16 ms·

Shortest URLs on the Internet

489 points by jamespwilliams 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
remram 4y ago
TLDR It's http://ai http://ai (or http://ai./ http://ai./) and a few other 2-letter TLDs. Doesn't seem to work on my Android phone but works from another machine.
- theragra 4y ago
  Works on pixel6
  - remram 4y ago
    I see, it must be a problem with my DNS provider then not my device.
- rilut 4y ago
  Works on pixel 6 pro and pixel 4a
- bbu 4y ago
  Also doesn’t work on my iPhone.
  - frizlab 4y ago
    Works on iOS, but the final dot (after the ai) MUST be there. So it must be exactly: “ http://ai http://ai. ” EDIT: It will also depend on your DNS server apparently. I use Cloudflare’s.
progval 4y ago
Close second: http://1.1 http://1.1
- derefr 4y ago
  Why does 1.1 resolve to 1.0.0.1? I don't recall this being in any of the documents about CIDRs. Are browsers implicitly mapping IPv4 addresses temporarily into IPv6 addresses during parsing, such that "1.1" becomes "1::1", and then gets IPv6 abbreviated-form expansion applied to it?
  - eesmith 4y ago
    I'm also curious. Especially since curl 7.64.1 (Release-Date: 2019-03-27, on macOS) says: % curl 'http://1.1/' error code: 1003 while curl 7.85.0 (Release-Date: 2022-08-31, on FreeBSD) says: % curl 'http://1.1/' <html> <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head> <body> <center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center> <hr><center>cloudflare</center> </body> </html>
    - cyral 4y ago
      That is because their http:// http:// site redirects to https:// https://
      - eesmith 4y ago
        Sure, but why do the two different versions of curl give different results? With 7.64.1: % curl --dump-header /dev/tty 'http://1.1/' HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2022 19:01:53 GMT Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 16 Connection: close X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN Referrer-Policy: same-origin Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT Server: cloudflare CF-RAY: 7492a7924b2bd895-CPH error code: 1003 (Note that curl 'https://1.0.0.1/ https://1.0.0.1/' works just fine, so it's not like curl is blocked by the server on general principle.) With 7.85.0: % curl --dump-header /dev/tty 'http://1.1/' HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Server: cloudflare Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2022 19:03:09 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 167 Connection: keep-alive Location: https://1.0.0.1/ CF-RAY: 7492a96a181df18a-PIT <html> <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head> <body> <center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center> <hr><center>cloudflare</center> </body> </html>
thewebcount 4y ago
It’s interesting that Anguilla is the ai domain. I didn’t know that! It’s also a nice little island to take a trip to if you want to go somewhere that’s not too touristy. Beautiful beaches, and at least last time I was there, they didn’t allow cruise ships. So it ended up being a beautiful and quiet getaway. They do, however, drive on the left side of the road, but with North American cars, so it’s a little odd driving there at first!
- Tistron 4y ago
  Interesting. When I was in Myanmar/Burma some years ago, they drove on the right, but with mostly Japanese cars (made for driving on the left side). It seemed fairly dangerous.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    ...makes you think twice about pointless overtaking.
themoonisachees 4y ago
Cool to know, i guess. TIL that dotless record on newer gTLDs is forbidden, which explains my age-old question: "if google holds google., why are they only using it on domains.google? Surely having the url https://google https://google would be desirable for the folks in marketing?". The answer is that they can't possibly because the ban was added precisely because of this.
- KMnO4 4y ago
  Google actually serves a bunch of pages through their TLD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.google
  - varun_ch 4y ago
    Google Search is actually a useful way to find sites on a TLD: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoog https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoog
    - bdn_ 4y ago
      This works with DuckDuckGo as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32473643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32473643 You can combine the exclusion `-` syntax with this as well. If you want to find different sites on the TLD `.test` but only URLs on `home.test` are being shown, you can use this search: site:test -site:home.test
  - judge2020 4y ago
    I think it’s obvious that they use their TLD, just not via a root A record, so resources aren’t loaded via https://google/some.js https://google/some.js
- varun_ch 4y ago
  It's not really the same, but Microsoft has https://www.microsoft/ https://www.microsoft/ as a redirect to their .com, which causes some weird side effects in Chrome's omnibox, because it automatically adds the www subdomain: https://imgur.com/a/2cVxnYf https://imgur.com/a/2cVxnYf
bdn_ 4y ago
