4 ms·

The requested URL /~mc2zk/cs451/mco_P4.pptâ€Ž was not found on this server. I don't know who is mangling the URL (Chrome, Apache, MITM?) nor why it's happening

The requested URL /~mc2zk/cs451/mco_P4.pptâ€Ž was not found on this server. I don't know who is mangling the URL (Chrome, Apache, MITM?) nor why it's happening.

ashmud 13y ago
There's a U+200E character between "www.cs.virginia.edu/~mc2zk/cs451/mco_P4.ppt" and "."
kens 13y ago
There's an invisible Unicode U+200E left-to-right mark at the end of the URL, probably picked up when the parent cut-and-paste the URL into HN. This in UTF-8 is E2 80 8E, which gets misinterpreted by the server as Windows-1252 character set: E2 = â, 80 = €, 8e = Ž. (It could be iso-8859-1, except that doesn't include €.) Interestingly, Chrome's DOM inspector shows this character as the HTML entity &lrm; while view-source has it as the actual invisible character. I think the poster of the URL originally mangled it, but it would be nice if the HN software filtered out invisible characters from URLs. There's not much the destination server can do about it. (Yes, I've dealt with too many character set issues in the past.)
rayiner 13y ago
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~mc2zk/cs451/mco_P4.ppt http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~mc2zk/cs451/mco_P4.ppt Does that work? I copied and pasted it from a Google search result (because otherwise the file downloads without showing me the URL). Google of course has decided "copy link to" shouldn't work.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Google of course has decided "copy link to" shouldn't work. There's an addon for that.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    It shouldn't need an addon though. I'm often on Google's side on debates but this is just ridiculous.
    - stephengillie 13y ago
      We should make our own browser where we can make those decisions!
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Addon to what?
    - nitrogen 13y ago
      An addon to Firefox (mobile, too) and Chrome that prevents Google from changing the link address to a tracking address, allowing you to right click a search result, then choose Copy link address, and get the correct result. I agree with mpyne, though, that it shouldn't be necessary.
- cpach 13y ago
  I’ve noticed this issue a lot of times. Is Google deliberately inserting Unicode crap at the end of URL:s in order to prevent copy-and-paste from their search results? Or perhaps it’s to prevent scraping, and the loss of copy and paste functionality is just collateral damage.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

The requested URL /~mc2zk/cs451/mco_P4.pptâ€Ž was not found on this server. I don't know who is mangling the URL (Chrome, Apache, MITM?) nor why it's happening.

ashmud 13y ago

There's a U+200E character between "www.cs.virginia.edu/~mc2zk/cs451/mco_P4.ppt" and "."

kens 13y ago

There's an invisible Unicode U+200E left-to-right mark at the end of the URL, probably picked up when the parent cut-and-paste the URL into HN. This in UTF-8 is E2 80 8E, which gets misinterpreted by the server as Windows-1252 character set: E2 = â, 80 = €, 8e = Ž. (It could be iso-8859-1, except that doesn't include €.) Interestingly, Chrome's DOM inspector shows this character as the HTML entity &lrm; while view-source has it as the actual invisible character. I think the poster of the URL originally mangled it, but it would be nice if the HN software filtered out invisible characters from URLs. There's not much the destination server can do about it. (Yes, I've dealt with too many character set issues in the past.)

rayiner 13y ago

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~mc2zk/cs451/mco_P4.ppt http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~mc2zk/cs451/mco_P4.ppt Does that work? I copied and pasted it from a Google search result (because otherwise the file downloads without showing me the URL). Google of course has decided "copy link to" shouldn't work.

nitrogen 13y ago
Google of course has decided "copy link to" shouldn't work. There's an addon for that.
- mpyne 13y ago
  It shouldn't need an addon though. I'm often on Google's side on debates but this is just ridiculous.
  - stephengillie 13y ago
    We should make our own browser where we can make those decisions!
- rayiner 13y ago
  Addon to what?
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    An addon to Firefox (mobile, too) and Chrome that prevents Google from changing the link address to a tracking address, allowing you to right click a search result, then choose Copy link address, and get the correct result. I agree with mpyne, though, that it shouldn't be necessary.
cpach 13y ago
I’ve noticed this issue a lot of times. Is Google deliberately inserting Unicode crap at the end of URL:s in order to prevent copy-and-paste from their search results? Or perhaps it’s to prevent scraping, and the loss of copy and paste functionality is just collateral damage.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]