15 ms·
Twitter preconnects to the wrong domains
- deepstack 6y agoPerfect! Please hire more qualified diligent software developer twitter.
- deepstack 6y agoOr improve your QA process.
- deepstack 6y agoI don't know why that gets down voted it really a test to see what kind of dev are on Hacker News now days.
- saagarjha 6y agoIt’s not really a test of anything but how well commenters react to shallow dismissals. As you may have guessed, the answer is not well.
- deepstack 6y agothat is just matter of opinion. The quality of developer has gone down in the years. That's all I'm saying. To provoke a knee-jerk reaction is expected.
- deepstack 6y agoseems like hacker news doesn't like the comment of how developer has gone down in quality. That's a shame.
- snazz 6y agoIt's not a comment that adds anything to the discussion. That's why you've been downvoted.
- megous 6y agoSo to reveal someone's IP address do I just send a DM with URL to my server and log connections? Is it that easy? No clicking needed?
- AstralStorm 6y agoIt also bypasses browser preloading settings and messes with people who have limited bandwidth or transfer quota. It should be optional.
- megous 6y agoYeah, I'm currently looking for a way to disable this and it seems like it may be controlled by: network.predictor.preconnect-min-confidence in Firefox.
- Deukhoofd 6y agoLooking at caniuse.com preconnect hasn't been supported by Firefox since v71. I assume for this very reason. https://caniuse.com/link-rel-preconnect https://caniuse.com/link-rel-preconnect
- Jestar342 6y ago"network.predictor.enabled" is there. Defaults is still "true".
- youngtaff 6y agoSuspect that's not for explicit `<link rel=preconnect` More likely it's for when FF is making a connection because it predicts that page is going to use a connection to another origin
- judge2020 6y agoIt just connects to the domain without making a request to it, so how does it use even a remotely noticeable amount of bandwidth?
- 6y ago
- netsharc 6y ago> It strips out the www. prefix to make a ”display version“ of the URL. I have no problem with this, as the prefix is entirely meaningless to humans. Hah, what a dumb comment. Let's just go back to AOL keywords... but we can call it Google keywords. I propose a new URL scheme: "web:nytimes/some/article/". Sadly I don't work for the Chrome team, so I can't just force it down the web's throat.
- hk__2 6y ago> I propose a new URL scheme: "web:nytimes/some/article/" This is already what we have, except that "web" is "http" and we have TLDs to namespace domains.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> and we have TLDs to namespace domains We do have them, but as everyone has already realized, namespacing domains isn't really a good idea.
- hk__2 6y ago> We do have them, but as everyone has already realized, namespacing domains isn't really a good idea. Could you expand on this?
- apples_oranges 6y agoHow does the preconnect work with the t.co redirect in between? t.co will return a 301 right? Then we see the real domain, then the browser can preconnect to the server, not earlier, or can it?
- jzwinck 6y agoTwitter run t.co so they know where the redirect goes without actually asking t.co. So they can preconnect to the target domain as well. And that's where they goofed up (I mean, apart from preconnecting to all these domains in the first place).
- apples_oranges 6y agoAh I get it. I thought the preconnect was an attribute on the anchor tag, but it's not. Confusion resolved, thanks.
- arusahni 6y ago> Twitter redirects links through its t.co link-shortening service. It was once a useful addition to its service as it helped people stay underneath the strict character limits. The link shortener reduced all links to 23 characters. Twitter gains some more data-insights about its users in the form of click-stream data and insight into popular links. The t.co link also helps them block URLs that they deem problematic on their platform - in the event of spam, attack, or abuse, the redirect can instead be a black hole.
- encom 6y agoThey don't need `t.co` to censor messages. `t.co` was never anything but click tracking, since the character limit is completely arbitrary.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- majewsky 6y agoIt wasn't arbitrary. Twitter started out with an SMS interface, and kept it for several years. SMS are 160 characters max [1], and some characters are needed for the protocol, so the payload was limited to 140 chars. [1] Note: Modern SMS apps support a protocol that sends larger messages as a stream of multiple interlinked SMS. This is transparent to the user, but at the time of Twitter's SMS interface this was not common.
