Is the Web Heading Toward Redirect Hell?

Ant snips from Royal Pingdom this excerpt: "Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it. We're talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web. And it has a price."

Comments

How do you get offenders to stop?

[alain94040]

Funny just this morning I noticed that it took at least 5 redirects or more for Google to let me login to Analytics. It felt like my browser had a life of its own!

The real problem though are the link shorteners. I'd like to vote with my feet and never click on them, but for many, they are like drugs, because they let you track your influence (how many people clicked) in real-time. It's especially bad on slower connections such as smartphones. Not everyone has 1MB/s.

Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?

--
Don't work on your startup project without a safety net

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[duguk]

Not everyone has 1MB/s.

Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?

Surely it's the latency, not the bandwidth that is the problem with 301s?
They can't be much more than a few hundred bytes!

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[TooMuchToDo]

Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?

Create a web service where you can provide a shortened URL and it will respond back with the full URL. Make sure this web service caches the redirect for at least 24 hours. You instantly kill any reason for the redirect to be there (their counts will no longer be accurate).

If someone wants to use this sort of service, I'd be happy to throw it together and provide it for free.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[sarx]

I agree; but to be fair, I think it is easy for people with a little less knowledge to heuristically lump bandwidth and latency together, especially if they aren't dealing with (say) satellite links, because links with very low latency are in practice somewhat more likely to have high bandwidth. So if it is wrong, it is at least understandably wrong.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[tom17]

Like this? http://unshorten.com/

I just 'thought of' that only to find it was done aages ago...

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[religious freak]

There is an RFC out there (I forget the number off the top of my head) which limits redirects to five. IE6 went above spec and allowed ... 20... I think. IE8 has shortened to allow 10 redirects. FF and Chrome allow the same or less. There is a limit on redirects by RFC, but many websites don't follow the rule and many browsers are forced to compensate because of this.

Ironically, I was just recently accessing a gmail based email system with an Android phone and suddenly I get the message "too many redirects". So now there's no way my google phone can access my google mail. -1 for that one Google.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[dyingtolive]

Nice. If that got turned into a firefox plugin to realtime decrypt the links...

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[skids]

Not to mention, when a shared medium or statistically multiplexed PtP link of low bandwidth has congestion, latency is higher than on a higher bandwidth link, which has a much shallower queue built up and/or takes less time to wait for the 1500 byte packet that just started being transmitted to get out of the way. The distinction is only really relevant when you're discussing technicals of TCP window scaling and bandwidth delay product. Certainly not to the end user: "slow" is "slow".

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[CannonballHead]

But it's easy to explain the difference, so it's not entirely understandable.

It's like understanding the difference between top speed and acceleration. Not a terribly hard concept.

The real problem is the "internet" is a magic black box. Most people don't understand it's really just a big network, and works like a network... actually, somewhat similar to a much-quicker-delivery postal system, in simplistic terms. Except that there's a "request" thing, not just a "send" thing.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[spazdor]

What an uncharacteristically even-handed Slashdot response!

You must be a noob.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[JSBiff]

1. 
        
2. Convince the cell phone industry to modernize the MMS/SMS system to allow messages longer than 256 bytes. (Sort-of done - you can send pics in MMS messages which are longer than 256-bytes, so if the 'content' of your message is actually in the 'attachment' to the message and the main text is essentially ignored, you could maybe get longer messages.
        
3. Update everybody's phones (everywhere in the world) to be able to receive the longer messages.
        
4. Make it part of the SMS/TXT standard to allow HTML (or a simplified subset thereof) which can be rendered by the messaging app built into the phones (so that long URL's can be hidden in nice anchor tags as in standard web-pages).
        
5. Update everybody's phones (everywhere in the world) to support the new standard with embedded HTML.
        
6. Convince twitter (and similar services - facebook, identi.ca, diaspora, etc), now that phones can send and receive longer messages, with HTML embedded, to update their services to allow longer messages, with HTML embedded.
        
7. Finally, convince all the people that really like the ability to track where clicks *really* come from that they should stop.

Personally, I'd like to see url shorteners die, because of a number of problems, but realistically I know it's not gonna happen. Things I don't like about shorteners:

• 
       
• You don't really know where the URL is going to take you. Surprise! You're at a site with a browser exploit, or a phishing site pretending to be something else, or a goatse site. Perhaps such 'shortened' URLs could potentially even be hijacked by whoever owns the shortening service - redirected so somewhere other than what was originally intended, like to a competitor's site.
       
• You're doing research on something and trying to review tweets from 2 or 5 years ago (or maybe a search engine sent you to an older page about a topic which you are researching, and someone in the comments of the page included a shortened URL to a related page which would be of interest to you), and the shortener url is no longer valid, either because it expired, or the site was bought by a competitor and shut down, or just went bankrupt, whatever, and you HAVE NO IDEA what was originally being linked. At least if you had the original URL, and the original site was no longer available, there's a small chance you might be able to find a copy of the linked page in the Wayback machine/Internet Archive, or similar.
       
• Someone who isn't the site you are going to visit, is tracking your browsing of that site.

There's probably other problems I haven't thought of just yet.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[CraftyJack]

Funny just this morning I noticed that it took at least 5 redirects or more for Google to let me login to Analytics. It felt like my browser had a life of its own!

Sure, but you're already saving 2-5 seconds per search with Google instant, so you still come out ahead.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also the added DNS lookups to consider.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[TooMuchToDo]

Oh thank god. I already have too much to do.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[StikyPad]

A few hundred bytes ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[shog9]

Close enough: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9549/

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Menkhaf]

A better analogy is water pipes. Bandwidth is width (the bigger, the bigger throughput), latency is pressure (the higher, the faster "it" travels).
Of course, this being /., your almost-car analogy is probably better suited.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[kurokame]

You know those exploding consoles on Star Trek? Did you ever wonder why someone would invent exploding keyboards? Now you know.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[tacensi]

Hummm... That goatse idea is very interesting. Imagine a flood of shortened urls, all pointing to goatse. That along with a Twitter exploit like the one from yesterday, would be funny as hell.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying the internet really is a series of tubes!

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[CannonballHead]

True. I've used that one, too, hehe.

Of course, then they ask what is "it" then? ... ;)

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[cgenman]

Well, for Twitter at least, you need link shorteners if you're posting a google map or other generated URL. Some simply won't fit into 140 characters, and most won't fit into that with a description.

Facebook's 400 character limit is much less objectionable, but you definitely bump up against them sometimes.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[eth1]

Yeah. Load the page as normal, then, in the background, replace the redirects with direct links.

As a bonus, if enough people started using it, it would so bork up the tracking stats (and the load on the redirect servers) that using redirects like that would be less appealing in the first place.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[OnePumpChump]

Standardize URLs and/or message boards/blogs such that any URL can be posted without being broken. Also, require URLs to be short enough to be passed from person to person by voice. Until then, link shorteners aren't going anywhere.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[richlv]

message to google.

i use your search engine a lot. quite often i also use it over slow and low latency links. i also like to right click damn urls and save/reuse them.

oh, so, the main message.

these redirect urls on the search result page suck, blow and fucking annoy me. not always, but some good 80% of the time i use your search engine. so, please, get rid of that crap. i don't feel like using bing or whatever, but you are just making it easier for somebody else to provide a better product/service.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[tagno25]

Nice. If that got turned into a firefox plugin to realtime decrypt the links...

There is a greasemonkey script to do just that.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Menkhaf]

As the AC parent sibling is getting at, just explain them it's really made of tubes, and try to avoid any questions about why postage around the world still takes at least a few days, "when I can play Farmville with my cousin in China in seconds".

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[netsharc]

Actually, why do people take the 140 character limit as if it's the speed of light anyway? I know it's because of SMS, but this is the freaking 21st century! It's like forcing people to use only 26 letters to write stuff because it has to be compatible with the telegraph, and Morse only has encoding for said letters! Arrrgggghhh!!!

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[BlueUnderwear]

It's like understanding the difference between top speed and acceleration

More like the difference between a sports car and a truck.

The sports car gets you faster to your destination (low latency), but the truck allows you to haul more stuff (high bandwidth).

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[omnichad]

Oh, so THAT'S why Slashdot doesn't support a wider Unicode character set.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[BlueUnderwear]

You instantly kill any reason for the redirect to be there (their counts will no longer be accurate).

Although URL shortening services are often abused to do invasive statistics, that's not the only reason why they exist...

You know, some people still use them to shorten URLs (like how else would you fit a long google maps URL into a short twitter message?)

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[TooMuchToDo]

As with most web services, you'd only unshorten the URL if you wanted to. You wouldn't *have* to use it.

When I said you'd kill any reason for the redirect to be there, I meant you'd kill their analytics, not that no value would be provided (easier URL, etc).

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Belial6]

I'm more confused as to why I can send a letter from California to New York, and it will reliably get their in 1 to two days, but when I send a Gamefly disk from Northern California to southern California, it frequently takes up to a week. Even more confusing is how two disks mailed in the same envelope can arrive in Southern California days apart from each other. Well, OK, I'm not really confused by that, but since the mail system was brought up, I couldn't help but take a crack a Gamefly's obvious fraud.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Just_Say_Duhhh]

Offenders can't stop. They're all afraid of Amazon's one-click patent.

