Non-Libyan URL Shortener

http://gadaf.fi/index.php

by pitdesi • 15 years ago

180 76 15 years ago

gadaf.fi

hendavid• 15 years ago

First post!

random423• 15 years ago

You are being downvoted, because your comment does not add anything worthwhile to the discuss/topic.

Kindly read the the community guidelines at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You may also find http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html by Paul Graham useful.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

He crated that account about a minute before making that post, and likely never had any intention of using it again. (Or in other words, don't worry about it, and let moderation do its thing ;)

joshfinnie2• 15 years ago

Karma is currently at -18... lesson learned.

<edit> Touchy tonight are we? I was just pointing out that it might not be in the best interest to downvote someone into oblivion on one of their first posts to Hacker News. With the green names indicating new people, we have the ability to show them the right way without killing his karma and motivation to post here. Random42 pointed him in the right direction...

biot• 15 years ago

  > it might not be in the best interest to downvote someone
  > into oblivion on one of their first posts to Hacker News

I disagree. If someone doesn't have the courtesy to try and understand the community they are participating in before they participate, lowering an arbitrary number associated with their username is hardly any kind of punishment. The only impact it has on the user is that they now have to earn back points on their arbitrary number. If it also bans them from posting for a while, even better.

ares2012• 15 years ago

Both funny and poignant. It is interesting to consider how many popular web services use .ly domain names and are hence tied to Libya (albeit far removed).

thushan• 15 years ago

I tip my hat to the genius who came up with this.

gaius4• 15 years ago

He's nothing compared to the genius behind http://arseh.at/

5l3• 15 years ago

Hate to nit pick but isn't it Gaddafi, or Qaddafi?

Edit: So it is, although the correct spelling is already taken.

leftnode• 15 years ago

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/09/how-many-dif... or any of those! :)

pluies• 15 years ago

And the corresponding regexp ;)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5365283/regular-expressio...

pitdesi• 15 years ago

I like the spelling Gadaffi, but here are atleast 112 different ways to spell his full name:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/09/how-many-dif...

5l3• 15 years ago

Yes well. Looking at that list there seems to be something of a consensus on the -afi. Also just because 112 different spellings have been used, doesn't mean all 112 spellings are correct.

Anyway it's a fun idea and I'm just nit picking.

bcrescimanno• 15 years ago

Cringely mentioned in a column a while back that Qaddafi didn't particularly care:

“Spell it any way you like, ” he said (in pretty fair English, by the way — something else that seems to have strategically disappeared over the years). “All that matters is spelling it correctly in Arabic.”

http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/major-jolloud/

andywhite37• 15 years ago

That site would be better if it was "cringe.ly"

danielhfrank• 15 years ago

People, have we already forgotten this? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5365283/regular-expressio...

This whole thing is hilarious, but probably useless

alphakappa• 15 years ago

I did some analysis to figure out the consensus on his name

http://www.ecogito.net/anil/2011/02/how-do-you-spell-gaddafi...

rkon• 15 years ago

Now, if only we could stop getting our tv from Tuvalu. Stop reliance on foreign domains! America needs Internet independence!

/palin rhetoric

guynamedloren• 15 years ago

I tried 5 different URLS, then I realized that it only works if you include http or https.

soult2• 15 years ago

While it is a funny play on all those .ly domains and the fact that vb.ly got seized by the Libyan government, it is my opinion that yet another URL shortener is a stupid way of protest.

Let me explain: I work with the Urlteam, a group of people that saves shorturl->longurl mappings for a bunch of shorteners. The typical life cycle of small shorteners is this:

- URL shortener opens, gets some praise for weird feature that bit.ly doesn't have.

- People actually don't care about feature and continue to use bit.ly.

- Spammers discover the shortener and abuse it.

- Owner closes the shortener because he can't deal with the spam.

All that remains are some non-functional links.

prawn2• 15 years ago

I created a shortener (for personal control, tracking, etc) and can really, really identify with #3 and #4. I was blocking loads of nonsensical domains each day for weeks before the hosting company pulled the pin and I just gave up and pointed my domain to bit.ly.

yuhong• 15 years ago

FYI, you can prevent new entries from being added to the shortener database without shutting down the shortener altogether.

zackattack• 15 years ago

How do spammers successfully abuse shorteners?

tlrobinson2• 15 years ago

I don't know what the parent commenter had in mind, but perhaps bad spam filters don't follow redirects and bad link filters don't filter certain TLDs?

astrange• 15 years ago

Most anything that filters out spam domains doesn't follow shortener links to them. Web forum spam is full of shortener links. Stop making shorteners.

balac• 15 years ago

Obfuscating spam links. It is much harder to tell a fake/crappy url when it is hidden through a shortening service.

dgl• 15 years ago

Like other comments have said spammers use it as a form of obfuscation. They even chain URL shorteners to obfuscate things even more.

