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1. Embed this notice
   Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Friday, 19-Jul-2024 07:15:47 JST Jonathan Corbet
   Ah joy ... Google is turning off its URL shortener and breaking every link that ever used it:
   
   https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/
   
   A quick search on lore.kernel.org:
   
   https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=goo.gl%2F
   
   ...turns up about 19,000 messages with affected links. That's a lot of history that is going to become harder (or impossible) to find.
   • clacke likes this.
   • simsa03 and clacke repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Vegard Nossum (vegard@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 19-Jul-2024 11:27:08 JST Vegard Nossum

     in reply to

     @corbet I think the vast majority of these are from syzbot emails and many are the same, a link to the syzbot docs. Something like https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=nq%3Agoo.gl+and+NOT+%28f%3Asyzbot+OR+s%3Asyzbot%29 returns only about ~700 emails

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 19-Jul-2024 15:02:57 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Lana Sinapayen

     @corbet @lana Google did this? Shocking!

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Scott Feeney (graue@social.coop)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 10:06:57 JST Scott Feeney

     in reply to

     @corbet My first thought was that should be no problem for the Internet Archive to back up.

     ...then I thought, why does a scrappy nonprofit have to do it instead of the $400 billion company keeping them up in the first place?

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: and clacke like this.
   • Embed this notice
     Albert Cardona (albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:10:39 JST Albert Cardona

     in reply to

     @corbet

     Will the webmasters run a script to dereference all the URL shorteners? They can.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Tofu Golem (tofugolem@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:10:44 JST Tofu Golem

     in reply to

     @corbet
     Good. I think those shorteners created more problems than they solved.

   • Embed this notice
     Andrew (andrewt@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:10:44 JST Andrew

     in reply to

     • Tofu Golem

     @tofugolem @corbet sure, but Google must have the resources to simply make it read only rather than breaking all those links

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Andrew (andrewt@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:10:49 JST Andrew

     in reply to

     • v̾i̾t̾r̾i̾o̾l̾i̾x̾
     • Tofu Golem
     • the hatter

     @hatter @vitriolix @tofugolem @corbet oh yeah, it's definitely costing them money to run it and they're going about it in as good a way as you can expect — most of the old Twitter-era services just quietly stopped working while nobody was looking. To be fair OP was right, really this is Twitter's fault for creating an artificial need for these silly forwarding services in the first place, although I'm sure analytics services would have normalised it anyway

     But it does feel a bit odd. Like, Google's core business is (was?) a constantly updating, publicly searchable live index of almost every page on the internet, and they really find it too expensive to maintain a static index of a billion or so string-string key value pairs you can only look up by the primary key with exactly zero UI that's already set up and presumably doesn't do much traffic any more? It's going to cost them more to shut it down this gracefully than it would to run it for another decade, surely?

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     v̾i̾t̾r̾i̾o̾l̾i̾x̾ (vitriolix@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:10:50 JST v̾i̾t̾r̾i̾o̾l̾i̾x̾

     in reply to

     • Tofu Golem
     • the hatter
     • Andrew

     @hatter @andrewt @tofugolem @corbet the point is it's breaks every archival post ever for posts that used it, it's a huge loss

   • Embed this notice
     the hatter (hatter@metasocial.com)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:10:50 JST the hatter

     in reply to

     • v̾i̾t̾r̾i̾o̾l̾i̾x̾
     • Tofu Golem
     • Andrew

     @vitriolix @andrewt @tofugolem @corbet Someone maintains goo.gl, someone maintains those archives. When the people still maintaining the shortener stop caring about the shortener, it's time for the archivist to do the work to preserve what they care about. Also, other archivists are doing what they can to preserve all links, regardless of immediate value that anyone else gives to each link. Likely very little will be lost in such a long deprecation cycle, and even less of value will be lost.

   • Embed this notice
     the hatter (hatter@metasocial.com)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:10:51 JST the hatter

     in reply to

     • Tofu Golem
     • Andrew

     @andrewt @tofugolem @corbet They did, they made it read-only 6 years ago. And now they're giving another 12 months warning, adding a little pain to links using it, even more chance for those using it to do something about it.

   • Embed this notice
     Phil (phil@chaos.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:10:56 JST Phil

     in reply to

     • Jason Scott

     @corbet Recently watched a talk by @textfiles about losing our history. And apparently link shorteners were already a problem back then.