BTW, the link will take you to a website where you will be asked if you want to see the patent, and if you click yes, you'll go to a page that lists several patents (along with lots of ads), and if you choose the right link, you might get to see the patent. Good luck.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Chninkel]

disable javascript on google.com: right-click and save url works like a charm :-) (although this also remove search autocompletion and instant ...)

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[RichardDeVries]

This Firefox addon does the same using the api provided by longurlplease.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Trieuvan]

should be 302 !! :)

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[duguk]

should be 302 !! :)

iirc, don't 302 redirects suffer from the hijack problem?

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Sancho]

Of course it is. The analogy was quite apt. I'm not sure why he got so much shit for making it.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[interval1066]

All I can say is thank god for NoScript.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Ivoch]

Actually, why do people take the 140 character limit as if it's the speed of light anyway? I know it's because of SMS, but this is the freaking 21st century! It's like forcing people to use only 26 letters to write stuff because it has to be compatible with the telegraph, and Morse only has encoding for said letters! Arrrgggghhh!!!

While I myself don't use Twitter and have literally only read about 3-4 tweets since the site first appeared, I can certainly see the use of this imposed limit. Say I want to follow the news about several dozen people (book authors, movie critics, gog.com owners, etc.) but don't want to waste much time doing it. So instead of reading their homepages and the news items they post on them, or their blogs, which could conceivably degenerate into multiple-page-long ramblings with only a tiny bit of relevant information hidden somewhere in them, I'd follow them on Twitter, where they are forced by the limit to write short and concise updates. In fact I suppose this might have been one of the reasons for creating the site in the first place or if not, it should have been.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Red Flayer]

Of course it is. The analogy was quite apt. I'm not sure why he got so much shit for making it.

Because it was quite obvious that he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, and was paraphrasing what someone had told him. It's laughable to try to impart understanding with an analogy when the person trying to impart understanding only groks one half of the analogy.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[zmooc]

Sounds just as brilliant as the classical idea to preload all links from a page... Addons like this kill the Internet. They're worse than the problem they're trying to solve.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[martin-boundary]

Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?

This would require a browser plugin to create a dictionary, by converting the short URLs into their long forms, and share that dictionary with others. Ideally, only one person would actually click through the shortened URL to learn what the long URL is, while everyone else would take advantage of that knowledge.

Basically, this amounts to creating a community driven middle man for the URL shortening middle men. The required technology isn't more sophisticated than spam blocklists, which have been done before.

If 80% of the most popular shortened links are community cached, then 80% of the most valuable browsing statistics will be unavailable to the shortened URL provider, and they'll have trouble monetizing their "added value".

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Timmmm]

The real problem though are the link shorteners

I agree they are bad, but even worse are sites where *every* link just goes to a generic search of that site. Engadget and phoronix spring to mind; Engadget are particularly bad. For example, look at the recent article about unused radio space:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/23/fcc-votes-unanimously-in-favor-of-using-whitespace-for-super-wi/

"_Just as we suspected_ earlier this month, the _Federal Communications Commission_ has voted unanimously (that's five yeas and zero nays, if you need a specific tally) in favor of using the unlicensed _whitespace_ airwaves for what it calls a "super WiFi" of sorts."

"Just as we suspected" links to a previous Engadget article; fair enough. But you might expect any reasonable website to link "Federal Communications Commission" to fcc.gov, and "whitespace" to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_spaces_(radio)

Where does engadget link them to?

engadget.com/tag/fcc
engadget.com/tag/whitespace

Totally useless. They blatantly use it to try to improve their pagerank. I would hope google is smarter than to fall for that though.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[TheABomb]

Quick! Patent that shit!

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[richlv]

hmm. that actually seems to work.
not extremely nice, as has to be done everywhere, and not easily possible with all browsers, but still nice enough - thanks :)

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Antidamage]

Or none of it. At that point he actually thought it was a series of tubes. We hear metaphor but he was speaking literally.

At least, in the end, his death was a series of heavy jolts and possibly an explosion. He lived as he died, descriptively.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[duguk]

Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?

This would require a browser plugin to create a dictionary, by converting the short URLs into their long forms, and share that dictionary with others. Ideally, only one person would actually click through the shortened URL to learn what the long URL is, while everyone else would take advantage of that knowledge.

Basically, this amounts to creating a community driven middle man for the URL shortening middle men. The required technology isn't more sophisticated than spam blocklists, which have been done before.

If 80% of the most popular shortened links are community cached, then 80% of the most valuable browsing statistics will be unavailable to the shortened URL provider, and they'll have trouble monetizing their "added value".

Or just connect to the URL, parse the headers and grab the URL that way? Storing a database of them would be an idea if you want to stop tracking, but it's not necessary to actually even visit the resulting URL.

However... How can you trust the people who control the database?

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[treeves]

As the AC parent sibling is getting at...

Ah, good ol' Uncle AC!

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[TangoMargarine]

Facebook's 400 character limit is much less objectionable, but you definitely bump up against them sometimes.

Plus, facebook does a JavaScripty link-attaching thingie when you paste it in so you can delete the URL afterwards. I suppose the URL has to be 400 chars or less, but...

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[dgatwood]

Simple. Same reason latency for packets varies, but in reverse. There's a huge volume of mail that moves from San Francisco to NYC, so they have air mail routes that optimize this. Because the distance from San Francisco to, for example, San Diego is relatively short and relatively low volume, they take it by truck, so it takes longer to get there, and probably stops in LA on the way (which is probably a latency disaster due to the amount of mail they process---going through LA can be like a corrupt BGP packet causing backbone traffic to be routed through your little home DSL router). With network traffic, it's the reverse; longer hauls are more likely to go to satellite, which spikes the latency way up. Shorter distances are more likely to be by cable, which has a lower latency. The point is that the haul mechanism determines the latency, and different links have different haul mechanisms depending on distance and expected load.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[ksandom]

See I was thinking that could be taken a step further. A URL shortener that resolves the original URL, but then provides a one step shorter URL. URL shorteners do serve a useful purpose afterall.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Belial6]

That might be believable if it was 2 days vs. 3 days. It isn't though, it is 2 days vs. 7 days, and they claim the same envelope arrives on different days.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[RichardDeVries]

I tried a few things out and this seems to work: block "http://*google.com/url*" with Adblock or something similar. Same works for "http://*.facebook.com/l.php*" . The redirect urls are triggered by javascript, but the HTML hrefs still work.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[martin-boundary]

However... How can you trust the people who control the database?

Short answer: by following the links.

Long answer: This is not a *trust* issue, because the function which converts a short URL to the long version can be computed easily by anybody (the browser simply follows the link, and remembers the association).

It's more properly a *quality control* issue, which can be solved in the usual way: take a small statistical sample of data provided by the database and verify that there's no shenanigans. For example, flip a coin and (with small probability, say 1/1000) have your browser follow the short URL directly to verify the data provided by the database.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[hedwards]

I think that they intend for you to use the application. I haven't had that problem with the gmail app.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[IamTheRealMike]

See HTML5s "ping" facility.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Phleg]

The "series of tubes" part was a fun catchphrase, but the reason he got so much shit for it was because he took the analogy too far. He used the "series of tubes" comment to explain that the tubes could get clogged, and stuff gets bogged down behind it for a ridiculous period of time. Hence, his secretary "sent him an Internet" and it took him several days to receive it. Which has nothing to do with network congestion, and more than likely points to his secretary simply forgetting to send the email for a few days, then blaming it on the tubes.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[ckaminski]

I think it's time to start a goatse storm, like the one that caused slashdot to add the [xyz.com] bits to the urls in comments.

Kill these fucking shorteners.

-Chris

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[dgatwood]

Fair point. However, the redirects are just the tip of the iceberg when you're talking about high latency connections. With modern web content, you have images that cause DNS requests followed by a request for the URL, scripts that cause DNS requests followed by a URL load request, and lots of other things going on that all cause suffering under high latency conditions. The web (and to some degree, the Internet as a whole) simply wasn't designed to degrade gracefully when round-trip packet latency goes much beyond about 100-200 milliseconds. Above that, throughput goes to hell in a handbasket rather quickly. At satellite latencies, it starts to be a problem. At multi-second mobile phone latencies, it is nearly unusable.

Honestly, I've concluded that the original, walled garden approach to mobile telecom was right in a perverse way. Sure, the walling was wrong, but the notion of (by default) using a proxy to make all of your web requests on a mobile phone is actually a great idea as long as it is not mandatory. In principal, a properly designed (non-transparent) proxy setup can cut the latency of web browsing almost in half by performing the DNS lookup on the proxy server instead of on the client, thus incurring the round-trip latency only once per request. That's a huge usability win when you're dealing with RTL measured in seconds. It also cuts the outgoing packet count roughly in half (most non-POST HTTP requests fit into 1-2 packets), which also improves latency for everybody else.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[X0563511]

... and the huge expensive airfreight hauler can get you there faster and with more cargo than either :P

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[duguk]

However... How can you trust the people who control the database?

Short answer: by following the links.

Long answer: This is not a *trust* issue, because the function which converts a short URL to the long version can be computed easily by anybody (the browser simply follows the link, and remembers the association).

I completely understand what you're suggesting; but those users who DO check with the online database, could be logged too. It's not quite as easy to track, but it's possible, even just for link popularity. Plus it's relying on a single point of failure for all shortening services.