At one point of time, `http://to http://to` resolved to a "It works!" page [1]. I've always thought it would be cool to have a URL shortener with links such as `https://to/library https://to/library` or something similar. Oh, how much fun running your own TLD would be... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319211308/http://to/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150319211308/http://to/
- infinityio 4y ago
  unfortunately, it seems like ICANN rules prevent this for new gTLDs
- shpx 4y ago
  At Google and many other tech companies, internal machines are configured to have go/<whatever> work just like you describe. Looks like someone even made a whole company around it https://www.golinks.com/blog/go-links-history/ https://www.golinks.com/blog/go-links-history/
  - dhosek 4y ago
    They had this at Chase when I worked there. As I recall discoverability was a problem though.
  - Macha 4y ago
    A problem with this approach is browsers love to resolve it to http://go.com http://go.com, so Disney may be getting a feed of what Googlers are interested in.
    - hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago
      I mean, have fun? You're gonna get most stuff like go/thor-design or go/zanzibar. It's not as if go links are go/our-disney+-competitor.
    - seedless-sensat 4y ago
      I have found Chrome more willing to resolve go/foo as a web search. As a result, the Google autocomplete suggestions for terms like "go/m" are pretty amusing
dehrmann 4y ago
Any FTP urls? I'm sure there are protocols with shorter schemes, but FTP is still semi-supported.
- mtmail 4y ago
  No longer supported by Firefox, Edge or Chrome https://www.zdnet.com/article/now-firefox-has-dropped-support-for-ftp-following-chrome-and-edge/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/now-firefox-has-dropped-suppor...
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    Still works on IE! Why my Windows 10 installation has an unsupported copy of IE is another question.
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
    Honestly, never expect browsers to support them to begin with anyway. Any semi-serious FTP users use dedicated clients.
ttctciyf 4y ago
You don't need the http:// http:// for pn. (At least in firefox on my laptop) pn./ suffices.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  We’re talking about the URLs, not what you can type in the address bar to access them.
gsich 4y ago
https://l.de https://l.de
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
hemmert 4y ago
I love short URLs! I found quite a lot are available for .cx (which is the Christmas Islands), so I got https://fh.cx https://fh.cx for myself a couple of years ago.
- _def 4y ago
  I like them too. I used to own wu.gl but couldn't justify the 50$/year just for fun
tpmx 4y ago
http://dk http://dk used to work at one point in time, IIRC. (It was some nic.dk thing, I think.)
peanut_worm 4y ago
pn was the only one that worked on my iPhone. Pretty cool, I am surprised its not used for anything major
daniel-cussen 4y ago
TimLeland 4y ago
Check out the URL Shortener T.LY. It's one of the shortest domain that allows you to create short links that I know of. >> https://t.ly/ https://t.ly/
- daqnal 4y ago
  That one is cool. Another similar one: > >>https://s.id/ https://s.id/
- Aachen 4y ago
  Tough competitor! I think dro.pm wins by one character because the URIs are shorter, at least on days where I didn't post it to HN. And that can be used for pastes and file hosting directly. The caveat being that it expires; it's meant as something you can write on a whiteboard on a conference or pass over the phone easily without needing to send a random URL to someone via chat, sms, or email or something.
jonatron 4y ago
Although it's nowhere near as short as ai , I like bl.uk
- axiolite 4y ago
  Bluk? Bluk! They're not even trying! How about: y.uk
  - jesterson 4y ago
    yu.ck would be better, although not that short
matttpt 4y ago
> Some have A records pointing to the root servers. I’m not sure why this is - I think it might be because no DNS has been configured in the TLD zone for these TLDs. I was also curious about this. It turns out that it's because dig interprets some TLDs as DNS record types (MD, MG, MR, MX) or DNS classes (IN and CH) of the same name! Not sure why, but when given only a type or class (without a domain name), dig actually queries for a list of the root servers, which explains the strange results. Looks like using the -q option to specify the domain name works around this.
- jamespwilliams 4y ago
  Oh interesting, thanks! I fixed the script and ran the TLD list through again, in case this meant I missed some, but none of the affected TLDs have A records. I'll update my post to mention your comment.
- N6VjeuHbGSwMN9e 4y ago
  Or you could just make it a FQDN: `dig @8.8.8.8 MX.`
- chedabob 4y ago
  There was a post recently about some of these TLDs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094645
amelius 4y ago
None of these links work (Firefox 104 on Linux).
- alana314 4y ago
  they do for me on FF 104 on mac.
_8j50 4y ago
aka.ms is short but probably not thr shortest, but I would say it is the shortest most popular url possibly. For those who don't know, that is MS's link shortner for official URLs
- inglor 4y ago
