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elrido / ZeroBin

This Project has been renamed and moved to
https://github.com/PrivateBin/PrivateBin
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Will this project support URL Shortening? #58

Closed Nhoya closed 8 years ago

Nhoya commented 8 years ago

Hey guys, i'm glad you started working on ZeroBin, but a think not so User Friendly (since the first ZeroBIn) is the URL generation, will you work on a new way or will you implement some URL shortening?

Hexalyse commented 8 years ago

URL shortening is not possible on Zerobin, since the longest part of the URL is the decoding-key that is after the # (ie. the anchor part of the URL that is not taken into account by URL shorteners. And if it were, it would cause some security problems too).

nitmir commented 8 years ago

Like this http://bf.uk.to/N or this http://past.is/zpnbl or this https://goo.gl/KbMBXy ? wink wink

A lot of url shortener take into account the anchor part.

I personally do not think this should be part of ZeroBin, let people free to use any URL shortener, if they do no care to share the cyphering key.

Hexalyse commented 8 years ago

Yes, and as I say : Google now knows the decrypting part of the URL. So it basically renders the "encrypted" part of Zerobin useless. wink wink Better use pastebin directly if you want to give your data to companies :)

PS: yes you could use the password feature of ZeroBin, but... why use Zerobin if you then give the complete URL to URL shortening services ? I myself never even paste an URL in cleartext if it does not use the password feature.

Nhoya commented 8 years ago

at least a self-hosted shortening service will solve the problem

Hexalyse commented 8 years ago

Yes... "if your users trust your shortening service". Because if you possess both encrypted data and decyphering key, then again, it defeats the purpose of Zerobin that was that the service owner has ZERO knowledge of the data hosted. If you have the key somewhere on your system, then you can decypher the data and see everything the users post.

Just.... URL hosting/shortening and ZeroBin does not mix well. If you use url shortening, then it's the same thing as using any other pastebin-like service.

nitmir commented 8 years ago

I self host my instance of ZeroBin, sometimes, I value the encrypted part, sometime not. I do not plan to self host another paste just for that case. As I also self host my url shortener, I generally do not give my pastes to "companies" anyway.

Hexalyse commented 8 years ago

Well, seems perfectly fine use case. As you said, the best is to let people use an URL shortening service if they want... it's not very relevant to implement it into Zerobin itself.

Nhoya commented 8 years ago

Yes... "if your users trust your shortening service". Because if you possess both encrypted data and decyphering key, then again, it defeats the purpose of Zerobin that was that the service owner has ZERO knowledge of the data hosted. If you have the key somewhere on your system, then you can decypher the data and see everything the users post.

Just.... URL hosting/shortening and ZeroBin does not mix well. If you use url shortening, then it's the same thing as using any other pastebin-like service.

As described here the problem of trust or not trust is to be consider too on the ZeroBin structure so, i think is not a big probelm the shortner

elrido commented 8 years ago

I personally would not use an URL shortener on the basic principle that it is unnecessary, redundant and if you care for that, even bad for SEO. The only place I ever saw the value for it was on twitter or identi.ca. But twitter now has such a service built in, so not even there it is of use anymore.

Apart from this personal opinion of mine and the points mentioned above, I would not be against integrating such a feature as a (non default) option.

How exactly would you, @Nhoya, imagine it to work technically? There doesn't seem to be a standard for this. Here are some examples I found:

So we would need to maintain different code per supported URL shortener. Or we could offer a very simple variant, were you could configure a generic URL and the ZeroBin link would be appended as the last (URL encoded) parameter value similar to the snipurl example from the earlier commit.

Nhoya commented 8 years ago

I think a config file where the manteiner can insert the URL request will be good, but if we want to talk more about "trusting" actually we should point on Yourls that is one of the shortner more used and self-hosted

elrido commented 8 years ago

Ok, thanks for the feedback. I'll try to add such an optional "send the generated URL to this shortener URL" feature next weekend.

elrido commented 8 years ago

Sorry, took me a week longer then expected. Was a bit short on time during last weekend.