Your idea would possibly even use more traffic anyway* - a 301 redirect is all in the header, and would be smaller, or at least no larger than any other way of returning a URL. I'm just not sure how it'd be advantageous. It is a nice thought though. I can't think of any decent solution to solve it without exchanging more bandwidth for privacy.

* presumably it'd use HTTP for lookup, rather than caching the database; which would get huge, and any new links would have to be looked up manually anyway

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[justin12345]

I was just joking about that at work the other day. The original quote was something like: the internet isn't a dump truck its more like a series of tubes. We reasoned you could just as accurately describe a dump truck as a series of tubes as you could the internet. Likewise: a dog, a plant, a person... we came up with quite a list.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[dgatwood]

No need to get into things like acceleration. That would be inaccurate anyway. A better car analogy is capacity versus maximum speed. Consider a 50 passenger bus versus a customized tour bus. Both vehicles will get you there and back in an hour, but one carries 50 passengers and one carries half a dozen. The 50 passenger bus has high bandwidth, with one hour latency. The tour bus has medium bandwidth, with one hour latency. A Ferrari has low latency (it gets you there and back in 15 minutes, assuming you don't mind the tickets), but also doesn't have great bandwidth. A space shuttle has low latency (for a very limited set of destinations) and is moderately high bandwidth (at least for non-human cargo, if you use the cargo bay).

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Surt]

If he thought it was actually a physical series of tubes, he was largely correct, as that's in fact what it is. Lots of plastic tubes filled with glass or copper.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Surt]

Not for the individual using them. It's like ad-block: bad for everyone except the user. As long as users have the control, there will be problems like this. The obvious solution is time-locking seatbelts at internet connected computers and eyeball tracking video to make sure you're seeing what you're supposed to see.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[religious freak]

It's my university's implementation of a gmail email system. So the blame likely lays with my university (which would not surprise me at all) but I kind of wish the Google phone would work with the gmail service even with a crappy implementation by my school.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[nametaken]

I don't love them either, but this won't happen. For nearly everyone browsing the web, shortened urls aren't a problem. It's a process that has added utility for both parties and "just works".

Or put another way, when people stop liking Twitter AND knowing how many clicks they've gotten through urls... THEN it'll stop.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Surt]

I doubt if google is smart enough to avoid it, because their goal is to make all the sites that steal their content have lots of links back to them. Unless the stealing sites are quite careful (and lets face it, is a stealing site going to be hardworking, or lazy?) the content will have links both to ars and to sites legitimately related to the content.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Scaba]

Yea, but only once per domain, and then it's cached by your machine.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Shakrai]

With network traffic, it's the reverse; longer hauls are more likely to go to satellite

Huh?

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[dgatwood]

Longer hops (hops that cross oceans, more specifically) are more likely to be satellite hops, at which point latency goes south rather rapidly.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[martin-boundary]

I completely understand what you're suggesting; but those users who DO check with the online database, could be logged too. It's not quite as easy to track, but it's possible, even just for link popularity. Plus it's relying on a single point of failure for all shortening services.

Yes, any one provider of such a decoding service could log the requests, but I think you're assuming a single provider and that any provider would have power over its users.

However, whereas currently URL shortening services do have power over users, because the shortened URLs are dead links if there's no access to *their* database, that's not the case in a world with (possibly several) URL decoding services. In that case, the links aren't necessarily dead if a single decoder (or even the original shortening service) closes the database. (In the long run of course, both shortening services and decoding services would disappear, and the historically shortened links would become useless).

* presumably it'd use HTTP for lookup, rather than caching the database; which would get huge, and any new links would have to be looked up manually anyway

The full database serves every web surfer in principle, thus is huge. But any one web surfer visits a relatively small number of sites. The true question of efficiency is whether a single web surfer repeatedly clicks on the same links over a period of time that is sufficient to amortize the cost of the lookup. Moreover, the URL shortening service will typically be located in one place, e.g. a server in the US, whereas a decoding service could well be located closer to the actual user, anywhere in the world.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[dgatwood]

It's not too hard to believe.

First, Many large companies gets so much mail that the business comes with their own truck and picks it up from the USPS branch. Under those circumstances, as far as the USPS is concerned, the package or envelope is delivered the day it gets sorted and put into the pile to go to that company. However, this usually occurs after the company makes their pickup run for the day. In effect this means, the USPS almost invariably claims the package or envelope has been delivered a day before it really gets to the company. Whether this adds a day or not depends on what time of day the package or envelope got to the USPS office initially (whether it was before or after the company's pickup). So that's potentially one extra day.

Next, with the air mail, it probably flew out at the end of the day to NYC and arrived the next morning for processing. Truck drivers don't generally drive overnight when they can help it. That's two extra days.

Next, the truck has to break that trip up into two days worth of driving, assuming it's more than an 11 hour drive or that the truck driver didn't start in San Francisco. That's three extra days.

Next, because it is going by truck, it is probably indirect through Los Angeles, so it has to be sorted. That's four extra days.

Add one day lost in the back of and/or run over by a truck somewhere, and there you go. :-D

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Reziac]

Irony: The link from that page to http://www.longurlplease.com/ uses a redirector, albeit through mozilla.org.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Shakrai]

Says who? I've never seen latency on an overseas link that would approach satellite levels. Except for extremely remote areas most of the internet backbone is based on fiber, even for oceanic crossings.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[InfiniteWisdom]

engadget.com/tag/fcc
engadget.com/tag/whitespace

Totally useless.

I'd actually argue that's more useful, because those links take you to a list of other stories engaget has written covering those topics. If I want to search wikipedia for something I know where to find it.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[RocketRabbit]

No, there's just a send thing. A request is sent over the network; it doesn't arrive by mentalism.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Shadow of Eternity]

... Really because I don't remember smacking my face on the tube going to someone's laptop when I walk past a starbucks...

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[dgatwood]

I said more likely to, not likely to.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[qengho]

There is an RFC out there (I forget the number off the top of my head) which limits redirects to five. IE6 went above spec and allowed ... 20... I think. IE8 has shortened to allow 10 redirects. FF and Chrome allow the same or less.

I wonder what Safari allows. Verizon.com is particularly frustrating in this respect. When browsing my account and, say, trying to pay my phone bill, I often get the "too many redirects" message, so I have to go back to the entry page and try again.

Don't get me started about Verizon's customer service. Or their voice mail. And I'll never buy a Verizon cell phone. Crap, I got myself started. (However, their FiOS service has been outstanding. Go figure.)

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Belial6]

You are not reading what I am writing. First it is the envelope being delivered in the same state that takes a week or more. So, even if you take one day sitting in my local post office. It put on a truck and driven to San Francisco for day 2. It goes on a truck to Los Angeles for day 3. It goes to a local L.A. office for day 4, and gets delivered on day 5, there is no excuse for it to take 7 days or more.

The other part that you are not reading is that GAMEFLY claims the one single envelope arrived on two different days. It isn't a conflict between the USPS and Gamefly. Gamefly will say that the envelope arrived on Tuesday, and then claim that the same envelope arrived on Thursday.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Surt]

Only because they buried their tube underground. Or if you mean their wireless, then you're looking at an insignificant fraction of the internet, and really only the clients, not the content.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Steeltoe]

Fuck off!

Creds. NOW!!!

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[MichaelSmith]

Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?

I have a shortened link in my sig because otherwise I will overflow the 140 character limit. Slashdot could fix the sig length and the [url] would point to the correct place.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[AK Marc]

So you need a universal URL?

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[OnePumpChump]

Not really, alain just needs to get over it.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[gullevek]

Write in japanese and suddenly you can write a whole novel in 140 characters.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[dgatwood]

Sounds like they're incompetent, then. :-)

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Perhaps they shouldn't force our hand, then.

If the solution to a man made problem is worse than the problem itself, maybe it will train those in the future not to be so presumptuous about how much crap we'll take.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Noughmad]

Or you could use some ultra-hyper-modern twitter-like that would let you post messages longer than 140 characters? Too bad no-one thought of that yet...

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Finite9]

I have a 24Mbit connection and surfing feels like i'm in the early 90's again. It's become worse over the last several years or so.

I now use noscript to stop all the goddamn redirects. If I turn noscript off, I notice a substantial increase in wait time until pages load due to the latency of all the redirects.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[dave420]

Or for people to simply stop visiting sites with content/adverts/colours they find unacceptable on a website. I've never had to use noscript or adblock, as I generally don't go to sites that have things on them I don't want. If I do, I don't mind the adverts and redirects, as it pays for the site's content which I clearly want (as I'm on the site).

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[tehcyder]

Ironically, I was just recently accessing a gmail based email system with an Android phone and suddenly I get the message "too many redirects". So now there's no way my google phone can access my google mail. -1 for that one Google. /blockquote. How come I (and presumably every other Android/gmail user) haven't come across this?

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Surt]

That's an ok way to look at it, though I use adblock not because I find the adverts objectionable, but rather because they tend to eat time (slow down the web experience substantially). And that's with the simplest static banner ads. Don't get me started on the impact of flash ads.

Also, adverts and personal data harvesting to me represent a gross overpayment for content. I'd much rather make micro payments for adless content, except of course for the problem that I don't have that option.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[religious freak]

This is my university's implementation of a gmail based email system, not gmail itself. So unless you're going to my university or accessing its mail client, you wouldn't see it.

