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 future historians trying to figure out how the present-day web was interlinked.<p>So there's a project called URLteam to index and save them. I just started running a Warrior instance on the URLteam project, and it's really straightforward. I figure folks reading this may be interested. More info:<p><a href="https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam" rel="nofollow">https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam</a><p><a href="https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior" rel="nofollow">https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warr...</a>
Where and why are you guys still seeing/using shortened URLs? I don't think I've personally made a shortened URL since Twitter built one into their service, and I stopped <i>seeing</i> shortened URLs around the same time.<p>There are two exceptions:<p>• I still see service-specific short URLs, e.g. goo.gl, nyti.ms, etc. Because these can only be created by the service in question, they don't introduce security/privacy concerns.<p>• When a URL shortener is used to create a sort of vanity link to e.g. a Google doc. (OP's service could be useful for these!)<p>Outside of those times... why would you use a URL shortener? When are you limited by number of characters?
Reminds me when security researchers used data Bit.ly exposes to go from one url shortened by Russian military intelligence to the hundreds of other short URLs they made for phishing emails, many of which had state embedded in query parameters that gave away who they were targeting. All because the GRU forgot to set their accounts to private.<p><a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mg7xjb/how-hackers-broke-into-john-podesta-and-colin-powells-gmail-accounts" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mg7xjb/how-hackers-broke-...</a>
Oh wow thanks for all the feedback. Should not post a link on HN and than sleep directly after.<p>I came to work on this as I wantend to not get bothered with the short link services (and the links behind them) tracking me. So unshort.link also tries to "learn" (by trying different url parameters) which paramters on the long url are required and which are not and are only tracking you (with a HTML diff).<p>The service learns new shortlink services the moment you enter them on unshort.link and they than are also automatically used in the extension.
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.<p>I suppose that issue could also be solved with a browser extension.<p>It'd be nice to do this with DNS rather than an extension though, above point aside, e.g. if already running Pi-hole or similar, send shortener URLs to unshort.link, and redirect immediately.
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.
Is 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?
This is really cool. And it's all written in Go? Interesting.<p>Do you have any plans on releasing the static JS/HTML? Or is there a way this could be run on standard Apache/Nginx/IIS web servers?