  It's also used quite extensively internally for company wide resources. Any employee can create aka.ms urls, here is one for your comment: https://aka.ms/AAhztyq https://aka.ms/AAhztyq
  - jonas-w 4y ago
    What a flex. Can you also specify a custom link? Like aka.ms/mango or aka.ms/inglor?
    - inglor 4y ago
      I can, there are a bunch of them - e.g. aka.ms/undertale - take any word after aka.ms and chances are someone used it ^^
  - _8j50 4y ago
    That's very cool!
- sophiebits 4y ago
  g.co and t.co used by Google and Twitter are shorter.
  - _8j50 4y ago
    Can't believe I forgot t.co!
fennecfoxen 4y ago
I used to have an email address with a three-letter username @eh.net, which was actually surprisingly annoying to use. If you ever gave the address to someone they'd be very confused at how short it is.
- zfxfr 4y ago
  From my experience if you give people any email address with a custom domain people will usually be confused and ask you to repeat even if it's very clear and easy to remember. Last time i gave my mail which is something like :myname@LLL.fr i was asked : are you sure ?
  - cldellow 4y ago
    I had to deal with an accountant to get advice on how to file taxes after the sale of a private company. They needed information from a third party. I gave the accountant the third party's email address, firstname@lastname.co. The transaction was taking a while to get resolved. After repeated followups, the accountant finally told me that he was having a hard time getting a hold of the third party. Was I sure that their address was firstname@lastname.com? Like... what the heck. We're all corresponding over email. You could have literally clicked the email address in the email that I sent you. But instead, somehow you've mangled it and are confused that it doesn't work? That was instructive for me. .com TLDs only going forward!
    - mxuribe 4y ago
      I hear ya! I've had my own last name .CC for well over a decade...and i still get the occasional "Did you mean .COM?" ....so nowadays i premptively state my email is: xyz@whatever.CC (that's .CC and NOT .COM)....and people get it nowadays more than in the past, though its funny that its only my fellow Americans who are not used to TLDs which are not .com, .net, .org. ;-)
  - AviationAtom 4y ago
    I usually get: "@gmail.com?" "No, no. Not everyone has to use Gmail!"
theomega 4y ago
Just to check: Could it be that pihole (dnsmasq) has an issue with these dotless domains? I'm getting a NXDOMAIN for `dig ai.`, but when directly doing with an upstream server (i.e. 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1) it perfectly works. I assume this is the result of the `Never forward non-FQDN A and AAAA queries` setting being checked in pi-hole (which is AFAIK the default).
- Komodai 4y ago
dn3500 4y ago
http://ai http://ai is an interesting case. It was there from the early days of the web, back when you could type "ai" into the mozilla url bar and it would take you there. Today firefox "helps" you out and changes what you typed into something else because it knows better than you do what web site you want. It's run by a character named Vince Cate who moved to Anguilla to protest taxes or something. He was from the US and gave up his US citizenship. He talked the Anguilla government into letting him set up its internet infrastructure for them.
- ktpsns 4y ago
  You still can type "ai." (including the dot, excluding the quotation) in your browser. Works in firefox (tested in 104), however does not work in Chrome (tested in Chromium 105).
  - camoufleur 4y ago
    "http://ai http://ai." works in Chrome
    - jbkkd 4y ago
      Doesn't work on Chrome on Android
      - 867-5309 4y ago
        working here. latest chrome, android 12
        hansel_der 4y ago
        i wish ppl would stop calling anything "latest" it has a specific version. plz use it.
        867-5309 4y ago
        okay
kypro 4y ago
http://ai http://ai. resolves for me, but http://ai http://ai doesn't. Is http://ai http://ai invalid or is that just my DNS?
- proactivesvcs 4y ago
  Both resolve for me on my Android phone but neither on my Linux desktops, unless I specify a DNS resolver. Curious!
megous 4y ago
Shortest address is http://1 http://1 Not on the internet, though. Just on the network. Kinda surprised Linux routes 0.0.0.1 to my router, when used as a destination address. Might be fun to use it as a local redirector whitout having to do any DNS shenanigans. Edit: yep, it works
- Aachen 4y ago
  Shorter: ftp://1 Anyone knows a shorter protocol name that is widely supported/known?
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    I think on Windows machines you can use `\\` to access a machine via SMB, so `\\1` would be the shortest if you're happy with Windows-only.
    - easrng 4y ago
      //1 turns into file:///1 everywhere AFAIK
      - zzo38computer 4y ago
        But "//1" is not a full URL, and any URL with "file:" is not "on the Internet".
        easrng 4y ago
        //1 is a full (relative) url
  - vesinisa 4y ago
    Both Chrome and Firefox have actually recently removed support for ftp:// for security reasons.
    - zzo38computer 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
heydemo 4y ago
I love hacker news for this type of insightfully researched light-hearted tech trivia.