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[Belial6]

Well, you know what they say... "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

Of course, that is what the malicious people want you to think. ;)

Re:How do you get offenders to stop?

[jabelli]

Yes, but you're using TinyURL which is, as far as I can tell, the only one that allows you to set a cookie so that every time you click on a TinyURL, you get a landing page that shows you the URL you're actually going to.

It's a shame too...

[bziman]

I refuse to click on any "shortened" link, because I want to know PRECISELY where I'm going to end up. Thank you Slashdot and goatse.cx. If it's important enough to go visit, it's important enough to spell out properly. And thank you, but I don't live my life via SMS, so the few extra characters is worth my piece of mind.

Re:It's a shame too...

[The MAZZTer]

TinyURL has a cool feature to help with this. For TinyURLs, of course.

Re:It's a shame too...

[tibman]

I'm the same way. If i must click a shortened link, it's with a throwaway sandbox'd firefox.

Re:It's a shame too...

[kent_eh]

Especially if you are using your work computer.

In other news, I now know how many times you have to trigger the content filters before you get a visit...

Re:It's a shame too...

[piquadratCH]

With bit.ly, you can simply append a "+" to the URL and get an information page showing, between other information, which URL hides behind it, e.g. http://bit.ly/cTGasX+. I don't know if they have a setting to always display this info page, but I'm sure there are usersrcipts and bookmarklets out there that automatically append a "+" to every bit.ly link.

Re:It's a shame too...

[mpicker0]

I prefer to use "lengthened" URLs: http://hugeurl.com/.

Re:It's a shame too...

[AndrewNeo]

You can also stick preview. as the subdomain in a TinyURL to force the preview to show.

Re:It's a shame too...

[Itninja]

Can you ever know PRECISELY where you are going to land? Any URL can dump wherever it wants. Like when WAMU was bought by Chase. For at least 24 hours before the transition was made public the TLD of wamu.com was dumping me at wamu.chase.com. I thought I was being phished, until the next day when it all made sense. All a domain name can assure you of is that it exists. You can really end up anywhere.

Re:It's a shame too...

[Urza9814]

...so that instead of clicking one link, you can copy it, then go to another site, paste it in, _then_ click it and be redirected. Because that's exactly what we need - more intermediate steps.

Re:It's a shame too...

[mini me]

So, why not configure your browser to display the long URL before you click it? In the age of open source browsers and browser extensions, it would be trivial for anyone to add such a feature.

Re:It's a shame too...

[shutdown -p now]

It's all true, but, pragmatically, you can reasonably expect to not see Goatse under, say, msn.com.

Re:It's a shame too...

[Surt]

Firefox even has a plugin that does it (as mentioned in various other posts).

Re:It's a shame too...

[zerocool^]

Myself, I prefer shady urls.

http://www.shadyurl.com/

http://slashdot.org/
becomes
http://5z8.info/aryanbr0ther00d_l9e5b_malicious-cookie

Re:It's a shame too...

[bill_mcgonigle]

I refuse to click on any "shortened" link, because I want to know PRECISELY where I'm going to end up.

Do you view the HTML source or DOM tree before clicking a link? Because where it looks like you're going is easy enough to fake if you control the HTML.

Or.. "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Click on Shortened URL's".

Re:It's a shame too...

[pilybaby]

I prefer Dickens URL

Like this: URL too long for slashdot

Re:It's a shame too...

[tehcyder]

I always assumed tinyurl and the rest were there to make printed articles readable.

Re:It's a shame too...

[tehcyder]

That's the funniest thing I've seen all week. It's good to know there are people even more bored at work than I am.

Re:It's a shame too...

[bziman]

Do you view the HTML source or DOM tree before clicking a link? Because where it looks like you're going is easy enough to fake if you control the HTML.

I used to. Until I disabled the javascript for spoofing HREFs. That was like the first javascript feature Firefox offered. Or maybe that was back in the Mozilla days. It's hard to remember that far back.

Techie price greater than luser price

[apoc.famine]

For those of us who use things like NoScript, the price can be that we don't get there. Ever.

I know that when I go to a site that can't work unless I allow a half dozen or more other sites to run scripts, I sometimes decide that it's not worth my time. When I click a link that then has to contact several domains, (sometimes ones I have specifically blocked) I might stop right there and close the tab.

The web isn't just headed towards redirect hell - it's turning into a damn sketchy web of tentacles working their way into every page. When I find ones that I'm not comfortable having around, I don't go back.

I'm not sure I like what the web has become. Thanks to NoScript, I at least know what it's become.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[koterica]

As with so many other things, the situation is worse because most people don't know / don't care /are willing to put up with it. I am guilty myself. The problem is that the people making design decisions are not the people most effected by the decisions and the people effected don't understand the decisions being made.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[Spazntwich]

I've noticed this as well, and just consider it the price I have to pay to avoid losing my nerd credentials along with my tiny bank balance.

But it is becoming more prevalent, and I'm not sure what the solution is. Part of me worries this is one of the setup steps in someone's grand scheme to make the internet "dangerous" enough that the "only solution" is to grant absolute internet authority to agency x. You know. To protect the children from all the sexual predators hiding kiddie porn in bit.ly links.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[interkin3tic]

My university seems to have come up with a plan to advertise themselves to staff and students who already work/study here: provide no direct link to the university e-mail. They want you to go to the front page, to see the latest news you're not interested in and ways to make donations to the university (hint hint), then login, and you'll be taken to more irrelevant news, links for course tools, and another link for e-mail, which will redirect you one or two times before getting to a google mail system.

I have it automatically forward everything to a normal gmail account that is easier to access anyway, so it doesn't matter except for those few times when I need to access it directly. I usually make a mental note to spend 5 minutes finding out a more direct way and memorizing it, but then never get around to it.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[Bazman]

JavaScript has nothing to do with these things, surely. The server sends back a HTTP Redirect or Moved message, and your standards-compliant browser is supposed to go, "Kthx, I'll check there". It was part of the web's protocol from near enough day zero. NoScript won't stop you following them unless the redirect systems are abusing JavaScript for this. Are they? Oh dear god no.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[floodo1]

Indeed, NoScript is a constant reminder of how much a) ad related b) tracking related c) who knows what related (obscure domains) javascript out on the web. I've been on sites that had 10 external domains trying to run javascript. The sad part is that on the vast majority of sites that have external javascript, I can leave that javascript disabled with no detriment. Typically, enabling javascript for the domain of the site I'm visiting, and maybe a CDN domain makes everything work (menus, videos automatically, what have you).

Ad to this redirects which you can't do anything about? Talk about hell! At least you can block ads and control javascript (to a large degree, including running your own (GreaseMonkey, etc)), but you can't un-redirect a link. Sure you could use javascript to try and resolve all the links on a page, but all you gain is having your browser do it in the background instead of pre-click. But that's a helluva kludge.

Down with tracking. Fuck you if you want to spend your time watching me. The horror of the digital revolution is that now you don't have to have an actual person to spy on people :( Which is exactly why it's very much different for a police officer to stand on a corner watching out for crime and having a camera mounted there recording all the time. But I digress.

All we can do is voice our opinion against this trash practice, and try to avoid it as much as possible.......so FUCK YOU TWITTER, stop acting for your own interests and respect mine!

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[CCarrot]

Hear hear!

Unfortunately, the vast majority of web users don't give a rat's arse if half a dozen leech scripts are hooking into their site, as long as it loads 'fast' and looks 'cool'.

I am a strict NoScript user as well, and I tell you, it is always a struggle when friends (or even my tech-savvy spouse!) want to use one of my machines to check something out. It seems like *every* time I have to show them how to allow (temporary) access to the leech scripts, and help them identify which ones probably aren't needed to load that flash vid of the cute kitties they want to watch...

I did have one ray of sunshine last week, however, when one person using my computer and picking off the scripts with me said "jeez, I didn't realize how much crap is on that site. Maybe I should install this NoScript too?"

Hallelujah!

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[Dr Herbert West]

The external script thing is a real bummer-- there's a lot of news sites out there that won't display properly (or at all) because they load all kinds of tracking data/cookies/plugins from other sites that I have adblocked. Or they're coded poorly, and unable to function at all. Facebook is a major culprit-- I've been seeing a lot of little "share this article if you're a facebook douchebag" mini-flash apps embedded in websites (in a frameset, no less). The crazy thing is if the app can't pull the data it wants, the ENTIRE PAGE won't load until the app gets what it needs.

I now have a wildcard block for everything facebook. Some sites I used to visit regularly are now unusable. Oh well-- I'm sure their marketing team has no problem with losing views so they can track whatever views they still have left.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[cgenman]

The web is becoming a series of interdependent systems that all interact with each other. You may have one company that serves your ads, another that helps you understand your users better, another that serves extra content, etc. All of these services "tentacle" together to create a modern mature web experience.

That's the nature of things once a system matures. Middleware providers, essentially, move in. They start providing portions of service to web pages from 3rd party servers. This can be as simple as a 3rd party e-mail provider showing the number of unread messages on your college homepage, or as nefarious as those evil TrAcKiNg cOoKiEs. Even the worst ones mostly just want to know if you're interested in cars, in case you'd like to buy a car.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[commodore64_love]

I'd never realized this was a problem. Sure I've seen Facebook turn my youtube links into facebook.com redirects, but didn't think it was a big deal. It still accesses youtube quickly.

