Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
In other words, if you type something like gu.com[2002]/rest/of/url then it should continue to resolve whatever IP address is chosen by the person who owned it in 2002. (And the IP can be updated by that owner for the rest of time.)
For end users it wouldn't matter -- putting gu.com into the browser bar always resolves to whoever owns it today.
But anytime you embedded a link into a webpage, best practice would be to append today's year (or date) to the domain in the URL. Or if you added a meta tag to the page for when the page's content was created, all links therein would default to pointing to each domain on that date.
This way, change of ownership of domain would never affect existing links.
Obviously it doesn't solve all the problems -- the historical owner still has to be maintaining the site and serving the content. But as domain names get repurposed for rebranding and financial reasons, it means existing links could still work. Especially if we think we'll be continuing to use domain names for generations more.
It could be compromised, maybe, by encrypting a particular date at the end of the URL. In order to point to an earlier link that the user thinks is the current link.
Embedding the date in the URL would be great for an archive.org extension but it would be practically useless for preventing broken links.
I think an external service like archive.org that also captures redirects, so it can list all shortened URLs for a page, would be the better solution.
https:// web.archive.org/web/[date]/[full url]
to be honest, your / TBL's idea is quite good!
That’s the reason you keep hearing the argument: proof-of-work blockchain technology has not yet demonstrated that it provides “orders of magnitude more value.”
Less impact, surely. Not zero impact.
The only real use case for URL shorteners is length-limited fields like 280-character tweets, but Twitter runs their own URL shortening service already, so again, no blockchain needed.
Exercise left for an interested reader, which sounds like isn’t you :)
The key point in my view is “control”. You’ve referred to Uber.com/Xmas-sale as an example where Uber the economic entity is in charge of their own shortening and therefore avoids the problem. However, Uber the company may fall on hard times, sell their real and intellectual property and we’re facing the same issue of a lifetime mismatch between an owner and an URI.
Incentivized blockchains are theoretically singletons and perpetual; the worst case of a history rewrite is economically disincentivized. The lifetime of the URI database exceeds the URI lifetime.
In practice, I agree with you that companies should ensure control over their URIs over their lifetime. The advantages of a blockchain approach are far outweighed by the current downsides.
Just to avoid misunderstanding -- IPFS right now does work pretty well, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
True, but I still think users would trust "uber.com/xmas-sale" over "tinyurl.com/FgL82" or whatever. It's not that much extra typing.
> Also, why is Twitter’s URL shortener exempt from this concern?
Twitter's character limit means that some URLs can't fit in a tweet due to length limits. So some form of shortening is required, but it's still definitely not ideal. Because everything is owned by the same company, they are controlling their own data (without a blockchain), in a roundabout way. I would never use a t.co link outside of Twitter.
I would.
One of the main problems I have with shortened URLs is that they remove transparency. I have no idea where the shortened URL actually goes unless I click on it. That means that I have to blindly trust whoever is giving me the shortened URL.
In practice, that means I won't use shortened URLs unless they come from a person or company that I already trust.
The Ethereum merge to Proof of Stake was one the biggest technological achievements in 2022, how did you miss it?
https://mydomain.com/path/to/resource?maybe=with&some=query¶ms=included
https://mydomain.com/s/X3s5321
Shortening 1 = using a shorter/different domain with a shortened path that maps to a longer domain/path
Shortening 2 = using the same domain with a shortened path that maps to a longer path.
If #2 isn't considering "URL Shortening" then I guess I rest my case as I agree that nothing good comes from #1. Of course #2 is still a problem if you have long-lived urls and you don't maintain their integrity. The way we use them is for short-term one-time/short-term login links so it's even less of an issue, no one is bookmarking them/saving them and for sure they are in reference papers somewhere.
Wikipedia says:
> URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page
That's what it is.
Yes. You aren't shortening a URL, you are serving a web page that has a short URL.
I realize this is pedantic, but the relevance is that we're talking about URL shortening services, which this is not using.
I don't mind short URLs much (although I greatly appreciate it if the URL gives me some hint of the content it's pointing at, even if that makes it longer). URL shortening services, however, come with additional problems that lead me to the opinion that they're unacceptable.
Take this URL from yahoo news that I just picked out at random:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-accidentally-breaks-42-000-...
Lets say tomorrow yahoo sells off "yahoo.com" to the highest bidder. The new owner can reply to queries for that url with whatever they like. The only real difference is the URL above has some meaningful text in the title, so if an article on something very different comes up, there's some indication of something wrong. This is vs. gu.com/ABCD having no indicator of anything amiss if a new owner serves different content.
But the story really boils down to: when a domain is sold to a new owner, that new owner can change the content for any existing URL's for that domain.
Companies do break their own URLs, which is bad, but I think using a shortener aggravates the problem.
Android should allow OCR and QR input as a keyboard feature.
Link shorteners exist partly because of missing features elsewhere.
QR codes aren't very information dense, though.
Neither are shortened URLs.
My social media feed - personal data in general - probably should not. For that, there are simply too many bad actors on the internet that will go the length to piece together a complete dossier of you, should you ever look like a juicy target. That goes for people that know they have an attack surface and should probably practice good hygiene online, but also for unwilling participants in Kiwifarm-esque witch hunts (read: neurodivergent and queer people). Not to mention what this "osint" can achieve in the hands of more powerful actors - state actors[1] even.
[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/texas-transgender-database-dr...
On the secondary subject of broken URLs and historical archiving in a sense, I think there is no issue as is. I type this because I think it many cases archiving information on the internet for the sake of strictly keeping historical data and such is a feat in itself that I have yet to see anyone competent and prolific enough to do it, if anything I would advocate for anyone and everyone as an active internet user to partake their own individual archiving of what is worth keeping. Simply put, it is and continues to be a free for all in that sense. I do commend and am a fan of what archive.org and the archive team (two separate entities) are doing but I also don't rely on them wholly. I have my own small setup. On that subject, I'm curious if anyone else here has?
> Millions of links around the web - including many on the Grauniad itself - are all now broken.
Which made very large positional changes but to just the right combination letters to produce another plausible-sounding name out of "Guardian".
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/graun...
Something to do with frequent typos in the paper, I think.
There's the following: Gaurdian, Grauniad, Guarrdian
What's the joke here? Is he referencing something?
Innocent typos or there is some joke i missed.
Edit: as per other comments this seem to have been a joke.
The only advancements/alternatives I've seen in this space are cryptocurrency-based, which is even worse in my opinion.
I don't think any of the examples in either this article or his companion referenced (why URl shortening is bad for users and bad for the web) are compelling reasons to avoid using a URL shortening service, from a user perspective.