vesinisa 4y ago
All the domains have an invalid TLS certificate. Now, it would be very interesting to see the process for actually obtaining a valid certificate for one of these. Anyone know if there are reasons one could not be obtained?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- notpushkin 4y ago
  I think these weren't meant to run on the apex domains, so nobody even bothered getting a certificate. Would be interesting to try and get one, I agree.
axiolite 4y ago
It would be great if someone with an ultra-short URL could run one of the "what's my IP address" sites on it, like: ifconfig.co ifconfig.pm ifconfig.show ipaddr.in ipconfig.io They return plain-text IP address to curl/wget, while serving up a more detailed web page to other web browsers.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  I like to use eth0.me for this purpose. Short and memorable.
- thenickdude 4y ago
  There's https://ip.me/ https://ip.me/, it supports curl like you describe!
- geoffbp 4y ago
  canhazip.com
snvzz 4y ago
Interestingly, in my lan: dig ai @ googledns works dig ai @ unbound works (DoT cloudflare behind) dig ai @ dnsmasq NXDOMAIN (openwrt, forwards to unbound) Thus something's up with openwrt (22.03.0 release) dnsmasq, or dnsmasq in general.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  This explains why many home users can't connect - a lot of home broadband routers use dnsmasq internally.
- easrng 4y ago
  Try "ai."
  - snvzz 4y ago
    Same result @ dnsmasq.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32804868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32804868 There's a dnsmasq setting you have to twiddle to make it work.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    Thank you for the pointer. I'll look into that at the next chance.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    I was able to test it. It is this setting indeed. The default is probably due to some concern about leaking misspelled split-horizon local names.
    - mindcrime 4y ago
      Probably. I'm sure there are actually good reasons for keeping that setting turned off. But it's annoying when you want to look at an edge case like this. :-) I'm debating if I'll keep it set so that this works, or put it back the way it was.
epuixrk 4y ago
omg i always wanted to know that, everyone i had asked in the past either shrugged or said it was impossible
edent 4y ago
You can also use Unicode ligatures to make URls which look shorter. From that list, you could use http:// http:// ㎝. / - that's U+339D if HN mangles it. I wrote it up at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/buying-a-single-character-domain-and-3-character-fqdn-for-15/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/buying-a-single-character-d...
- bluenotebo0k 4y ago
  Interesting. You can also have emojis in URLS apparently. (rolled up newspaper emoji).fm, for example.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  Unicode URLs are scary
  - password4321 4y ago
    I thought this was super sketch: Shorten URLs using invisible spaces https://github.com/zws-im/zws https://github.com/zws-im/zws
    - emsixteen 4y ago
      Bloody hell, that's genuinely scary. No notice about it in my browser at all, I feel like there should be.
- Kuinox 4y ago
  Ah funny, firefox display it as a link, refuse to open said link, have a context menu to copy the link, but not open it.
teloli 4y ago
Amazing, instead of "ping 1.1" I can now use "ping ai" and save one character. What a great world we live in.
- pxeger1 4y ago
  It's a shame it doesn't respond very quickly (at least for me, in the UK). (1.1 is pretty fast everywhere)
askvictor 4y ago
Could shave off a character by using ftp:// instead of http:// http:// though I suppose modern browsers have removed FTP support recently. Are there any protocols that are known by even shorter abbreviations?
- jwilk 4y ago
  git:// comes to mind, but that's not understood by browsers. irc:// is understood by Firefox at least.
layer8 4y ago
> I imagine most browsers etc. would consider a URL with an empty hostname invalid – Chrome considers both http:// http:// and http:// http://. invalid, at least. An empty hostname is invalid according to RFC 7230: A sender MUST NOT generate an "http" URI with an empty host identifier. A recipient that processes such a URI reference MUST reject it as invalid. This requirement also carries over to HTTPS.
sleepy_keita 4y ago
Quick question: my systemd-resolved doesn't want to resolve `ai.` (`dig ai.` results in a SERVFAIL, but doing `dig ai. @8.8.8.8` works fine). Anyone have this problem? I already checked upstream resolvers and they work with the bare TLD, any hints to how I can get systemd-resolved to resolve this?
ck2 4y ago
Ha ego bump, I like to think I inspired this submission? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32801317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32801317 17:07:12 vs 17:10:57 great minds, yada yada ;-)
jamwil 4y ago
I think I used to own your domain name. Happy to see it put to good use.
JimWestergren 4y ago
My website builder is at https://n.nu https://n.nu - also short.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kapilkchaurasia 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

