Re: [PLUG] OT: iTerm2 Leaks Everything You Hover in Your Terminal via DN

Re: [PLUG] OT: iTerm2 Leaks Everything You Hover in Your Terminal via DNS Requests

I can't think of any solution that doesn't involve context sensitive parsing of all input and output in the terminal that could highlight all valid URLs and not invalid ones. If you try to parse using regex, you will highlight every single file or path on the screen. Even using the DNS lookup approach, there is no way that would work properly. Does iTerm highlight URLs with an IP address instead of hostname? Also, a DNS query doesn't help determine if there is a web server at that hostname, only if it has an IP address.

The real question we should be asking is: Why would anybody want to click a link in their terminal emulator? The only time anybody needs to use a mouse in their terminal is to copy or paste, and having clickable links (that do what? open a browser? who would want that functionality?) would only impede that goal.

On the command line we have pipes and redirects and text streams, adding web browser functionality has no benefits.

This is hilarious though. I can't wait to tell all my coworkers.

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 2:47 AM, PaulNM <plug@paulscrap.com> wrote:

On 09/20/2017 02:22 PM, Thomas Delrue wrote:

On Wednesday, September 20, 2017 11:16:31 AM EDT JP Vossen wrote:

To avoid creating dead links by using inaccurate string pattern matching
algorithms, the feature would make a DNS request instead, and determine
if that domain actually existed.

WHY, why would you farm this out to the cloud (i.e. "someone else's
computer")? We have more processing power in our pocket than the entire world
had available in the 70's and URL parsing is farmed out to the cloud? :|

To be fair it wasn't about determining valid urls, but whether or not there was a responding site at said url.

That said, I agree the whole concept was idiotic. Requiring an internet connection to highlight urls is silly. Doing parsing in real time instead of once while the file/text/whatever is loaded/typed is even dumber. You don't want to waste the user's time by making it look like the link may be working, so instead you make them have to move the mouse all over the place before you check things?

-- PaulNM

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