The Web is taking a wrong turn with all these redirections minifier tracking you along the way of your clicks. And sometimes it becomes quite insane. Following my twitter account as usual, I see a link which seemed interesting.
First issue, Twitter is using its own minifier to capture all clicks, and you do not have the choice to deactivate it. That is wrong. Let's see where do I go from there.
% curl -sI http://t.co/n3XZBLb0
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:10:08 GMT
Server: hi
Location: http://zjb.go.ly
Cache-Control: private,max-age=300
Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:15:08 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Ok I'm being redirected to: http://zjb.go.ly Let's check it.
curl -sI http://zjb.go.ly
HTTP/1.1 307 Temporary Redirect
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:11:47 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://preview.go.ly?zjb
Cache-Control: max-age=259200
Expires: Sun, 04 Dec 2011 15:11:47 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
ACCEPT-RANGES: none
Huh yet another redirection, but notice that there is no Location header.
% curl -sI "http://preview.go.ly?zjb"
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:35:59 GMT
Server: Apache
Cache-Control: max-age=259200, must-revalidate
Expires: Sun, 04 Dec 2011 15:35:59 GMT
X-DNS-Prefetch-Control: Off
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
ACCEPT-RANGES: none
With Opera browser, I'm reaching this page which is not really encouraging for the user. Specifically the note at the bottom which says it failed.
And then in the Web page this time… It gives as the next URI, yet another URL minifier. sigh. Why so much hate?
Let's dig it!
\
% curl -sI http://mzl.la/rR6RFC
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved
Server: nginx
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:10:42 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
Set-Cookie: _bit=4ed798ee-002bc-02170-291cf10a;domain=.mzl.la;expires=Tue May 29 15:10:38 2012;path=/; HttpOnly
Cache-control: private; max-age=90
Location: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/12/state-of-the-web-apis-an-interview-with-john-hammink/
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Length: 178
Ah a location header which seems to make sense.
% curl -sI "http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/12/state-of-the-web-apis-an-interview-with-john-hammink/"
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache
X-Backend-Server: pm-app-generic02
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Cache-Control: max-age=60
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:39:02 GMT
X-Pingback: http://hacks.mozilla.org/xmlrpc.php
Link: <http://hacks.mozilla.org/?p=10390>; rel=shortlink
Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:40:02 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: Keep-Alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.9
X-Cache-Info: caching
\ Alleluiah!
My question: Why do we put so much efforts into breaking the Web?