[Rd] New URL redirect checks

[Bob Rudis]

 I was going to offer my opine on security risks but some prominent R folks
tend to woefully inaccurately knee-jerk/react badly to my 25+ year expert
opinion on such things and create childish website verbiage to show their
lack of maturity (who knew random developers can become security experts
overnight with no training or experience?).

Allowing shorteners is a terrible, woefully insecure idea. I fully support
CRAN’s position.

I’d likely counsel any folks looking to move to R and CRAN packages to seek
Scala or Julia ecosystems instead if it were to be overturned.

But, hey, what do I know.

-boB

On Sep 16, 2020 at 5:50:52 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 16/09/2020 4:51 p.m., Simon Urbanek wrote:
>
> I can't comment for CRAN, but generally, shorteners are considered
> security risk so regardless of the 301 handling I think flagging those is a
> good idea. Also I think it is particularly bad to use them in manuals
> because it hides the target so the user has no idea what hey will get.
>
>
> I agree, and we do have \href{}{} in Rd files and similar in other
> formats for giving text of a link different than the URL if the URL is
> inconveniently long.  There's still a bit of a security issue though:
> the built in help browser (at least in MacOS) doesn't show the full URL
> when you hover over the link, as most browsers do.  So one could have
>
> \href{https://disney.org}{https://horrible.web.site}
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Simon
>
>
>
> > On Sep 17, 2020, at 5:35 AM, Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor using gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
>
> > Dear all,
>
> >
>
> > the new CRAN URL checks flag HTTP 301 redirects. While I understand
>
> > the intent, I think this is unfortunate, because several URL shortener
>
> > services use 301 redirects, and often a shorter URL is actually better
>
> > in a manual page than a longer one that can be several lines long in
>
> > the console and also potentially truncated in the PDF manual.
>
> >
>
> > Some example shorteners that are flagged:
>
> >
>
> >> db <- tools:::url_db(c("https://nyti.ms", "https://t.co/mtXLLfYOYE"),
> "README")
>
> >> tools:::check_url_db(db)
>
> > URL: https://nyti.ms (moved to https://www.nytimes.com/)
>
> > From: README
>
> > Status: 200
>
> > Message: OK
>
> >
>
> > URL: https://t.co/mtXLLfYOYE (moved to
>
> > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-47975564)
>
> > From: README
>
> > Status: 200
>
> > Message: OK
>
> >
>
> > ______________________________________________
>
> > R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
>
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
> >
>
>
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