TLDR It's http://ai http://ai (or http://ai./ http://ai./) and a few other 2-letter TLDs. Doesn't seem to work on my Android phone but works from another machine.

theragra 4y ago
Works on pixel6
- remram 4y ago
  I see, it must be a problem with my DNS provider then not my device.
rilut 4y ago
Works on pixel 6 pro and pixel 4a
bbu 4y ago
Also doesn’t work on my iPhone.
- frizlab 4y ago
  Works on iOS, but the final dot (after the ai) MUST be there. So it must be exactly: “ http://ai http://ai. ” EDIT: It will also depend on your DNS server apparently. I use Cloudflare’s.

progval 4y ago

Close second: http://1.1 http://1.1

derefr 4y ago
Why does 1.1 resolve to 1.0.0.1? I don't recall this being in any of the documents about CIDRs. Are browsers implicitly mapping IPv4 addresses temporarily into IPv6 addresses during parsing, such that "1.1" becomes "1::1", and then gets IPv6 abbreviated-form expansion applied to it?
- eesmith 4y ago
  I'm also curious. Especially since curl 7.64.1 (Release-Date: 2019-03-27, on macOS) says: % curl 'http://1.1/' error code: 1003 while curl 7.85.0 (Release-Date: 2022-08-31, on FreeBSD) says: % curl 'http://1.1/' <html> <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head> <body> <center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center> <hr><center>cloudflare</center> </body> </html>
  - cyral 4y ago
    That is because their http:// http:// site redirects to https:// https://
    - eesmith 4y ago
      Sure, but why do the two different versions of curl give different results? With 7.64.1: % curl --dump-header /dev/tty 'http://1.1/' HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2022 19:01:53 GMT Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 16 Connection: close X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN Referrer-Policy: same-origin Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT Server: cloudflare CF-RAY: 7492a7924b2bd895-CPH error code: 1003 (Note that curl 'https://1.0.0.1/ https://1.0.0.1/' works just fine, so it's not like curl is blocked by the server on general principle.) With 7.85.0: % curl --dump-header /dev/tty 'http://1.1/' HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Server: cloudflare Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2022 19:03:09 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 167 Connection: keep-alive Location: https://1.0.0.1/ CF-RAY: 7492a96a181df18a-PIT <html> <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head> <body> <center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center> <hr><center>cloudflare</center> </body> </html>

thewebcount 4y ago

It’s interesting that Anguilla is the ai domain. I didn’t know that! It’s also a nice little island to take a trip to if you want to go somewhere that’s not too touristy. Beautiful beaches, and at least last time I was there, they didn’t allow cruise ships. So it ended up being a beautiful and quiet getaway. They do, however, drive on the left side of the road, but with North American cars, so it’s a little odd driving there at first!

Tistron 4y ago
Interesting. When I was in Myanmar/Burma some years ago, they drove on the right, but with mostly Japanese cars (made for driving on the left side). It seemed fairly dangerous.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  ...makes you think twice about pointless overtaking.

themoonisachees 4y ago

Cool to know, i guess. TIL that dotless record on newer gTLDs is forbidden, which explains my age-old question: "if google holds google., why are they only using it on domains.google? Surely having the url https://google https://google would be desirable for the folks in marketing?". The answer is that they can't possibly because the ban was added precisely because of this.

KMnO4 4y ago
Google actually serves a bunch of pages through their TLD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.google
- varun_ch 4y ago
  Google Search is actually a useful way to find sites on a TLD: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoog https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoog
  - bdn_ 4y ago
    This works with DuckDuckGo as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32473643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32473643 You can combine the exclusion `-` syntax with this as well. If you want to find different sites on the TLD `.test` but only URLs on `home.test` are being shown, you can use this search: site:test -site:home.test
- judge2020 4y ago
  I think it’s obvious that they use their TLD, just not via a root A record, so resources aren’t loaded via https://google/some.js https://google/some.js
varun_ch 4y ago
It's not really the same, but Microsoft has https://www.microsoft/ https://www.microsoft/ as a redirect to their .com, which causes some weird side effects in Chrome's omnibox, because it automatically adds the www subdomain: https://imgur.com/a/2cVxnYf https://imgur.com/a/2cVxnYf

bdn_ 4y ago

At one point of time, `http://to http://to` resolved to a "It works!" page [1]. I've always thought it would be cool to have a URL shortener with links such as `https://to/library https://to/library` or something similar. Oh, how much fun running your own TLD would be... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319211308/http://to/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150319211308/http://to/