     "URL shorteners are the stupidest idea we've come up within the last 10 years."

     https://youtube.com/watch?v=tJqZGRIwtxk

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     GhostOnTheHalfShell (ghostonthehalfshell@masto.ai)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:11:01 JST GhostOnTheHalfShell

     in reply to

     @corbet
     destroying the web, one little act of enshittification at a time.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:11:05 JST Jonathan Corbet

     in reply to

     • Vegard Nossum
     @vegard Better but still really painful to fix; public-inbox is pretty firmly built around the idea that archived messages do not change.
     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:11:07 JST feld

     in reply to
     @corbet I just mentioned the other day if you look at recent amicus briefs they use tinyurl in the citations
     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     millennial falcon (falcennial@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:11:11 JST millennial falcon

     in reply to

     @corbet obviously this is a bad faith fuck you to their customer base, with the fuck gradient correllating closely with long term customership.

     seems crazy they are capable of wanting to destroy this, but not as crazy as the fact their are still people willingly using google products.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     183231bcb@transfem.social's status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:11:16 JST 183231bcb

     in reply to

     • Erisa A

     @erisa@awau.social @corbet@social.kernel.org Oh, Google has more than one URL shortener, just to confuse me, and the one they are shutting down is not the one I use. Cool.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Erisa A (erisa@awau.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:11:18 JST Erisa A

     in reply to

     • 183231bcb

     @183231bcb @corbet those use "forms.gle" now so I wouldn't think so.

   • Embed this notice
     183231bcb@transfem.social's status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:11:20 JST 183231bcb

     in reply to

     @corbet@social.kernel.org Does this apply to shortened links to Google Forms surveys which can still be generated today?

   • Embed this notice
     Glitzersachen.de (glitzersachen@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:11:23 JST Glitzersachen.de

     in reply to

     • 183231bcb
     • Erisa A

     @183231bcb @corbet @erisa

     They'll come for you, too. Don't sweat it.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Brewster Kahle (brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:11:39 JST Brewster Kahle

     in reply to

     @corbet

     Archive.org is up for helping...

     The original URL shorteners thought about this, and archived their links with archive.org .

     https://archive.org/details/301works?tab=about

     I hope google joins now, and gives us the host domain so we can make them continue to work (redirect into the wayback machine that would archive the redirect).

     please.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Ben Zanin (gnomon@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:13:19 JST Ben Zanin

     in reply to

     @corbet hey, I wrote you a short thing: https://git.sr.ht/~gnomon/fetch-goo.gl-shortlink-dereferences

     It turns out that the ~19,000 goo.gl shortlinks in that lore search you posted deduplicate down to about 360 unique shortlinks. The script in that repo can pull down about 285 of them. Stuffs 'em in a smol sqlite3 database with a simple index that makes lookups, even in a tight loop, close to instant.

     It's only the very simplest proof of concept, but it _does_ work. The Lore picture is not as bad as I expected.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Dan Scott (dbs@code4lib.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2024 14:13:29 JST Dan Scott

     in reply to

     • Brewster Kahle

     @brewsterkahle @corbet thank you for having taken over purl.org when the library monopoly, err, cooperative, gave up on it

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Jason Scott (textfiles@mastodon.archive.org)'s status on Monday, 22-Jul-2024 01:28:38 JST Jason Scott

     in reply to

     • Bjoern Michaelsen
     • Bastelwombat

     @bastelwombat @Sweetshark @corbet been working on it for 10 years so yes

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Bastelwombat (bastelwombat@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 22-Jul-2024 01:28:52 JST Bastelwombat

     in reply to

     • Jason Scott
     • Bjoern Michaelsen

     @Sweetshark @corbet Good idea. @textfiles are you aware of this?

   • Embed this notice
     Bjoern Michaelsen (sweetshark@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 22-Jul-2024 01:28:54 JST Bjoern Michaelsen

     in reply to

     @corbet burn them all into archive.org?

   • Embed this notice
     🇺🇦 haxadecimal (brouhaha@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 22-Jul-2024 01:28:58 JST 🇺🇦 haxadecimal

     in reply to

     @corbet Maybe Google could ameliorate the pain of killing their Short URL service by setting up a system where you could query one of their short URLs that are going away, and get back a redirect to the URL it originally pointed to.

   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 22-Jul-2024 01:28:58 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • 🇺🇦 haxadecimal
     @brouhaha @corbet So ... not killing their service?