[D-community-offtopic] (Fairly) new very long URLs on news.yahoo?

[Randy Kramer]

I'm glad this list exists, as I can ask questions like this, which I haven't 
found discussed anywhere else so far.  (I've tried googling.)

A number of questions:

Has anyone else noticed the very long URLs that are used (sometimes) on 
news.yahoo.com?

They are something like this (I've inserted \ to break the line into smaller 
pieces):

http://news.yahoo.com/things-watch-cpac-094500007.html;_ylt=Ao.ld\
Dd3JlqitJQDhqeoTg.s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNsNDVmbnNjBG1pdANUb3BTd\
G9yeSBGUARwa2cDMTdlYWJhN2UtYmUxZi0zOThmLWFhZWUtNzM3NzM1\
MDFmNWQ2BHBvcwMxBHNlYwN0b3Bfc3RvcnkEdmVyAzAwOWM3ODBhLT\
UzNDEtMTFlMS05NTA5LTMzOWVjZTFhZmEyNg--;_ylg=X3oDMTFvdnRqYzJ\
oBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANob21lBH\
B0A3NlY3Rpb25zBHRlc3QD;_ylv=3

It seems that a (truncated) link like:

http://news.yahoo.com/things-watch-cpac-094500007.html

... works perfectly fine to reference the story.

Depending on circumstances which I haven't figured out yet, sometimes when I 
click on a link, the target page comes up with just the shorter link, 
sometimes it comes up with the longer link (most often with the longer link).

I suspect that the longer link may have some sort of personally identifiable 
information encoded in it, because in experiments I've tried logging in to 
yahoo with two different IDs, that long string of characters differs.

I save a lot of links to my personal / private blog.  (Some parts are public, 
and I may make more public.)

My interests include the following:

   * finding a good address to write to yahoo and complain
   * finding a way to consistently click on a link and get the page to come up 
with the shorter link
   * and thus, being able to C&P the link to my blog without subsequent 
editing
   * maybe finding a way to modify klipper to automatically truncate such 
links before the first ;

Obviously, I could use a service like tinyurl to create a new smaller url, but 
that is not an acceptable solution for a few reasons.  (Among them, the url 
loses any meaning embedded in the original url, and now I have to worry about 
tinyurl going defunct, at which point the smaller urls would not work and 
have no clue to find the original URL.  (Yes, other information in my blog 
usually includes the title of the page and often quoted text, but, the 
tinyurl solution is just not what I'm looking for.)

So, any feedback is welcome!

Randy Kramer

PS: For some time, these long URLs have been limited to news.yahoo.com.  Now 
I'm starting to see them in shine.yahoo.com.  The last thing I want to see 
happen is to have them spread.

PPS: I guess I've noticed these long URLs on news.yahoo for the last 3 to 6 
months.  (That's just a guess.)