infinityio 4y ago
unfortunately, it seems like ICANN rules prevent this for new gTLDs
shpx 4y ago
At Google and many other tech companies, internal machines are configured to have go/<whatever> work just like you describe. Looks like someone even made a whole company around it https://www.golinks.com/blog/go-links-history/ https://www.golinks.com/blog/go-links-history/
- dhosek 4y ago
  They had this at Chase when I worked there. As I recall discoverability was a problem though.
- Macha 4y ago
  A problem with this approach is browsers love to resolve it to http://go.com http://go.com, so Disney may be getting a feed of what Googlers are interested in.
  - hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago
    I mean, have fun? You're gonna get most stuff like go/thor-design or go/zanzibar. It's not as if go links are go/our-disney+-competitor.
  - seedless-sensat 4y ago
    I have found Chrome more willing to resolve go/foo as a web search. As a result, the Google autocomplete suggestions for terms like "go/m" are pretty amusing

dehrmann 4y ago

Any FTP urls? I'm sure there are protocols with shorter schemes, but FTP is still semi-supported.

mtmail 4y ago
No longer supported by Firefox, Edge or Chrome https://www.zdnet.com/article/now-firefox-has-dropped-support-for-ftp-following-chrome-and-edge/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/now-firefox-has-dropped-suppor...
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Still works on IE! Why my Windows 10 installation has an unsupported copy of IE is another question.
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  Honestly, never expect browsers to support them to begin with anyway. Any semi-serious FTP users use dedicated clients.

ttctciyf 4y ago

You don't need the http:// http:// for pn. (At least in firefox on my laptop) pn./ suffices.

chrismorgan 4y ago
We’re talking about the URLs, not what you can type in the address bar to access them.

gsich 4y ago

https://l.de https://l.de

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

hemmert 4y ago

I love short URLs! I found quite a lot are available for .cx (which is the Christmas Islands), so I got https://fh.cx https://fh.cx for myself a couple of years ago.

_def 4y ago
I like them too. I used to own wu.gl but couldn't justify the 50$/year just for fun

tpmx 4y ago

http://dk http://dk used to work at one point in time, IIRC. (It was some nic.dk thing, I think.)

peanut_worm 4y ago

pn was the only one that worked on my iPhone. Pretty cool, I am surprised its not used for anything major

daniel-cussen 4y ago

TimLeland 4y ago

Check out the URL Shortener T.LY. It's one of the shortest domain that allows you to create short links that I know of. >> https://t.ly/ https://t.ly/

daqnal 4y ago
That one is cool. Another similar one: > >>https://s.id/ https://s.id/
Aachen 4y ago
Tough competitor! I think dro.pm wins by one character because the URIs are shorter, at least on days where I didn't post it to HN. And that can be used for pastes and file hosting directly. The caveat being that it expires; it's meant as something you can write on a whiteboard on a conference or pass over the phone easily without needing to send a random URL to someone via chat, sms, or email or something.

jonatron 4y ago

Although it's nowhere near as short as ai , I like bl.uk

axiolite 4y ago
Bluk? Bluk! They're not even trying! How about: y.uk
- jesterson 4y ago
  yu.ck would be better, although not that short

matttpt 4y ago

> Some have A records pointing to the root servers. I’m not sure why this is - I think it might be because no DNS has been configured in the TLD zone for these TLDs. I was also curious about this. It turns out that it's because dig interprets some TLDs as DNS record types (MD, MG, MR, MX) or DNS classes (IN and CH) of the same name! Not sure why, but when given only a type or class (without a domain name), dig actually queries for a list of the root servers, which explains the strange results. Looks like using the -q option to specify the domain name works around this.

jamespwilliams 4y ago
Oh interesting, thanks! I fixed the script and ran the TLD list through again, in case this meant I missed some, but none of the affected TLDs have A records. I'll update my post to mention your comment.
N6VjeuHbGSwMN9e 4y ago
Or you could just make it a FQDN: `dig @8.8.8.8 MX.`
chedabob 4y ago
There was a post recently about some of these TLDs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094645

amelius 4y ago

None of these links work (Firefox 104 on Linux).

alana314 4y ago
they do for me on FF 104 on mac.

