Microsoft also provides a URL lengthener via "Advanced Outlook.com security for Office 365 subscribers". Thanks to them, any URL we send or receive by email at work turns into an unrecognizable monster. At least the links include comforting words like "safelinks" and "protection" so that everyone can feel safe and protected.
Was posted on Hacker News:
https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
This domain uses 56 `a`-s. Interestingly enough 63 `a`-s .com is also a URL lengthener: http://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
A handy link to this discussion: https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
you got a xss bro https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
We took "Show HN" out of the title because it implies that the project is the submitter's own personal work. Please don't do that if it isn't. The rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
Back in the early days of web hosting I recall that a customer had a domain name that was literally as long as ICANN would allow at the time. It was very nearly a full sentence. I don't recall the limit but this domain
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com
is 57 characters (not including .com) and I think that sounds familiar. One could have a lot of fun with that if they wanted to (and such as was done in this case).
Then there's
http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogog...
Who needs this when you can simply use Google search results URL
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
This reminds me, I did a little investigation into what the actually URL length limits are per browser. Here is the blog post in case you are interested:
> Disclaimer: Since there is a maximum letter count to a URL, there is a slight chance your resulting URL will be too long to use. No worries, try running it through a site like bit.ly and then paste that one over here. Every resulting URL ends up having a minimum number of characters, so your URL will still be plenty long!
This seems like something you can trivially solve yourself. Is there any good reason why you push this issue on the user?
haha nice! I built the exact opposite the shortest possible URL shortener :) https://t.ly/
I lengthened the lengthener URL about 7 times before my browser complained it was too long
I just couldn't resist.
https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
Don't forget Total Asshole Compression!
TAC* is the best compression format available for the web today! By using revolutionary scientific methods, research teams at RSG and the Beige Programming ensemble were able to a compose a complex software tool that expels many of the myths that surround modern file compression techniques. The secret of TAC compression is not that it makes files smaller, but that it makes files bigger, much bigger.* This provides the end user with a compression tool to meet almost any need in today's bandwidth and gig overloaded computing world.
I was inspired by a certain someone's meandering speech patterns to do something similar some years ago: https://www.biglyurl.com/
"So that's what things would be like if I'd invented the thing longer. Oh, a man can dream though."
Awesome to see a Replit app on top of HN! Our hosted apps proxy requests per second doubled (3k to 6k) by virtue of this being on HN.
This app is fully made and hosted on Replit using Replit DB too:
Frontend: https://replit.com/@piemadd/url-lengthener
Backend: https://replit.com/@piemadd/ax56api
Check out other Replit Apps here (launched yesterday): https://replit.com/apps
Related: The longest valid domain name possible http://a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.oo.pp.qqq.rrrr.ssssss.ttt...
A nice feature is that when you design a URL lengthener, you can make the service stateless. The backend doesn't need to store every URL that it was ever given. This contrasts with URL shortener services, which must store state in order to generate very short URLs. (In theory, shorteners can use stateless compression like zlib, but it wouldn't save enough space to be worth it.)
The author is a highschool student
Dumb question: the lengthener prepends the URL with "\x20\x0b" strings which are then not removed on the other end. So the link inserted in the <meta> redirect ends up looking like
" \x0b \x0b \x0bhttps://www.example.org"
Reminds me of an API I worked on. We had a max length for some token. A client had an incrementing sequence number, so they decided to pad it out to the max length. It looked something like this:
A00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
A00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002
etc
Fyi - I posted this link to the sub https://www.reddit.com/r/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA/
It seems to fit very well there.
On a related note, I did a client side (really badly coded) link lengthner 5 or 6 years ago. : https://rickynotaro.github.io/B.U.R.N/
It basically just base64 encode the url to generate the link and decode the url arg to do the redirect.
I also own this email address that I made just for fun: JesuisLeProprietaireDeCeNomDeDomaineTresLongBonjourCaVaBienAller@icirickynotarodemontrealetceciestunnomdedomainebeaucouptroplong.club
I keep http://www.whyisyourdomainnamesolong.com as an email forwarder. Surprisingly memorable.
Somewhat related
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511735 (45 points | March 28, 2019 | 32 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24229085 (17 points | 8 months | 7 comments)
For the curious, aaa[...].com is just converting your string to hex, and then replacing the hex with various types of "A"'s.
If you wanted to use an alphabet other than 16 characters, you could do arbitrary base conversion: https://convert.zamicol.com/
This would allow you to use more or less characters.
This can also be done using data urls. You can make a long URL encoding a HTML doc with a meta redirect
Hehe. Reminds me of Freaking Huge URL, which sadly is no longer with us.
https://lifehacker.com/freaking-huge-url-lengthens-too-short...
I don’t know why but just seeing this title made spontaneously start laughing.
I guess I'm not the only one drinking tonight. =)
Anyway, cool project. It's okay to build something for a laugh every now then. I know these days sometimes I forget I used to do this for fun. Have a good weekend all.
