Re: RDi Hub Wiki open for contributions

On 27-May-2014 11:30 -0500, Charles Wilt wrote:

On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 12:17 PM, Briggs, Trevor wrote:

Well, of course, bit.ly is blocked on our network as well, as it
seems ibm.biz is too. I can see why these shortcut sites are
blocked as opening them up would be tantamount to allowing access
to the whole interweb. <<SNIP>>

Not really...the shortcut sites aren't proxying the requests or
anything. They simply redirect your browser to the original. Thus
your browser is still making a request to the original URL.

If your network blocks facebook.com, using a shortcut to it isn't
going to get around that.

The only reason to block the shortcut that I can see is that it's
easier to hide a nefarious URL, thus more users are apt to click on
them.

The Tiny URL preview feature helps with that...

I had long used the Google Translate feature [and a prior similar service] to /translate/ [the text at] a URL, thus making google.com an effective proxy, to bypass various attempts [by the effective ISP] to block sites or content. But when I tried visiting translate.google.com to do that today as a test, before replying here, I am no longer able to use that successfully; I believe I had actually noticed that the feature had been defunct for me since the end of last year. However...

I searched the web to see if anyone had documented that technique. No surprise, I was not unique in recognizing the capability. Some results document that and several other techniques; the search:
<https://www.google.com/search?&q="google+translate"+"translate+url"+"as+a+proxy";>

One sample from the above results <http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-proxy-server/28112/> showed using Google Translate, and their example functioned quite well for me [regardless of my prior technique no longer being fruitful]. The following produces what I would have expected to appear after setting-up the translate options on the page at that domain [without the extra data on the URI] and clicking the /translate/ on the page:
<http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&http://example.com/>

Effectively the same details as the above labnol.org sample, except noting also the possibility to get data from Google Cache:
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/feeds-and-syndication/shWt3BWABTM>

And FWiW I verified my recollection, that a bit.ly URL is recognized as a redirect, and thus the Google Translate gives feedback about that, yet gets and /translates/ the final page. However that capability may be moot in this case, because the /translate/ feature seems unable to deal with the IBM DeveloperWorks wiki links whether or not there is a redirecting service involved; i.e. an error or a blank page, for me. I did not test any other means presented as possible means for a proxy.