Re: Three on Request for IP policy change

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

I encourage people to provide long urls. I have had a lot of problems  
with short ones. I clearly will NOT require it but encourage it djf


Begin forwarded message:

From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
Date: January 19, 2009 9:45:22 AM EST
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Request for IP policy change

I find these URL-shortening services problematic in many ways, thus I  
don't use them when I post, and (while it probably doesn't matter) I  
refuse to click through them as well.

As to whether you should have (or enforce) a policy, Dave, I'm  
neutral.  I will continue to privately recommend that people choose  
not to use them, and continue to not click through them.  I'd be happy  
if the users were made more widely aware of the costs they impose on  
others.

In my opinion they heighten what is a generally a very mild security/ 
privacy risk, and I do feel like having them imposed on me by others  
is a teeny bit rude, though I can understand the desire to make  
readers have a more convenient experience.  Like "tracking cookies"  
and cross-site-scripting attacks, they tend to cause malfunctions and  
serve surveillance purposes.



Begin forwarded message:

From: Dave CROCKER <dhc2 () dcrocker net>
Date: January 19, 2009 10:10:44 AM EST
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>, Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>
Subject: Re: [IP] Request for IP policy change
Reply-To: dcrocker () bbiw net

Rich's observations are correct.  The idea of tinyurl was nicely  
constructive and responsive to community needs at the time.  However  
the Internet's trust model make it problematic.

In fact, it has become common for anti-abuse software to disable  
tinurl references.

d/

From: Steve Lamont <spl () ncmir ucsd edu>
Date: January 19, 2009 10:15:11 AM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Request for IP policy change

> Any problems? djf

Yes.

>         - a typo in the link renders it useless, whereas a typo
>                 in most other links (e.g. "washingtonpost.cm")
>                 might allow manual correction, even if it requires
>                 a search of the site in the question

Cut and paste is cut and paste.  If you're hand copying a URL,
somethings exceeding wrong.

>         - they're superfluous.     While some years ago, some broken mail
>                 clients might have had difficulty with long URLs, their
>                 authors have had plenty of time to fix those problems.
>                 I don't see a need to continue trying to accomodate
>                 old/broken software at the expense of everyone else.

This is not true.  It's not always on the client end.  Sometimes the
originating mailer does something idiotic in trying to insert line
breaks.

Long URLs (those greater than about 74 characters in length) are often
still mangled by mailer or forwarder software, especially those with
"funny" characters (punctuations, etc) embedded.  What works on your
iPhone may not work under Thunderbird (and in fact, usually doesn't).

Now I admit that I'm a bit of a Luddite when it comes to mailers
(okay, and a lot of other things, too, but still. . . ) and read mail
with good old command line `mailx', only switching to Thunderbird when
I need to deal with something not easily dealt with from the command
line, attachments, etc., so maybe I see more of this broken,
unreadable junk than others but, for me, tinyurl does the trick.

Okay, maybe it's not a great tragedy for a reader to have to piece
together a broken URL with cut and paste -- it takes about 30 seconds,
give or take, but nonetheless, it is a waste of time.

I propose a compromise: use both.  I've gone to that model on one of
Gene Spafford's mailing lists and there've been no complaints, which I
suppose either everyone's happy or they just don't read anything I
post any longer, which probably means everyone's happy, too.

                                                        spl


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