I've never thought about a practical URL that couldn't be accessed by specific browsers based on length as something someone would explicitly want versus something to avoid until this post.
Absolutely irrelevant, but I cannot help but remember the nooooooooooooooo button.
For anyone who wants to self host a URL lengthener https://github.com/asim/url
Tried it on https://news.ycombinator.com/. Malwarebytes instantly blocked it. LoL.
On iOS, the location bar animates scrolling through the aaaaaas when you navigate to the site. Someone had to design that animation. Thank you, anonymous designer.
I don't get it. Is this a joke or it has some real use?
Chia coin html internet
Interesting where is frontier who can make most long 256+ url shorters & lengther vector hahah
like tiny.cc -> aaaaaaaa...aaa -> goog.gl -> bbb...bb -> etc
I'm not an advanced programmer, so can somebody explain me why would you collect "insights" for a such made-as-a-joke service.
Now they need to register every aaaa... domain from ~20-50 characters so all you need to do is hold the "a" key for a little bit.
Funny, I present a fictional URL shortener called Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as an example in my book Street Coder :)
Scraper? Honeypot?
I guess my tinfoil hat is too tight. While its cool and funny I inherently don't trust things like this.
Edit: the concern is about data collection and profiling over time, it could essentially be an advertising model, you get an idea of things a particular cookie/IP/fingerprint does. depending one what is in your original link, all kinds of ids and data can be sitting in the url alone. Does a link to my social media account potentially expose my PII?
I’m hiring a head of cyber security at the moment. I think I’ll use this or shadyurl.com to send the zoom link.
Hacker News URL Lengthened...
https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
lol neat project, this would get bonus points from me if it made them look like Amazon product URLs :)
Love it. Always looking for new weird side projects. Can’t be too productive on your hobby software
Slightly off topic, but does anyone know of a good, self-hosted URL shortener?
Looks great. But I don't known any scenes we need to use this function.
Can you use these urls in tweets?
If so, how many of these urls would fit in a tweet?
The problem with this is that when I hold and press "a" in the address bar on mac at least alternate characters menu pops up instead of the key being repeated. I'd suggest this new domain:
1234567890qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm.com
Reminds me of David Rees’ urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com
really isn't long enough. was expecting 56 subdomains of 56 a's, with at least 5 times the path length
I rarely use Discord these days, but when I need to link something next time, I'll use this service. (Discord still doesn't support hyperlinks.)
I would love to have a longer url.
I'm a bit disappointed that the lengthened URL for http://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... itself doesn't work. That is:
https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
EDIT: Uh, I don't know what I did differently, but this one works:
https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
EDIT: Looks like the site is actively being updated, there are new option checkboxes, the self-reference link only works with "Use a path instead of an URL" checked
EDIT: I repeatedly lengthened maybe a dozen times, that seems to get it stuck in a loop:
https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
I love long URLs and build them into my apps for sharing. You can have powerful apps that are 100% clientside and use just a dumb file web server.
For example, here's a URL that contains both the grammar for a language that compiles to CSS and also example code. Works like a charm.
https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/#grammar%0A%20toolin...
funny project but why are you tracking the people visiting the website??
Meh... These links could be longer... can we get a URL Lengthener Lengthener?
Awesome!
fun fact. in the browser wars of 1993(?) i looked at the specs from netscape (mozilla dady for the young folks) and microsoft (what w3c? ha!) and netscape release a browser spec that said "X must support up to Y", as in "url must be up to 1024 chars", "cookies must be up to 1mb", etc...
then microsoft release IE4 (or 6?) web spec. It was literally a copy of netscape's but with "up to" replaced with "at least".
and from this day on, nobody knows about limits on the standard and everything was up in the air, just so sites could work on IE4 and be broken on netscape. Thanks microsoft!
I did some experiments to test the actual URL limit of IE. at the time it was around 4MB, but IE would still go over if you got creative with hostnames levels and odd schemas.
-- quick edit:
keep in mind, in 1993, the money from giving out free browsers where on the servers: netscape server vs microsoft IIS (just like today giving free browsers the money is on makig it easier to access YOUR content --e.g. default search, etc).
Making your browser crash the competitor server mean that server was seen as lower quality. (Same thing with google deliberately crashing performance of firefox on their services today[0])
The point of microsoft making this change was to force netscape to update their server as they increase the URL limit arbitrarily to all IE users.
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
This is the kind of project we need more of. No politics, no perverse economic incentives. Just one human helping other humans utterly obliterate their address bar.
Unfortunately due to the way your service performs redirects(?), link previews give away the game. if I post a shadyurl.com link I get a link preview of the target website, but link previews for a(x56) show a preview for your website. Here's an example from a Messenger conversation where I used both services:
Mods complain about people making comments that are "obvious" but they don't complain about URL hiding services?
Here is an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27122041
Love it.
This is going in the toolbox along with http://shadyurl.com