As for for NoScript I've never seen it balk. I have "Temporarily allow to sites by default" and "Allow 2nd level domains (noscript.net)"

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you if you want to spend your time watching me

Oh, come on! What am I going to fap to now?

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[think_nix]

and if you are on a vpn or other encrypted connection + noscript have a coffee , and another , and lots of patience.

imho this is bullshit . Especially when trying to get real work done remotely . Most major sites or services do this already. PITA imho. The web was not invented for this matter.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[interkin3tic]

No, that login is for admins.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[omnichad]

Sorry - I meant to say:

https://mail.google.com/a/schoolmaildomain.edu/

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[rgmoore]

I'm sure their marketing team has no problem with losing views so they can track whatever views they still have left.

Absolutely, and don't act surprised. You aren't doing them a favor by visiting their site; you're costing them money. They pay for those costs by advertising and tracking their visitors. If you aren't going to help them pay for your use by letting them display ads and track you, they'd be much happier if you didn't visit.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[interkin3tic]

That does work, thank you.

I really wasn't looking for tech support though, my point was just that the redirection is used for some schools to advertise to you, getting between you and your e-mail.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[omnichad]

That's fine - and my point was that Google always offers lower level access than their competitors, so any attempt to obfuscate their services can be bypassed one way or another. Like how they offer IMAP when almost nobody else does, CalDAV for calendars, and hopefully CardDav for contacts soon!

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[curunir]

NoScript won't stop you following them unless the redirect systems are abusing JavaScript for this. Are they? Oh dear god no.

JavaScript is the only way to add POST data to the request, so it is typically used in situations like SSO where the redirect is actually submitting a form.

We've also run into problems with our JavaScript framework (GWT) since it uses URL fragments to represent state and those are not sent to the server. So when the URL fragment needs to survive the redirect, we have to use JavaScript.

It could also be useful in situations where you want to conditionally redirect based on some criteria not available in the initial HTTP request. For example, let's say you wanted to redirect clients with a screen width less than 800px wide to a page that explained why that was the minimum screen width for your site.

HTTP redirects are preferable when the functionality allows them, but JavaScript is far more flexible for the situations where HTTP redirects won't work.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[hedwards]

Part of it has to do with CDN providers, and each add seemingly having its own to deal with.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[dbIII]

Why does it have to be government conspiracy when we have Rupert Murdoch going around the world yelling about how the web needs to be cut back, fenced off and have a high cost of entry to kill off startups?
Personally I think most of the problems are idiots taking shortcuts and crap like flash instead of any sort of conspiracy.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[LBt1st]

I'm the exact same way. Often times someone will give me a link to a video, and the video doesn't play so I check NoScript's list. Usually there are about 5 to 10 other domains trying to do stuff. I'll whitelist the domain I'm actually at, and failing that maybe one or two more if they seem legit.

Beyond that I just close the window. Half the time it turns out the video is just coming off youtube but the site's design requires a bunch of BS to run before displaying it.
They're doing nothing more then adding ads to the service that Google is supplying. To hell with sites like that.

Re:Techie price greater than luser price

[apoc.famine]

Frustrating, isn't it? My favorite are just straight IP addresses which require permission to run scripts. With all the botnets in the world using home computers, I'm not even going to bother to look up who it belongs to. That's just sketchy as all hell.

If you're a legitimate website, there's no reason you need to have 5-10 other domains running scripts on your page, including just random IP addresses.

www.linuxtoday.com is the champion

[bogaboga]

Folks at linuxtoday.com have been doing this for a long time. It's one reason I fled the site. Instead of taking me to where I wanna go directly, they make me click twice on the same site. This I believe, enables them to collect 'vital information' to present to their advertisers.

The bad thing is that they lost me and many others in the process.

By the way, it's intentional for me not to link to them from Slashdot directly.

To be honest the web was getting a bit fast...

[youn]

... so they had to find yet another way to slow things down... so the web could live up to its reputation of "world wide wait" ;)

Re:To be honest the web was getting a bit fast...

[RealGrouchy]

... so they had to find yet another way to slow things down... so the web could live up to its reputation of "world wide wait" ;)

Thankfully, it beat out the alternative of using only plus-size models for porn.

- RG>

More ads, again...

[Drakkenmensch]

[Wait 30 seconds or click here to skip to comment]

User Experience

[Yhippa]

Speaking of redirects how about websites waiting to load content on Doubleclick analytics? Not only do the ads you're serving not load up but I tend to give up on visiting the page altogether. Everybody loses.

Re:User Experience

[jack2000]

Ad-block or hosts file or iptables, pick your weapons.

optimize google

[emkyooess]

The Optimize Google add-in for Firefox gets rid of some of their hellish redirects. Sadly, it doesn't update frequently and seems prone to breaking.

My Idea

[wbav]

I want to create a redirect loop. Just imagine, google to tinyurl to bit.ly to dilv.it back to google.

Or you could always just make a really long way to get to someone who'll never give you up, never let you down.

Re:My Idea

[NevarMore]

http://breakingcode.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/having-fun-with-url-shorteners/

Re:My Idea

[TheSpoom]

Nice. Firefox would catch the redirect loop though, as would most modern browsers.

Re:My Idea

[clone53421]

Done.

http://tinyurl.com/25lsp67
http://3.ly/2e5g64f

bit.ly adds its own little blab page if it detects multiple redirects, which is entertaining in its own way I guess... never-ending loop:

http://bit.ly/9bV4Re

The preview feature is fun too...

http://3.ly/RwuW
http://tinyurl.com/k2w9uiz

Re:My Idea

[clone53421]

Infinite recursion that defeats browser infinite recursion detection:

http://3.ly/3x5qdno
http://tinyurl.com/36n5j5y

(the tinyurl long link is <html><body><script>var t=setTimeout('window.location="http://3.ly/3x5qdno";',50);</script></body></html> encoded in a data: URI)

Re:My Idea

[clone53421]

http://3.ly/3x5qdno

Re:My Idea

[mcgrew]

I and an online friend actually did something similar back in the Quake days. His site, Yello There (a parody of Blue's News) was in a frame. One time he linked my site, so I linked his site back. If you clicked on my site from his, mine loaded up in his frame, framed by his frame yet again. Once my site was loaded in his frame, every time you clicked the link to his site from my site it would open another frame. Since our fans were all nerds (almost everybody on the internet was a nerd back then), everybody got the joke. Even funnier is, that is the only instance of his site in the wayback machine (last time I looked, most of mine was still there, probably because he had a host and I had my own domain).

If we'd have made a redirect to automatically open the link we'd have DoSed all our fans. Ah, those were the fun days...

Re:My Idea

[Surt]

Ouch. Why does firefox (3.6.10) not figure that out?

Re:My Idea

[clone53421]

We call it a Slashdotting ’round these parts.

Re:My Idea

[garphik]

Looks very close to a browser based DOS attack :-)

Re:My Idea

[ZeRu]

Can you give wayback link to your friend's site? I would like to see it.

Re:My Idea

[mcgrew]

There's only the one page of his site out of hundreds he posted left, but search for thefragfest.com on the wayback machine for my old site; his is bound to that. "Kneel's" parody was surealistically hilarious.

Note, after I got bored after a few years of posting I let the domain lapse, and someone else registered it as a porn site. So if you see porn, you're at the wrong place.

Re:Work around

[mazarin5]

I am constantly irritated when I copy a link, only to paste a wall of text in my little IM window.

It's money, not knowledge

[Morth]

If someone is paying me for the clicks I send to their site, I need to count it so that I know how much I should charge, and they need to count it as well to know I'm not lying. They could make the count on the destination page, but usually it's far more easy to make a special service for it.

A redirect page is usually just a couple of hundred bytes large. Cookies might add some clutter, but probably still less than 1k in each direction, still fits in a single packet. I don't see the problem here.

Re:It's money, not knowledge

[seekertom]

pls send a few cents to the enclosed address, paypal accepted. it's only a few cents. c'mon!

Sampling can be good

[amplusquem]

Google and Facebook both use these "intermediate steps" to weed out malware infested sites and warn the user. Sampling can also be useful in judging if something is NSFW, or more importantly, rickrolling prevention.

Re:Sampling can be good

[spazdor]

Google and Facebook could just as easily filter malware out of the hyperlinks before they present them to you in the first place. I know Facebook in particular doesn't even let you post such links to your wall in the first place, let alone allow anyone to click them.

Not all that new

[shoptroll]

Jeff Atwood hit on this issue in a blog post last year: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/url-shorteners-destroying-the-web-since-2002.html

Feature or bug?

[Etcetera]

This used to be considered something that was potentially a Good Thing. To help prevent link rot and redesigns from breaking links, people thinking a lot about Hypertext came up with initiatives like PURL's: http://purl.oclc.org/docs/

Now that the primary usage of these redirects are simply to shorten links to something more convenient, we're using the same tech (a 301) and using it in different ways. One question is, how many people use the "custom link name" feature of tinyurl.com vs, simply let a random string of text be used? And, will a service start letting us update link destinations after the fact (like the original purl site did)? If so, how do you prevent nefarious uses of this (like moving it to goatse after it's memeing about)?