- matsemann 6y agoTwitter is so full of weird connectivity bugs. For the last weeks until a few days ago I've been unable to access twitter unless doing a hard refresh on every click. Because they installed a faulty service worker of some kind that would break most of the requests. (Both on desktop and android) And on Android, every time I follow a link to Twitter in an app that opens in a web view, it gives me a faulty page that I have to refresh a few times before I'm able to view it. It loads the page fine, but some rest call or whatever to fetch the tweet crashes. Edit: Not heard many others complain about this before, so mainly thought it was something about my setup. But the huge amount of upvotes this got suggests some Twitter engineers better look into this..
- saagarjha 6y agoIn Safari it will just drop you to an error page 70% of the time you navigate to it through a link, I assume because it doesn’t get its tasty tracking data. You have to reload the page to get anything to show up.
- d3nj4l 6y agoOn FF on Linux and Android it shows me that error message 100% of the time. Refreshing gets it to load.
- R0b0t1 6y agoSame here, now refreshing typically doesn't work.
- pram 6y agoYes I get this too, for a long time. I’m constantly shocked that a major platform could be so fundamentally broken for so long lol
- oauea 6y agoThis has been happening for at least a year for me in Firefox. 100% of the time. It's rather odd.
- saagarjha 6y ago> It strips out the www. prefix to make a ”display version“ of the URL. I have no problem with this, as the prefix is entirely meaningless to humans. It does serve important technical functions, however. I know most people don’t know the difference, and it would generally be a bad idea to have your www not redirect to the bare domain (or vice versa), but personally I prefer when we don’t hide these things. Just a bit of pedantic correctness, I guess. > I can’t look at older versions of Twitter, as its pages don’t work well in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Now this really gets to me.
- chrisweekly 6y agoAll of this gets to me. A www subdomain is _not_ necessarily equivalent and interchangeable with the apex domain; treating them as equivalent is presumptuous in the extreme.
- saagarjha 6y agoI think for most common domains it’s far to late to make a distinction; we already lost http:// http:// and now www is pretty much gone everywhere. I wonder if we’ll get rid of .com anytime soon. While we’re on the topic, I wonder why some websites chose to redirect to www and some keep the apex domain as their homepage. I use the latter because it’s cleaner and, well, my domain is primarily used for my website, but I wonder if there is a technical reason behind choosing one or the other.
- outloudvi 6y agoNow we have at least three tech giants that don't know www.example.com is not example.com: * Twitter * Google (maybe deliberately) * "The almighty WHATWG" who accepts Google's revision on whatwg/url about this
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoWell I learned something that's not in the article. I thought browsers requested a domain lookup (gethostbyname()) and basically got back a "zone file" which would have the cnames in. So, I was confused, when people complained about Twitter forcing a domain lookup "on the wrong domain" as I was assuming this would at least cache the domain lookup: It's the right domain, of course, but the lookup for an address on a subdomain includes the subdomain and then gets the cname directing wherever. It always confused me that dig/nslookup didn't seem to provide all the info. They can, using nslookup 'ls example.com' or 'dig example.com -t AXFR' but the server in general refuses to serve the zone file (seemingly for security by obscurity reasons). So, for example, if the browser looks up example.com it doesn't get that there is a cname from www->example.com . It only gets that relationship from looking up "www.example.com". So, TIL, and now results provided by dig/nslookup on the command line make more sense!
- d2wa 6y agoAlmost everyone uses a “recursive DNS resolver“ provided by their ISP, or one of the big ones from Google/Cloudflare/Cisco. The recursive resolver does all the hard work of resolving the root, top-leevl-domain, the apex domain, the subdomain, any CNAMEs, and finally find the right IP addresses to respond to the DNS client. Recursive resolvers benefit a lot from caching responses at each stage of the chain, the same way your browser/OS/router DNS client benefit from caching the final responses from the recursive resolvers. If you run a full DNS resolver, you have do to all of these steps locally.
- daodedickinson 6y agoSo it's not just me that has to reload basically every time I try to view a Twitter page?
- Khaine 6y agoTwitter delenda est