unshort.link
Security and privacy
link unshortening
SHOW HN2019
How HN took it
3 positive, 7 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 4 critical, out of 14 comments about the project. Thread score -0.11.
Privacy: 2 for, 3 againstIdea: 1 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Useful for avoiding link shortener tracking
From 2 comments
Yes yes yes! I hate URL shorteners. It's not just privacy - I can't decide if I want to click it or jot before I do. I suppose that issue could also be solved with a browser…
OJFord on HNYou can run it yourself, and audit the source if you like: https://github.com/simonfrey/unshort.link/
notduncansmith on HN
Objections
Hosted version could track users; trust is hard to verify
From 2 comments
How do we know this site is not tracking us?
pmoriarty on HNTBO you would never know, that's why the project is open source and if you want to be really sure what happens here, run it yourself. The browser extension can be easily (in the…
l1am0 on HN
Running your own server may lose anonymity benefits
From 2 comments
If you run it yourself, do you not lose some of the privacy benefits?
eat_veggies on HNShorteners are frequently used to hide/prettify query parameters used for tracking; so if you run your own you're losing the aggregate anonymity-ish, and gaining that OP can't…
OJFord on HN
Pi-hole DNS filtering cannot see URL slugs
From 2 comments
Pi-hole would only see the hostname, and not the "slug", so that wouldn't work.
tyingq on HNBut bitly.com/xyz can be mapped to full.domain/abcdef The pi-hole doesn't see the /xyz, or any of the http redirects either.
tyingq on HN
Requests
DNS-level or command-line support
From 3 comments
Yes yes yes! I hate URL shorteners. It's not just privacy - I can't decide if I want to click it or jot before I do. I suppose that issue could also be solved with a browser…
OJFord on HNYes, that's the browser extension that I was referring to when I said I'd rather do it (for all devices) via DNS. ``` 1. Resolve shorterners to unshort.link server 2. Use `Host`…
OJFord on HNIs it possible to make such a thing working if using command-line programs such as curl or wget to download a file rather than opening it in the web browser?
zzo38computer on HN
Add more vanity short domains like nyti.ms
From 1 comment
Pretty cool. You might consider adding some of the more popular vanity names that bitly runs for big sites. Like nyti.ms (New York Times), wapo.st (Washington Post), etc.
tyingq on HN
Questions
How do we know the site is not tracking us?
From 1 comment
How do we know this site is not tracking us?
pmoriarty on HN
Will static JS/HTML be released for other web servers?
From 1 comment
This is really cool. And it's all written in Go? Interesting. Do you have any plans on releasing the static JS/HTML? Or is there a way this could be run on standard…
zelon88 on HN
Alternatives named
URLTeam / Archive Team archiving of shortened links
From 1 comment
Related, the Archive Team realized a while ago, that when a link shortening service goes dark, all the links that went through it instantly break. This has bad implications for…
myself248 on HN
Shell curl script removing utm parameters
From 1 comment
This is what I use which also removes utm_* tracking parameters. ``` getloc () { curl -sI "$1" | grep -i "Location" | awk '/http.*/{print $2}' | sed 's/[%+]*//g' | sed…
moehm on HN