_8j50 4y ago

aka.ms is short but probably not thr shortest, but I would say it is the shortest most popular url possibly. For those who don't know, that is MS's link shortner for official URLs

inglor 4y ago
It's also used quite extensively internally for company wide resources. Any employee can create aka.ms urls, here is one for your comment: https://aka.ms/AAhztyq https://aka.ms/AAhztyq
- jonas-w 4y ago
  What a flex. Can you also specify a custom link? Like aka.ms/mango or aka.ms/inglor?
  - inglor 4y ago
    I can, there are a bunch of them - e.g. aka.ms/undertale - take any word after aka.ms and chances are someone used it ^^
- _8j50 4y ago
  That's very cool!
sophiebits 4y ago
g.co and t.co used by Google and Twitter are shorter.
- _8j50 4y ago
  Can't believe I forgot t.co!

fennecfoxen 4y ago

I used to have an email address with a three-letter username @eh.net, which was actually surprisingly annoying to use. If you ever gave the address to someone they'd be very confused at how short it is.

zfxfr 4y ago
From my experience if you give people any email address with a custom domain people will usually be confused and ask you to repeat even if it's very clear and easy to remember. Last time i gave my mail which is something like :myname@LLL.fr i was asked : are you sure ?
- cldellow 4y ago
  I had to deal with an accountant to get advice on how to file taxes after the sale of a private company. They needed information from a third party. I gave the accountant the third party's email address, firstname@lastname.co. The transaction was taking a while to get resolved. After repeated followups, the accountant finally told me that he was having a hard time getting a hold of the third party. Was I sure that their address was firstname@lastname.com? Like... what the heck. We're all corresponding over email. You could have literally clicked the email address in the email that I sent you. But instead, somehow you've mangled it and are confused that it doesn't work? That was instructive for me. .com TLDs only going forward!
  - mxuribe 4y ago
    I hear ya! I've had my own last name .CC for well over a decade...and i still get the occasional "Did you mean .COM?" ....so nowadays i premptively state my email is: xyz@whatever.CC (that's .CC and NOT .COM)....and people get it nowadays more than in the past, though its funny that its only my fellow Americans who are not used to TLDs which are not .com, .net, .org. ;-)
- AviationAtom 4y ago
  I usually get: "@gmail.com?" "No, no. Not everyone has to use Gmail!"

theomega 4y ago

Just to check: Could it be that pihole (dnsmasq) has an issue with these dotless domains? I'm getting a NXDOMAIN for `dig ai.`, but when directly doing with an upstream server (i.e. 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1) it perfectly works. I assume this is the result of the `Never forward non-FQDN A and AAAA queries` setting being checked in pi-hole (which is AFAIK the default).

Komodai 4y ago

dn3500 4y ago

http://ai http://ai is an interesting case. It was there from the early days of the web, back when you could type "ai" into the mozilla url bar and it would take you there. Today firefox "helps" you out and changes what you typed into something else because it knows better than you do what web site you want. It's run by a character named Vince Cate who moved to Anguilla to protest taxes or something. He was from the US and gave up his US citizenship. He talked the Anguilla government into letting him set up its internet infrastructure for them.

ktpsns 4y ago
You still can type "ai." (including the dot, excluding the quotation) in your browser. Works in firefox (tested in 104), however does not work in Chrome (tested in Chromium 105).
- camoufleur 4y ago
  "http://ai http://ai." works in Chrome
  - jbkkd 4y ago
    Doesn't work on Chrome on Android
    - 867-5309 4y ago
      working here. latest chrome, android 12
      - hansel_der 4y ago
        i wish ppl would stop calling anything "latest" it has a specific version. plz use it.
        867-5309 4y ago
        okay

kypro 4y ago

http://ai http://ai. resolves for me, but http://ai http://ai doesn't. Is http://ai http://ai invalid or is that just my DNS?

proactivesvcs 4y ago
Both resolve for me on my Android phone but neither on my Linux desktops, unless I specify a DNS resolver. Curious!

megous 4y ago

Shortest address is http://1 http://1 Not on the internet, though. Just on the network. Kinda surprised Linux routes 0.0.0.1 to my router, when used as a destination address. Might be fun to use it as a local redirector whitout having to do any DNS shenanigans. Edit: yep, it works

Aachen 4y ago
Shorter: ftp://1 Anyone knows a shorter protocol name that is widely supported/known?
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  I think on Windows machines you can use `\\` to access a machine via SMB, so `\\1` would be the shortest if you're happy with Windows-only.
  - easrng 4y ago
    //1 turns into file:///1 everywhere AFAIK
    - zzo38computer 4y ago
      But "//1" is not a full URL, and any URL with "file:" is not "on the Internet".
      - easrng 4y ago
        //1 is a full (relative) url
- vesinisa 4y ago
  Both Chrome and Firefox have actually recently removed support for ftp:// for security reasons.
  - zzo38computer 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

heydemo 4y ago

I love hacker news for this type of insightfully researched light-hearted tech trivia.

