I love this site. There is no good reason to use this, other than to show how crazy the normalisation of URL shorteners really is. You have no idea what's behind a link anymore!
There are hundreds of people out there painstakingly training corporate users not to click on links which look like this, with little success. This lets them create evil URLs on demand.
On a more serious note, I wonder how many thousands of other purely fun sites that offer no useful service have been forever lost. Hosting requires periodic maintenance (e.g. hosting fee payments, domain name renewals, SSL certificate updates). I bet a lot of sites like this disappear after a year or two when their creators either forget about them or are unwilling to continue maintaining them.
Due to this specific site’s dynamic nature, it cannot be captured by the Internet Archive. When it’s gone, it’s gone.
I always double and triple check domains because of short links like this. How are people supposed to know what's okay to click and what isn't when a major vendor like Microsoft conditions its users to click on whatever.
That just means it’s not a well-defined function (i.e. each input is mapped to only one unique output, which is not the case here).
As other posters write, “idempotent” means that recursively applying the function returns the same result, e.g. f(f(x)) = f(x). (The site is also indeed not idempotent, since entering a shady URL will not return the same shady URL.)
Today I learned the mathy definition of idempotent (used above) which is different than the one more commonly used when talking about code: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotence
> the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application
Perhaps my maths background is influencing me here, but isn't that the commonly used definition when talking about code?
Not the replied-to user, but I also wasn't aware of the mathematical definition and my understanding of idempotency was that the main point was that performing the same idempotent operation multiple times wouldn't make a difference in terms of __side effects__ (for instance, not charging a user twice when accidentally submitting an idempotent request twice).
It’s not clear to me what the difference in definition is - even reading the CS definition on Wikipedia, both cases reference the mathematical definition. What am I missing?
Right. If you think about it as a function of the state itself, the 2 definitions agree. If the function is `f(x, state) -> (y, state')`, then f is "imperitively idempotent" when `g(state) = f(fixedX, state).state'` is "mathematically idempotent"
Since I typically find short urls suspicious and frightening, especially in text messages from short phone numbers not in my contacts, this headline illustrates a third form of idempotentcy.
It's as if certain webmasters go out of their way to make URL shortener domains as sketchy as possible. I once saw something like virus-basket.biz.ru in an SMS and obviously didn't click it.
My corporate email got a msg which simply said few things, like Hi, Hello, blah blah blah, & then said, "to get hacked click here". The email was from mcrosoft (in the text, I didn't check any headers).
The generated URL domain (5z8.info) is blocked by OpenDNS (Umbrella) under the Web Spam category. I can't remember the last time something slipped past my own DNS filters to get blocked upstream.
- http://www.5z8.info/backyard-fireworks-disasters_w0v6qb_hitl...
- http://www.5z8.info/foreign-brides_a7s2us_begin-bank-account...
- http://www.5z8.info/stoleniphones_w7e4ro_whitepower
- http://www.5z8.info/gruesome-gunshot-wounds_f1u0dv_usb-hijac...