In terms of the filtration-for-tracking-purposes? That horse has left the barn already; I'm more concerned with final destinations not being recorded over time for posterity. These redirect services are totally interchangable anyway... as soon as one starts using interstitals, people will move to another one.

Re:Feature or bug?

[Lehk228]

And, will a service start letting us update link destinations after the fact

why not just allow inline goatse embeds and save me the time of clicking THEN seeing goatse.

Why it has to be so technically impractical?

[Anonymous Coward]

Less fragile and less of an unnecessary intermediary on this Web 2.0 (or whatever) age would be to catch the click of a link with onclick, set a cookie, and open the original, intended link. When user would again come back to the site, this cookie would be dumped to the site that so much wanted the information it was clicked. Even if the user would have some sort of embedded resource from this site open somewhere else, it could harvest the information and send it back.

Instead, we seem to be ending up with endless chains of redirectors and opaque identifiers that are bound to organizations that don't necessarily exist in a year. What a joy to use technology which is driven by needs of utter morons and greed of those interested to press most information out of the morons...

advertising funds nothing serious

[FuckingNickName]

and there is no useful (i.e. non-light-entertainment) content created primarily through advertising revenue. Slashdot developers who have made their money over the last decade producing tat by not overestimating the intelligence of the general public cannot bear to admit this, but you simply cannot produce high-calibre content when your primary aim is to suck in as many as possible of the kind of people who take notice of adverts.

Murdoch, often maligned for his lack of business sense but mysteriously still richer than all of us, seems to have tried and failed at pushing the subscription model. Obviously there are other viable models for producing information on the web such as government sponsorship (BBC, academia) and well organised groups of hobbyists (e.g. ham radio), but how will the sites who do not already have a dedicated subscription base through off-line heritage sustain themselves? Or maybe the answer is that they will not, the moment they take their eye off the advertiser as customer and start worrying directly about satisfying the desire for the reader to intellectually advance himself.

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[mister_dave]

Has he failed?

WSJ.com is a success. The Times? Too early to know, but there are reports that News of the World is following, so The Times' experience can't have been a disaster.

ComScore‘s figures suggested the number of unique visitors to The Times web site dropped from 2.79 million in May to 1.61 million in July and that page views fell from 29 million in May to nine million in July as well as readers spending less time on the site. However, consider that first set of numbers again: Prior to the paywall, the site was getting 2.79 million users accessing the site for free. Now it has 1.61 million but all have paid a price to be there. On a figures basis 2.79 million of nothing is nothing but 1.61 million paying a £1 is a lot, lot more revenue.

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[FuckingNickName]

I intended a bit of sarcasm in repeating the myth that Murdoch is some sort of business failure, but I am not sure he has succeeded in convincing himself, let alone others, that he yet has a viable subscription model except when there is already a substantial off-line media subscriber base. IOW, those 1.61 million include people getting the site for free because they already subscribe to the paper paper.

There's also the Appleqsue danger of using the launch period frenzy, including any temporary special offers, to completely overstate the long-term impact of your product on the market. (You'd think they heralded the resurrection, but after nearly 4 years iOS browser market share sits around 1.1%.)

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[mister_dave]

The Times circulation is 500,000 -ish. So 4x that paying for the web edition looks pretty good.

I thought the received wisdom was that when free websites put up a paywall, they lose 90% of their traffic. The Times seems to have done rather better.

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[garcia]

and there is no useful (i.e. non-light-entertainment) content created primarily through advertising revenue.

I guess it depends on what you're reading. If you're looking for a small time blog which really gets into the meat of something, like I try to do, you have to realize that it couldn't be done without some sort of money coming in. This isn't my full-time job but it would not be possible without the hosting costs covered, my gas costs covered, and my food costs covered when I'm researching stuff to write about.

Let's not jump to conclusions just because you think the world revolves around The Big Guys. There are people out there providing niche services which The Big Guys cannot and people are happy that those places exist.

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[FuckingNickName]

Let's not jump to conclusions just because you think the world revolves around The Big Guys.

The biggest guy is the ad broker; below that are those who can capture the attention of the public, the advertisers. If you have a chip on your shoulder about "the big guys", you couldn't be much more self-defeating than allowing them to erect a banner on your front yard.

You not so burdened, of course, because by admitting that you require advertising revenue to produce your site you are also admitting that you tailor your website to the kind of people who will (not block, take notice of, and) click on adverts.

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[FuckingNickName]

That's /. wisdom :-). I think the more widely accepted wisdom is that no publisher is quite sure he writes good enough material that anyone actually wants to pay for it.

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[garcia]

You not so burdened, of course, because by admitting that you require advertising revenue to produce your site you are also admitting that you tailor your website to the kind of people who will (not block, take notice of, and) click on adverts.

Being that I have a responsibility first to those who read my site daily, and not to those who come from Google searches much later, I don't show ads on my main page or on subpages which are less than 4 days old. So for you to say that I cater to those who click on ads is quite wrong. Those who do click ads, who 96% of which come from Google searches, are generally fly-bys who visit the site either once or so infrequently that I don't track them in Analytics.

But you can continue to make incorrect assumptions left and right as it suits you.

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[FuckingNickName]

Despite your spin, what I get out of your description is that (1) you put adverts on all pages over 4 days old; (2) you are well aware that the kind of person who clicks on adverts doesn't care much about the content; yet (3) you have built a site in such a way as to entice enough of this type of person that you receive respectable ad revenue anyway.

You seem to be annoyed about agreeing with me: the content seeker is not the advert follower, so anyone optimising for revenue from the latter is going to take away from the former.

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[garcia]

Wow, you're a worthless asshole.

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[dbIII]

seems to have tried and failed at pushing the subscription model

It's part of his plan to hurt google and similar competitors for the advertising dollar and his newspapers bleed money anyway. Haven't you heard about his travelling roadshow to convince regulators around the world to tie up the internet? Haven't you heard, seen or read in his media about how evil google is with streetview making things easier for child molestors (there really were articles that said that) or spying on WiFi?
With a subscription model he can put a more credible fictional value on some stuff that he'll let google link to and use that as "proof" that google are a bunch of theives that should be regulated out of existance. Let's hope the phone tapping stuff keeps him busy for a while and his son never gets to be as good at manipulation.

Re:advertising funds nothing serious

[dbIII]

Many think the only reason he keeps his newspapers is because he sees them as a means of political influence (very blatantly applied in Australia over the last year). Overall he's losing money on them now. Earlier this year he probably made more money from a single sale of a cable TV network in China than his newspapers made for him over the last decade.

Tracking

[iONiUM]

Not only do you not know where you're going to end up, but also the service can track your behaviour. Obviously this latter reason is why all the companies want to do it.

So, how do you get around it? I don't even think we can. I think we're screwed, to be honest. It's just going to be like that, perhaps until the day an exploit comes out and re-targets all of a services re-directs (i.e. tinyurl) to some hostile domain. Then, and perhaps only then, would it get enough attention to bring it to the "mainstream" users that it might be a bad idea.

Not.. that I'm suggesting anything... 4chan.

It hasn't bothered me so far.

[maillemaker]

I didn't even know this was occurring. Guess it hasn't bothered me so far.

Facebook

[Xacid]

To play the devil's advocate - facebook's redirects started as a way to filter out all the spam links.

Re:Facebook

[explosionhead]

Why redirect on all links then, couldn't they have had it running only on known spam links?

Re:You mean like this?

[DanTheStone]

(Redirects to this page.)

The AJAX Solution

[TheSpoom]

As I commented on TFA:

So we have jQuery, and we have AJAX. Why don’t they just attach an onClick to their links that sends a quick POST to Google before sending the user on their way, directly to the site in question? It won’t work for people without Javascript on, but that’s such a small percentage that I doubt it matters to them much. The important thing is that they could get their statistics, while still avoiding a redirect. The service providers could argue that they need the tracking even if Javascript is off, but that just seems extreme.

Can someone tell me if there are any issues I'm not seeing with this approach?

Re:The AJAX Solution

[Osso]

Tracking visitors with no or disabled javascript is one of the reasons.

Re:The AJAX Solution

[farble1670]

your browser's SOP (same origin policy) prevents you from doing this. scripts aren't allowed to make net connections to sites outside the domain of the current page. this is to reduce XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks.

i understand there are standards in the making to allow such things, securely.

Re:The AJAX Solution

[TheSpoom]

Why would SOP stop Google from posting to Google from inside Google? It's not like the target page would be the one posting; Google would, before the onClick finished.

Re:somes it's neccesary

[Asmor]

That sound you hear is the point, zooming at mach 5 over your head.

Redirect Remover for Firefox

[michaelepley]

huh? what? web sites are redirecting?

(ok, RDR is not that good, but it helps, and I'm sure as this becomes even more prevalent, people will work around it)

Re:Redirect Remover for Firefox

[pregister]

What do you find to be the problems with RDR? I just started using it a few weeks ago and am interested in where it could be failing.

Redirects don't get you link love

[Animats]

On the other side of this are the search engines. They may not follow the chain of links, especially if it involves "cookies". So a reference that uses a redirection service may not be credited as an inbound link for ranking purposes.

Then there's the firewall/proxy issue. Firewalls need to see where you're really going, so they have to run down the link chain. This may result in bogus hits on the end site, if both the firewall and the browser separately do this.

