Endless URL Shortening Redirection Loop

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2702303

by xpose2000 • 15 years ago

1 5 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I wonder if its possible to use 10+ url shorteners in an endless loop of redirection. Can this be abused to cause increased latency to one of the shorteners across their network? I wonder.

mendicant• 15 years ago

Many will notice if a shortened url goes to another shortener and give a 'security notice'.

lysol• 15 years ago

I don't think any modern browsers will redirect indefinitely.

nbpoole• 15 years ago

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.redirection-limit

All other browsers, to the best of my knowledge, have similar systems built in. So your premise is flawed: you can't have an "infinite redirect."

jleader• 15 years ago

"This preference affects only HTTP redirects, not redirects with HTML meta tags or JavaScript." So if the shorteners use (or can be configured to use) different redirect methods, it might be possible to get around this limit.

However, you'd have to create a chain composed of shorteners each of which either doesn't recognize the next one on the list, or doesn't do any "security" checking at all.

xpose2000• 15 years ago

All very good comments. It seems a LOT less likely to be able to do it than I originally thought.

Endless URL Shortening Redirection Loop

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