I work for an anti-spam company. We see a constant stream of spammy short URLs -- peaking at tens of new unique links per second.

ra• 15 years ago

Better to just use your own domain with a (free) bit.ly/pro/ account

warp• 15 years ago

That sounds like a useful thing to do. Does Urlteam have a website somewhere? A quick search didn't turn up much information.

soult2• 15 years ago

The "website" is at http://urlte.am , but it only includes a placeholder (the content intended for it currently resides at https://github.com/soult/urlteam-stuff/tree/master/website ). We also have a page at the ArchiveTeam website ( http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam ), but our main communication happens through IRC, #urlteam on efnet.

wladimir2• 15 years ago

URL shorteners are evil. It's the digital equivalent of stepping into a car driven by a stranger, blindfolded. You don't know where you're going before you're there. It might not necessarily be a pleasant place.

gaius4• 15 years ago

Plus, they are stupid. What, are we short of space for email? Are links people send each other consuming too much disk? I've barely touched my howevermany squigabytes GMail is giving away these days. I can guarantee that there is no "URL shortening service" that has the longevity of DNS either. If you want any more proof of a bubble, it's that it's possible to operate a business doing this.

d0m• 15 years ago

I think it should add http:// if it's missing.. I wasn't sure what wasn't working at first when trying www.google.com.

Also, I find gadaf.fi really hard to remember.

blackguardx• 15 years ago

Just pick up a newspaper any day for the next few months and the name is bound to be in there.

InclinedPlane2• 15 years ago

Or just use j.mp, it's the same as bit.ly just without the dependence on the Libya TLD.

RyanKearney• 15 years ago

And it's shorter! Although I've started using goo.gl since they offer similar analytic data on your shortlinks and, well, it's powered by Google's infrastructure.

InclinedPlane2• 15 years ago

Oh, nice! I didn't know that google's shortener had been launched for general use (it used to be google reader specific).

csomar• 15 years ago

I don't consider this a nice move. I actually hate it. It's like Gaddafi is going to stand longer than that and that we should only boycott him. We ought better supporting the rebellion or the people who are under the fire.

-- Misrata (24 April): http://www.facebook.com/media/set/fbx/?set=a.101501680318019...

RobIsIT• 15 years ago

Why not host your own?

I've been using Yourls (http://yourls.org/) for a while now. It works very well. I bought a short domain, installed Yourls in under 5 min and have been happily using it ever since. It even works with Tweetdeck to auto shorten URL's and has a couple of bookmarklets to make things easy. It's locked down for private / non-spammer use and is under my full control.

NameNickHN• 15 years ago

> Why not host your own?

I second that. Here is an alternative to yourls.org.

http://www.gentlesource.com/short-url-script/

Xk• 15 years ago

You should block me from redirecting a link to itself.

http://gadaf.fi/5j

And probably block cycles too.

staktrace• 15 years ago

Isn't that impossible? You can redirect to a page (under your control) that redirects to itself, if your goal is to get the user stuck in a redirect loop. Until their browser decides enough is enough, that is.

wahnfrieden• 15 years ago

You can have the service test the link for redirects (using HEAD requests), and have a max depth to be safe. Then if a URL occurs twice, or the max depth is reached, mark as invalid.

ay• 15 years ago

"browser decides enough is enough"

IIRC from reading the sources, both FF and Chrome had a limit of 30 hardcoded - after this many redirects they would give up and say "uh, it's a redirect loop".

surat• 15 years ago

Nice try, but Chrome is smarter than that. "This webpage has a redirect loop. The webpage at http://gadaf.fi/5j has resulted in too many redirects..."

ballard• 15 years ago

Dictators don't just come out with their own line of cars anymore. http://goo.gl/PqQTK

jschuur2• 15 years ago

Slightly unrelated, but given the current sanctions, you can't renew a .ly domain name right now as a US business, correct? Bit.ly's domain name expires early next year, last time I checked.

dmor• 15 years ago

do you have a source? i have some .ly domains to renew and have been considering what to do with them

jschuur2• 15 years ago

I'll confess, I hadn't looked into my assumption further until now. Details of the US sanctions against Libya can be found here (look for the Executive Order 13566 PDF):

http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/p...

The .ly registrar Libyan Spider has been fairly communicative and open with its customers. Their CEO Hadi Naser says they are a 'private company run by ordinary citizens that have no affiliation with the government' and that 'purchasing the .ly domains supports Libyan citizens, not the government'. A 10 percent fee goes to a nongovernmental organization in Libya that mantains the .ly network:

http://www.businessinsider.com/ly-registrar-our-servers-have... http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-libyan-con...

There was some prior disruption of service when Softlayer, their ISP outside of Libya raised some sanction related concerns, but that appears to have been resolved later:

http://libyanspider.com/m/announcements.php?id=20

Locke1689• 15 years ago

One minor problem being that it takes the "short" out of "URL shortener."

Decent for making a point, but those characters are a precious commodity on Twitter.

westicle• 15 years ago

I was simultaneously impressed by the clean, informative presentation and horrified by the assault of grammatical errors.

May I suggest having a native english-speaker review your copy? Otherwise nice site.

_b8r0• 15 years ago

While it's a great pun, it's not exactly short, though is it?

yaix2• 15 years ago

Cool idea! Best URL shortener name of the year.

sjs382• 15 years ago

I know this is kind of a joke, kind of a way to bring publicity to whats happening in Lybia, but if the bit.ly domain disappears you can always just rewrite "bit.ly" to "j.mp" and the short URLs will keep working.

Then again, this presumes that the company is still running (which we can't really put a ton of faith in), which is why i use http://isshort.com (shameless plug) to find publisher-provided short URLs where possible.

Non-Libyan URL Shortener

Related Stories