Re:somes it's neccesary

[spazdor]

That's not the kind of URL hiding the OP is talking about. If you did this to URLs pointing to external sites, ones not controlled by you or your company, *then* you'd be contributing to redirect hell.

Said the Rich Executive:

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

Oh dear God yes! We can abuse JavaScript more to get more clicks!

Minor issue, not Hell

[blair1q]

Redirects are a minor inconvenience on the net. Much more insidious is the enormous number of sites that have to be accessed to get all the content on many webpages. Add to that the layers and layers of CSS needed to render them. And the massive, often buggy stack of scripts they bring. Not to mention the server-side scripting that slows down fetching the pages and embedded content and CSS pages and scripts before you get them.

It'd be interesting to see the average number of bytes transacted to render one byte of information to the screen. And the average loading time of a page.

Re:Minor issue, not Hell

[psyclone]

In addition to measuring bytes transacted per bytes of information rendered, how about connection counts too?

Those 20 external javascripts, and the 15 CSS documents (including @import), and the 40 images, all requested from several domains and multiple subdomains requires a ton of DNS lookups as well as TCP connections.

HTTP/1.1 helped solve the multiple request problem by enabling keep-alives. But if you request a resource from a different domain/subdomain, they obviously don't help.

Like others have said on this thread, simply using NoScript opens your eyes to the bloat of third party resource fetching.

Look at the script nodes and domain counts from the table half-way down in this article: http://www.schillmania.com/content/entries/2009/browser-performance-cost-of-social-media/

Re:Work around

[rs79]

Where are you seeing this? I just looked the the html source for the results of a google search and the target url is the target hfre with no google middleman. Am I missing something?

wasn't there a time....

[bickerdyke]

when it was considered a security hole if you DIDN'T use a redirect on your page? IIRC there used to be an attack vector where malicous sites used links from freemail pages to steel session IDs from the referer-headers.

Re:wasn't there a time....

[JesseMcDonald]

To be fair, that is nothing more than a workaround for several other major security issues:

1. The referrer header itself. This header serves no useful purpose, and leaks information that the destination website has no need to know. There is no way to use the referrer information securely, since it can be trivially forged, but it does serve as an invaluable tool for malicious attacks and unwanted tracking.

2. Session IDs should be validated to prevent hijacking. At the very least the session ID should be ignored if it comes from a different IP address than the one which created the session. It's not a perfect solution, given dynamic IPs, NAT, and proxies, but it would block most attacks without inconveniencing normal users.

3. No private information, including session IDs, should ever go in the URL. HTTP POST requests or cookies are a better solution here. (Naturally, cookies should be valid only until the end of the session unless the user explicitly indicates otherwise.)

Re:wasn't there a time....

[JesseMcDonald]

I did say it wasn't an ideal solution, partly because of proxies. However, unless you plan to protect the (POST- or cookie-based) session ID from eavesdropping with end-to-end encryption it would be highly irresponsible not to take some kind of precaution against session hijacking. Personally I consider these "proxy farms" to be a broken configuration, and I would not expect any session-oriented website to function properly with my IP address changing at random. If you must support them, however—and are unable to use HTTPS everywhere—then at least recognize that any site which relies on the session ID without at least checking the identify of the sender cannot be said to be secure against session hijacking.

Re:wasn't there a time....

[JesseMcDonald]

That protects you from eavesdropping, but not other ways in which URLs may be disclosed. For example, the HTTP referrer headers under discussion. They can also end up in bookmarks, or copied into e-mails, etc. The point of using HTTP POST or cookies, similarly, is not to protect against eavesdropping, but rather that such data is less likely to be exposed. URLs tend to be treated as public information.

Re:Work around

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

That you even have to highlight the url shows a lack of imagination on the part of my fellow programmers.

It should be auto-parsed so you just hover and right-click, go to url.

Infinite loop

[ron-l-j]

I think we could just write a Java program that will loop through a range of your top 10 urls every minute. Then you would never have to click. Call it autoBrowser. Because no one should actually click on things.

Re:Infinite loop

[TangoMargarine]

Set it as your homepage, add your browser to the startup folder, set your user account to auto-login, set your computer to sleep after a certain amount of time, enable wake-on-lan, and...crap, I'm stuck. Maybe setup a second computer with a script running to ping the PC every few hours?

Now THAT's zero-click browsing.

Re:Infinite loop

[ron-l-j]

Never sleep, and incorporate a garage door opener to the chair to refresh the loop.

Re:Infinite loop

[ron-l-j]

laughing = range(100000) for(i = 100,range(),i +=): raw_input("Still laughing in agreement?:")

mailing lists

[pinkishpunk]

those tinyurl makes archives mailing lists hell also, have anyone seen or code a tool automatic lookup the real url and replace the tinyurl for archival purposes ?

...Redirect hell?

[damn_registrars]

Accused by a site that is dependent on scripts coming from other domains.

Re:Plus the Mouseover Script

[vakuona]

That defeats the purpose of search engines. If you don't click on the links, how does google know it is finding the right pages for you?

Twitter Redirect ...

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

links you to Jap Porn.

Re:Check this out

[denis-The-menace]

Moderators, thought this redirection is written to go to goatse.cx
TinyURL does a preview of it and experience surfers will avoid it.

I was thinking of trying this myself but looks like TinyURL is already on the ball to prevent goatse.cx abuse.

Re:Advertising.

[CarpetShark]

Exactly. I don't even think advertising should exist in its current form. If capitalism is supposed to be about delivering the best goods and services to people at the best price, then what's needed to facilitate that is an independent directory of goods and services, that doesn't allow any bullshit about what the goods and services really offer for the money.

HTTP redirects

[GWBasic]

I'm going to assume that most of these use HTTP redirects. This is where the server returns a 3xx result that tells the browser where to go, as opposed to rendering a full page and using Javascript to redirect.

The nice thing about HTTP redirects is that a service like Twitter can just follow the HTTP redirects for you and cut all of the middlemen out of the chain. Even forthcoming server-side Javascript interpreters could parse out Javascript-based redirects.

Been happening for awhile.

[billsayswow]

Anytime I'm on a website, and I go to my iGoogle homepage, and then try and click back, it re-redirects me back to iGoogle. I have to hammer the back button about five times to get it to go back to the site I was at before.

Re:Been happening for awhile.

[msclrhd]

That annoys me too. The BBC iPlayer has this behaviour as well (presumably to track things like the Most Popular data).

Re:Been happening for awhile.

[billsayswow]

I've noticed that too, for the few things we're able to get over here in the States. (Avid fan of the World Service and BBC 6Music)

Something for Nothing

[Maclir]

This is the price we pay for using all of these "services" at no direct cost to ourselves. Something has to pay for all of the infrastructure, developers, support, etc from Twiter / Facebook / Google / etc.

Re:Work around

[wiredlogic]

Google inserts redirects on a low percentage of its search results. Most of the time you don't get them and they usually slip by unnoticed.

Re:Micropayment

[FuckingNickName]

It is definitely a possibility, although it is tempting to avoid consuming individual nuggets of information on a micro-payment basis unless you already "know" it's going to be useful, i.e. it tells you what you want to hear. Faced with a decent quality publication you have paid for in full, you can enjoy various viewpoints rather than being tempted just to fund/read the ones you like. Hm.

Shady URL's

[sirrunsalot]

Personally, I find the trend of redirecting to innocent sites via shady URL's much more alarming: http://5z8.info/foodporn_e0g0l_taliban-meetup

(I promise I'll get modded "troll" by someone who glanced at the link and assumed the worst. Hard to blame them, but I do love using those links whenever possible...)

Re:Shady URL's

[sirrunsalot]

I opened the tab in the background. "I love Horses." Okay... Lots of sick /. trolls around here... I tilted my head, I squinted my eyes, and... I clicked. Then I heard the music. And I felt much better. What a relief.

Re:Advertising.

[chocolatetrumpet]

so... product reviews?

The Road to Hell...

[OakDragon]

...is paved with redirections.

Re:HTML 5?

[msclrhd]

HTML5 supports a ping attribute on the anchor ('a') tag to notify a second url when the user clicks on the link if the user has enabled this feature (as browsers implementing this should have a configuration option to enable/disable it). This reduces the issues with url redirection on sites like google.com that use the information for analytical/advertising/tracking purposes provided that (a) all or most browsers adopt it, (b) users browse the web using one of these browsers and (c) these websites use the ping attribute in preference to other means when browsers expose it.

This does not solve the other main use of redirects: URL shortening. These sites provide short URLs that redirect you to the full URL when you navigate to them and are used by twitter to keep you within the 140 character limit. These are worse in many ways because:
    a/ you don't know where you are navigating to (without using an addon or other utility);
    b/ can be exploited in some cases (like tinyurl);
    c/ break a lot of pages if the shortening URL site goes down (e.g. most of twitter's information would be useless if bit.ly went down);
    d/ don't work well with archiving.

No, not good

[spage]

That's stupid. My browser does malware protection, I don't need Google or Facebook getting involved. And as @spazdor says, do that before presenting the link to me.

You're crazy if you think Google and Facebook intercept links for your benefit. They're doing it to track you, pure and simple.
At least I can infer their outbound links. Link shorteners are Russian roulette. If services like Twitter wanted a better user experience, they would unshorten links when they present a feed to browsers.

