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List:       debian-user
Subject:    (Fairly) new very long URLs on news.yahoo?
From:       Randy Kramer <rhkramer () gmail ! com>
Date:       2012-02-11 21:52:47
Message-ID: 201202111652.48166.rhkramer () gmail ! com
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This is OT.  I tried posting it on 
D-community-offtopic@lists.alioth.debian.org but didn't get much response, so 
I thought I'd try here (especially because I did get some good help on the 
other question I asked recently, about invisible cache files on /tmp from 
Flash).

A number of questions:

Has anyone else noticed the very long URLs that are used (sometimes) on 
news.yahoo.com?

They are something like this (I've inserted \ to break the line into smaller 
pieces):

http://news.yahoo.com/things-watch-cpac-094500007.html;_ylt=Ao.ld\
Dd3JlqitJQDhqeoTg.s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNsNDVmbnNjBG1pdANUb3BTd\
G9yeSBGUARwa2cDMTdlYWJhN2UtYmUxZi0zOThmLWFhZWUtNzM3NzM1\
MDFmNWQ2BHBvcwMxBHNlYwN0b3Bfc3RvcnkEdmVyAzAwOWM3ODBhLT\
UzNDEtMTFlMS05NTA5LTMzOWVjZTFhZmEyNg--;_ylg=X3oDMTFvdnRqYzJ\
oBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANob21lBH\
B0A3NlY3Rpb25zBHRlc3QD;_ylv=3

It seems that a (truncated) link like:

http://news.yahoo.com/things-watch-cpac-094500007.html

... works perfectly fine to reference the story.

Depending on circumstances which I haven't figured out yet, sometimes when I 
click on a link, the target page comes up with just the shorter link, 
sometimes it comes up with the longer link (most often with the longer link).

I suspect that the longer link may have some sort of personally identifiable 
information encoded in it, because in experiments where I've tried logging in 
to yahoo with two different IDs, that long string of characters differs.

I save a lot of links to my personal / private blog.  (Some parts are public, 
and I may make more public.)

My interests include the following:

   * finding a good address to write to yahoo and complain
   * finding a way to consistently click on a link and get the page to come up 
with the shorter link
   * and thus, being able to C&P the link to my blog without subsequent 
editing
   * maybe finding a way to modify klipper to automatically truncate such 
links before the first ;

Obviously, I could use a service like tinyurl to create a new smaller url, but 
that is not an acceptable solution to me for a few reasons.  (Among them, the 
url loses any meaning embedded in the original url, and now I have to worry 
about tinyurl going defunct, at which point the smaller urls would not work 
and have no clue to find the original URL.  (Yes, other information in my 
blog usually includes the title of the page and often quoted text, but, the  
tinyurl solution is just not what I'm looking for.)

So, any feedback is welcome!

Randy Kramer

PS: For some time, these long URLs have been limited to news.yahoo.com.  Now 
I'm starting to see them in shine.yahoo.com.  The last thing I want to see 
happen is to have them spread.

PPS: I guess I've noticed these long URLs on news.yahoo for the last 3 to 6 
months.  (That's just a guess.)











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