I hate that Google is exerting even more control on the internet with their TLD, but I don’t really think this attack is made all that much worse with .zip TLD. I can already bury a .com in a long URL and end it in .zip just fine like so:

https://github.com∕foo∕bar∕[email protected]/foo/bar/baz.zip

Or even use a subdomain to remove the @:

https://github.com∕foo∕bar∕baz.example.com/foo/bar/baz.zip

The truth is most people don’t look much at URLs outside of a domain to verify its authenticity, at which point the .zip TLD does not do much more harm than existing domains do.

For mitigation, Firefox already doesn’t display the username portion of the URL on hover of a link and URL-encodes it if copy-pasted into the url bar. It also displays the punycode representation when hovering or navigating to the second example.

Edit: looks like lemmy now replaces 0x2215 which is a character that looks like forward slash with an actual forward slash, so my comment is a bit more confusing. For clarity, the slashes before example.com in the above urls were 0x2215 and not “/”.

If I super heat a metal and it turns visibly red what is happening? Was it already emitting infrared and as it gets hotter the frequency shifts up? Or is it still emitting infrared but has a wider band of frequencies it is emitting as well (i.e. is it emitting frequencies below infrared as well as visible red)?

I just tried subscribing to [email protected], but it’s empty despite the peer tube channel having many videos. Any idea what’s going on?

There’s no way of knowing, which is the whole problem with their model and why a lot of us self host things in the first place. Even if they super duper promise not to use the data, they could be lying. And if they are actually true to their word today, that could change tomorrow.

The way I remember the order is that the parentheses around the link would make grammatical sense outside of markdown (the goal of markdown is to still be fully readable even when looking at the raw source).

For example if I were posting on a forum that didn’t have markdown support which one of these would make more sense:

1. You can find that on this lemmy instance (https://lemmy.world).
2. You can find that on (this lemmy instance) https://lemmy.world.

Option 2 makes no sense grammatically. Then you just need to use the square brackets (which rarely show up in non-markdown text) to denote the link range.

Alternatively, if you still have a hard time remembering the order, you can use reference-style links which make it even more readable outside of markdown rendered contexts (note that there are no parentheses in this version, nothing to get confused):

[Here is a link][1] and [here is another link][2].

[1]: http://example.org
[2]: http://example.com