understand that would be Gaddafi (in Libya) or Qaddafi (more generally). Or you could use what he has used himself in the past, which I have just discovered is: Gadhafi [0].

So without even nailing your colours to the mast over the correct definition of 'correct' in this context perhaps you might agree that Gadaffi is probably incorrect for any sensible definition of 'correct' in this context.

Or perhaps we could all agree to just call him 'that evil motherfucker from Libya'.

[0] http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/513/how-are-you-sup...

Since it is phonetic, it will differ from country to country since different languages map differently to phonemes.

Exactly, in France the most common form is Kadhafi

Any translation into english is going to be "wrong" in some aspect. If I were to define correctness, Gaddafi's name is spelt: قَذَّافِيّ‎

Anything else is just a translation and it all means the same, despite being different.

And while we are at it:

anything else is a _transliteration_

Cringely mentioned in a column a while back that Qaddafi didn't particularly care:

“Spell it any way you like, ” he said (in pretty fair English, by the way — something else that seems to have strategically disappeared over the years). “All that matters is spelling it correctly in Arabic.”

http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/major-jolloud/

That site would be better if it was "cringe.ly"

People, have we already forgotten this? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5365283/regular-expressio...

This whole thing is hilarious, but probably useless

I did some analysis to figure out the consensus on his name

http://www.ecogito.net/anil/2011/02/how-do-you-spell-gaddafi...

I was simultaneously impressed by the clean, informative presentation and horrified by the assault of grammatical errors.

May I suggest having a native english-speaker review your copy? Otherwise nice site.

I think it should add http:// if it's missing.. I wasn't sure what wasn't working at first when trying www.google.com.

Also, I find gadaf.fi really hard to remember.

Just pick up a newspaper any day for the next few months and the name is bound to be in there.

I tried 5 different URLS, then I realized that it only works if you include http or https.

While it's a great pun, it's not exactly short, though is it?

Dictators don't just come out with their own line of cars anymore. http://goo.gl/PqQTK

Cool idea! Best URL shortener name of the year.

Now, if only we could stop getting our tv from Tuvalu. Stop reliance on foreign domains! America needs Internet independence!

/palin rhetoric

First post!

You are being downvoted, because your comment does not add anything worthwhile to the discuss/topic.

Kindly read the the community guidelines at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You may also find http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html by Paul Graham useful.

He crated that account about a minute before making that post, and likely never had any intention of using it again. (Or in other words, don't worry about it, and let moderation do its thing ;)

May be so. However, Because of the fact that he is a newbie in the community, and not a spammer/troll, I'd like to give him the benefit of doubt.

Having a barrage of downvotes, just because you dint know the rules when you are new, without any explanation is not helpful (and slightly unfair and discouraging).

Fair enough, but as I recall HN barrages you with the rules as you join.

Oh.. I remember the opposite actually. (No mention of guidelines), when you join.

Karma is currently at -18... lesson learned.

<edit> Touchy tonight are we? I was just pointing out that it might not be in the best interest to downvote someone into oblivion on one of their first posts to Hacker News. With the green names indicating new people, we have the ability to show them the right way without killing his karma and motivation to post here. Random42 pointed him in the right direction...

  > it might not be in the best interest to downvote someone
  > into oblivion on one of their first posts to Hacker News

I disagree. If someone doesn't have the courtesy to try and understand the community they are participating in before they participate, lowering an arbitrary number associated with their username is hardly any kind of punishment. The only impact it has on the user is that they now have to earn back points on their arbitrary number. If it also bans them from posting for a while, even better.

Thank you for being the first person who downvoted me (assuming) and writing why you disagree. I come from idea that this person wanted to join Hacker News; didn't understand the community; didn't find the rules and regulations right away; and has been scared away from the community by crazy downvotes.

How many downvotes does it take to kill a comment? This person is forever lost to Hacker News...

I don't consider this a nice move. I actually hate it. It's like Gaddafi is going to stand longer than that and that we should only boycott him. We ought better supporting the rebellion or the people who are under the fire.

-- Misrata (24 April): http://www.facebook.com/media/set/fbx/?set=a.101501680318019...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com