Agree 100% but QR codes with long strings are a problem too.
I have the maximum allowed WiFi password (63 characters?) on my network and it’s all randomly generated. I have a giant QR code on a sheet of paper but even that is difficult to scan.
It’s really not much of a pain. All our Apple devices sync WiFi passwords and if we have a guest we can usually share it when they go to their WiFi settings.
The only time it’s been a pain is while connecting Oculus Quest devices because they give you zero ways of copying it from another device. No QR code recognition while you’ve got multiple cameras strapped to your face? Super annoying.
Privacy: trackers, trackers, trackers Security: you can’t know where you would be taken with a short link. A legit website? A malicious website? Who knows.
Because then other people control the link. Imagine writing a long print article about a community coming together to care for an elderly holocaust survivor that includes a link for more info. And then Musk (or whomever has the control over the link shortener you use) comes along and decides the link in your article should point at a holocaust denialism site instead. You can’t change the link that’s now printed on paper, but they can change what it points at.
URL shorteners are but inherently bad. I find them useful. I self host them on domains I own. So they’re secure, trust worthy, I can track engagement, and I can update them if need be.
Plus, I’m pretty sure Twitter forces you to use their shortener. My URL gho.st was “shortened” to a longer t.co/blahblah URL 😂
This obviously depends on the context. For instance, I’m speaking at a public event and I put a link up on a presentation to my website. The website is running on my nginx server so I could already track every visit. Having a shortened URL helps me gauge the value of my talk. It’s not black and white
I mean, I don’t do that but why the hate? You’re assuming someone doesn’t understand privacy based solely on the fact they’re willing to publicly show their face/name online.
Privacy is a big reason why. Archiving is also a very common way to dox people. Not to mention, I just don’t want my shit to exist online indefinitely. I want my data to be forgotten. In what way is this bad. Hoarding everything indefinitely is bad.
The engagement with my presentation for instance. I don’t care about tracking specific users.
It doesn’t change the user-facing URL like a shortener.
Where the user-facing URL points can easily be changed! For instance, changing the DNS record or changing where the reverse proxy points. I really don’t think you understand how the internet works under the hood.
Someone archiving the original content. It’s your fault for breaking the link at a whim.
I’m not going to optimize my content for lazy archivers. Check out web.archive.org for an example of how to properly archive, they update the URLs so links don’t break
On his own website, hosted on his own server, he has server logs to track whatever he wants, change whatever content he wants to display, and do whatever else he wants.
The only reason to use a URL shortener, is to interpose himself between his server and someone else’s server, meaning to become a third party to the relationship between user and other server.
I work for a college. We use our internal link shorteners to make sure a given link points at the latest version of a resource and measure engagement by seeing what is the best way to get important information to our students and faculty. (Did people actually click on that announcement in our LMS?)
I gotta say though, in my journey to find other ways to access information rather than using the big names, I often find delays and small frustrations to get where I need to go.
Every time I ask myself if it's worth it to not give data or money to these sites; whether it's more important to make sure I'm directing my attention and financial support to other people and other companies? And I take a breath and endure b/c it's the only power I have in all this.
Eh I don’t think it’s malicious in nature but can’t prove it either is or isn’t. They might be doing more analysis on some outbound links or users for something or just A/B testing some additional methods for gathering more data. Unsure. But I wouldn’t immediately jump to intentional.
i think you should read the replies to the hackernews post, there’s some interesting discussion there with more nuance. particularly the thread started by user “kens”
yeah, but that applies to a problem where you don’t have any additional information. if you do have background information of any kind, you would be wise to take them into account.
The fact that specific domains and user agents are effected by this says otherwise. Take a look in the link for people discussing curling the urls and their findings.
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