vesinisa 4y ago

All the domains have an invalid TLS certificate. Now, it would be very interesting to see the process for actually obtaining a valid certificate for one of these. Anyone know if there are reasons one could not be obtained?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
notpushkin 4y ago
I think these weren't meant to run on the apex domains, so nobody even bothered getting a certificate. Would be interesting to try and get one, I agree.

axiolite 4y ago

It would be great if someone with an ultra-short URL could run one of the "what's my IP address" sites on it, like: ifconfig.co ifconfig.pm ifconfig.show ipaddr.in ipconfig.io They return plain-text IP address to curl/wget, while serving up a more detailed web page to other web browsers.

notpushkin 4y ago
I like to use eth0.me for this purpose. Short and memorable.
thenickdude 4y ago
There's https://ip.me/ https://ip.me/, it supports curl like you describe!
geoffbp 4y ago
canhazip.com

snvzz 4y ago

Interestingly, in my lan: dig ai @ googledns works dig ai @ unbound works (DoT cloudflare behind) dig ai @ dnsmasq NXDOMAIN (openwrt, forwards to unbound) Thus something's up with openwrt (22.03.0 release) dnsmasq, or dnsmasq in general.

londons_explore 4y ago
This explains why many home users can't connect - a lot of home broadband routers use dnsmasq internally.
easrng 4y ago
Try "ai."
- snvzz 4y ago
  Same result @ dnsmasq.
mindcrime 4y ago
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32804868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32804868 There's a dnsmasq setting you have to twiddle to make it work.
- snvzz 4y ago
  Thank you for the pointer. I'll look into that at the next chance.
- snvzz 4y ago
  I was able to test it. It is this setting indeed. The default is probably due to some concern about leaking misspelled split-horizon local names.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    Probably. I'm sure there are actually good reasons for keeping that setting turned off. But it's annoying when you want to look at an edge case like this. :-) I'm debating if I'll keep it set so that this works, or put it back the way it was.

epuixrk 4y ago

omg i always wanted to know that, everyone i had asked in the past either shrugged or said it was impossible

edent 4y ago

You can also use Unicode ligatures to make URls which look shorter. From that list, you could use http:// http:// ㎝. / - that's U+339D if HN mangles it. I wrote it up at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/buying-a-single-character-domain-and-3-character-fqdn-for-15/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/buying-a-single-character-d...

bluenotebo0k 4y ago
Interesting. You can also have emojis in URLS apparently. (rolled up newspaper emoji).fm, for example.
tambourine_man 4y ago
Unicode URLs are scary
- password4321 4y ago
  I thought this was super sketch: Shorten URLs using invisible spaces https://github.com/zws-im/zws https://github.com/zws-im/zws
  - emsixteen 4y ago
    Bloody hell, that's genuinely scary. No notice about it in my browser at all, I feel like there should be.
Kuinox 4y ago
Ah funny, firefox display it as a link, refuse to open said link, have a context menu to copy the link, but not open it.

teloli 4y ago

Amazing, instead of "ping 1.1" I can now use "ping ai" and save one character. What a great world we live in.

pxeger1 4y ago
It's a shame it doesn't respond very quickly (at least for me, in the UK). (1.1 is pretty fast everywhere)

askvictor 4y ago

Could shave off a character by using ftp:// instead of http:// http:// though I suppose modern browsers have removed FTP support recently. Are there any protocols that are known by even shorter abbreviations?

jwilk 4y ago
git:// comes to mind, but that's not understood by browsers. irc:// is understood by Firefox at least.

layer8 4y ago

> I imagine most browsers etc. would consider a URL with an empty hostname invalid – Chrome considers both http:// http:// and http:// http://. invalid, at least. An empty hostname is invalid according to RFC 7230: A sender MUST NOT generate an "http" URI with an empty host identifier. A recipient that processes such a URI reference MUST reject it as invalid. This requirement also carries over to HTTPS.

sleepy_keita 4y ago

Quick question: my systemd-resolved doesn't want to resolve `ai.` (`dig ai.` results in a SERVFAIL, but doing `dig ai. @8.8.8.8` works fine). Anyone have this problem? I already checked upstream resolvers and they work with the bare TLD, any hints to how I can get systemd-resolved to resolve this?

ck2 4y ago

Ha ego bump, I like to think I inspired this submission? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32801317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32801317 17:07:12 vs 17:10:57 great minds, yada yada ;-)

jamwil 4y ago

I think I used to own your domain name. Happy to see it put to good use.

JimWestergren 4y ago

My website builder is at https://n.nu https://n.nu - also short.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kapilkchaurasia 4y ago