"It makes your head spin, doesn’t it?"

[toxonix]

No, it does not at all make my head spin! What kind of neurotics sit around and worry about stuff like this? Companies like data, lots and lots of data. So they're going to find ways to accumulate it. I'm not sure why people cry hell over url shortening. Its just a type of compression, and it makes communication easier.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

10.3 Redirection 3xx

This class of status code indicates that further action needs to be taken by the user agent in order to fulfill the request. The action required MAY be carried out by the user agent without interaction with the user if and only if the method used in the second request is GET or HEAD. A client SHOULD detect infinite redirection loops, since such loops generate network traffic for each redirection.

Note: previous versions of this specification recommended a maximum of five redirections. Content developers should be aware that there might be clients that implement such a fixed limitation.

It's called onmousedown!

[spage]

Yes you are really missing something! Just by viewing source you should notice on the a tag

  onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','3','AFQjCNElSuk8pqYMVk5pKG9sycYfDSh7zg','UsteGasJKDRPW0uis7I9Ig','0CCsQFjAC')"
  class="l"
  href="http://example.com/the/original/URL"

So on mouseover you see the original URL, but on click, function rwt ("rewrite"?) sends you to Google first with all that tracking crap, which then redirects you on your way.

If I right-click and Copy Link Location, I get a Google URL in Firefox with this tracking crap. If I feed that to curl, I don't get a status 301 redirect, I get a small piece of HTML back containing both a script that changes the window.location and a meta http-equiv refresh tag.

Disable JavaScript to disable all this.

Re:It's called onmousedown!

[spage]

Hmm, it varies. In Firefox if I'm logged in to Google a search result has an href with a plain URL but the onmousedown rewrites as I described above. If I log out the href is a Google URL and there's still an onmousedown rewrite. But in Konqueror where Google knows nothing about me, I get a plain href and no onmousedown handler.

So maybe another way to avoid Google tracking is use an obscure browser?

Go to Hell.

[Chris Burke]

Go indirectly to Hell. Do pass Go, and seven other affiliates. Do collect for us $200 in click-through money.

Even if it goes down...

[MaxOfS2D]

I'm pretty sure archive.org said at some point they'd take over URL shorteners which would go dead, so those billions of pests wouldn't all go 404 on our asses

Re:Plus the Mouseover Script

[Arker]

They dont know either way, so this argument makes no sense.

Re:Advertising.

[CarpetShark]

No, more like technical specs, lab results, and much less image, peer pressure, and other audience manipulation.

well i you want to frack up your site

[mjwalshe]

use loads of redirects - I have just spent several weeks testing on a big site 5M+ pages removing redirects with the real urls. Having to follow to many redirects is a good way of killing your site for search engines.

We even had to get our devs to go the extra mile and sort the underlying problems as they wanted to fix problems with redirects rather than fix the underlying problems.

Haw haw.

[professorguy]

That's the nature of things once a system matures. --The ______ Agenda [cafepress.com]

Is it ironic that I clicked on your tee shirt store link and with my NoScript running, could not view, shop for, nor purchase anything? In fact, it is impossible to leave the barren first page. Keep up the good work.

Re:Haw haw.

[Surt]

Not sure if that's ironic or not, as it would seem to be a perfect example of his point, the middlemen (cafepress) are no doubt the ones screwing your experience, rather than anything he did directly (other than choose to work with cafepress).

Re:Advertising.

[marcello_dl]

> If capitalism is supposed to be about delivering the best goods and services to people at the best price...

            Microsoft.

Your supposition is invalid.

And yet, there's no need!

[mcrbids]

It would be trivial to do something with javascript - put an onclick handler that does an xmlHttpRequest to save the "needed" information without even needing to worry about header redirects and the like. The link can be something like

<a href="http://www.thesite.com/path/to/page.html" onclick="return notifyBigBrother(this);">

where notifyBigBrother() is a function that sends the click info to the search engine site. Why isn't this done?

Re:And yet, there's no need!

[QuestorTapes]

This page:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/pagelinks.html

has some neat bookmarklets, one of which removes redirects.
I don't use it all the time, because some sites depend on the ad revenue.
But if the site abuses redirects, I have it as an option.

Several other nice bookmarklets there.

that's why I like the MVP HOSTS file

[PJ6]

They get most of the major offenders in the list. Sure it breaks some links, but it's worth it.

The ones I hate most...

[Reziac]

...are those that come in perfectly legitimate email, stuff that I actively subscribed to. They already know where I came from, their own damned email. Why does it need to go through a redirecting clicktracker?

Furthermore, it lets even legit emails send me somewhere not only unanticipated but also a pain in the ass, like links that unexpectedly open a whopping great PDF.

Many thanks to folks who posted links to two URL de-obfuscator services, which are now permanently on my toolbar.

http://unshorten.com/index.php
http://www.longurlplease.com/

for Greasemonkey

[KingAlanI]

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40582
Greasemonkey script with analogous function.
Despite the name, it works for things in addition to TinyURL.

ping (Re:HTML 5?)

[dveditz]

Firefox was an early adopter of the <a ping> HTML 5 feature to solve exactly this redirect-for-tracking issue, added in early 2006: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319368 There was huge controversy that the feature helped sites track users (never mind that you're being tracked as it is, and that the feature let you turn it off) and it was disabled before it ever shipped. We thus continue trudging through redirect hell when the browser could have been doing that for us in parallel while giving us the content we wanted.

The feature would have sold better if it was framed as <a shortcut> or <a dest>. That is, keep the historical href behavior jumping through redirects in old browsers, while new browsers could just load the final content directly from the shortcut (or dest) attribute and treat href as the ping. I'm sure that suggestion gives HTML purist fits on semantic grounds. At least it's backward compatible unlike ping which requires a site to choose between serving different content to old and new browsers, forgoing link tracking on old browsers (the majority? fat chance), or not supporting the feature at all (we have a winner!).

URL-shorteners are a different use-case altogether and not served by <a ping>

Re:somes it's neccesary

[LBt1st]

I've already posted or I'd mod this up.
This is a very good example of why such addresses may be necessary at times.

I'll repost my post from that site

[Master of Transhuman]

The real "overhead" for many, many Web sites now is the linking to fifty ad servers on every page - and THOSE servers are either down or slow, so they don't finish responding to the browser request in less than ten minutes.

Which is why your browser "busy" indicator stays that way even though the page appears to have been fully loaded - or worse, the page never loads.

This makes a difference when you try to save a page on your hard drive - that last little bit won't save and the browser will tell you the save "failed" - in reality you got most of it except for one lousy little ad.

All of this is just the effect of the Internet industry running on too little server horsepower and too little bandwidth - and WAY too little brains.

And yet people think they can run a business "in the cloud" - not with these morons running the cloud.

The reality is that the Internet is now as fast as an old monochrome green screen dumb terminal hooked up to a mainframe circa 1975 - except it's in color. You still spend a minute waiting for a Web page to load, no different than waiting for an overloaded mainframe to respond to a dumb terminal. And this despite the fact that the servers running a Web site are a thousand times more powerful than that 1970's mainframe.

And there may be an entire server FARM running that Web site - it's STILL slow. Because somebody else's server ISN'T.

As Woody Allen summed up the human situation, "Nothing works and nobody cares."

Re:Advertising.

[CarpetShark]

No, that's my point. Capitalism in itself isn't such a bad idea. How it's been implemented by selfish companies using advertising and other tactics to manipulate consumers (microsoft are one of them) is bad though. It wasn't supposed to be that way, and reigning in advertising to a more centralised directory structure would largely solve it. Assuming you could verify the directory system enough to prevent corruption, that is. But it shouldn't be too hard, with something as simple as a directory of goods and services.

URL rewriter.

[rew]

What I would like is a dynamic URL rewriter. When my browser notices a redirect, it submits the URL to a central database and asks for the rewrite rule for the rewriter behind that URL. (i.e. find the url=... in the google redirect).

So my browser would build up a locally cached redirect database, of redirecting rules of sites that I use.

The problem is that this will cause an arms race, that is easy to win for the redirectors. If they have "link=1928347234" instead of "url=http://www.slashdot.org/story/10/09/23/1851220/" it becomes difficult to find the destination URL without building a huge database, as big as the search-engine itself.

Not only redirects, but outright interference!

[seekertom]

For some of us less-literate folks, the problem seems even worse. When I try to find something on the web, the first thing I do is enter my quest in the search bar. Soon, a list of 28,132,667,534 hits comes up (in only .00036 microseconds, yet). When I try any of those links, thinking ya, I'm getting somewhere! instead of getting to the place I want, a zillion other websites are there listing all the responses to my original quest. It's like, if I want to buy a pound of apples, I google apples, and then click on one of the resultant links, thinking I will be taken to an apple-provider. No. It's just another site telling me they have a 'better' list of apple-providers! and i never quite get to the store to buy them apples.... (maybe i shudda used as example 'oranges'???) Want another dumb comparison? go to the grocery store, look at the signs hanging from the ceiling for 'soups and veggies'. You get to that isle, and no soups and veggies... instead, shelves lined with ads and instructions on how to get to the 'soups and veggies' isle.

Re:You mean like this?

[clone53421]

No, he means like this (click link:)
http://3.ly/2halj3u7