Comment by _flux
4 hours ago
Funny how how all the links, including the ones to their own pages, are routed through google.com/url, e.g. the link "Assets Available to Download". Usually tracking isn't quite this visible.
4 hours ago
Funny how how all the links, including the ones to their own pages, are routed through google.com/url, e.g. the link "Assets Available to Download". Usually tracking isn't quite this visible.
It's because their blog is hosted on blogger.com (yeah, weird decision), which is owned by Google and does that by default.
And when I click them I get a page with "Did you mean netflix.com? The site you just tried to visit looks fake. Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making small, hard-to-see changes to the URL." which then sends me to the Netfçix home page. Chrome on MacOS.
...how is that even possible?
It is very odd. I don’t see a good reason, not even tracking.
Aren't those just the URLs in google search results if you copy from the results page instead of clicking through to the destination?
The reason for the intermediary is because the clickthrough sends the previous URL as a referer to the next server.
The only real way to avoid leaking specific urls from the source page to the arbitrary other server is to have an intermediary redirect like this.
All the big products put an intermediary for that reason, though many of them make it a user visible page of that says "you are leaving our product" versus Google mostly does it as an immediate redirect.
The copy/paste behavior is mostly an unfortunate side effect and not a deliberate feature of it.
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