You may have noticed that some of your youtube links are a bit longer than you’ve seen before.
https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=4xDc5_c39H5gZEqM
Here’s whats going on. Google along with other companies have figured out a way to track resource sharing outside of their platform. That number at the end is sent back along with reference data courtesy of your browser in the form of user-agents and http reference fields. So they can reliably with a little guess-work find what computer accessed that resource.
For example: here are some source ids i’ve collected from my friends discord server over the last month
Youtube
?si=wJ0BawHIBjyA_2Oe
?si=3SbRGhjV336mhBcG
?si=tmKvmvaUOG2nh0D-
?si=Hc37xOJKkaHFKc2h
?si=H07IPxKs3ZS2vfPX
?si=ObkO56m7UbK75y98
?si=e0aYIKVJiLnYtNlA
?si=idwT1a5EiRJgK6ma
?si=nLJZO29DojLjgn0n
?si=O0DVwzNVkulrQULx
?si=blxECajnrvrERpnO
?si=rcgwx7jXnjuzHkPW
?si=jT0ifUb4tGOS_vyH
?si=fdfuTHhtauL_RBnJ
?si=jA5AH66plTBVvZdX
?si=gQ2NdY5F2TRF9Nbo
?si=z2ruBKeFCs9th7gw
?si=UNpKQgnmnu9AKAgv
?si=3UovfPJKVzh3UFzs
?si=eFKSrdFZbaAhUXCd
?si=rg_W6yyzsGJGxyyL
?si=49Kt2QyMcBuW7ftj
?si=aXozv3XzODmM-ZyS
?si=LzpH7Jeu1om7CDy-
?si=hYGjXduqP7quWyJE
?si=DiAO3F3914wlIQ38
?si=i8aIiTnmhAPVQXT8
?si=ZYq_N5nbldbdZmkd
?si=DS3xL4hDigN65oYe
?si=cl0FZ4AUb6ZWFivT
?si=QsqG8n-1WuPbpuHK
?si=1OZR2N8c--MLQxBY
?si=9KlyUcoGBtUH5C2a
?si=BI-UQhH57hRMg6DA
?si=igMAZaiILoTr7zG9
?si=7U9Cwuqne6pf8wVz
?si=S4jP0qGOsasSHsuT
?si=r7RHKF3meHd-V5Vo
?si=pBtXQWWKf1YjfEdk
?si=4RVxcLwGvBotlXUa
?si=n2HJrbJORZJ33KUp
?si=70UYsF4SVMCJcCBE
?si=C24nEVDUYhVBOMH0
?si=dZ0TZQZC3y2KIdtJ
?si=l4kbxfHkgz2UJ4yH
?si=ihIx6TkrIKJgT8E2
?si=Djt95c4IBOh6PMG_
?si=m55PRygwQEJzyNoD
?si=86iTHzp0EdFNWVv0
?si=nLJZO29DojLjgn0n
?si=Hgu9YRksul5tVLYE
?si=e1Cfv2w2axGgTXbK
?si=4uI5vX3mijDW2lO0
?si=7FJFRfH_LyklrKML
?si=O0DVwzNVkulrQULxSpotify
?si=d84e4e601b184040Youtube’s codes appear to be base64 encoding without padding. Just like their video ids. But unlike their video ids of 11 characters long, these are 16 characters long.
64 to the power of 16 is 7,92282 × 10^28 or 79 octillion possible codes!
That’s a bit overkill unless you mean to track every video share for the forseeable future.
Spotify seems to have gone a less drastic route with hexadecimal. Still 16 characters long, interestingly enough.
16 ^ 16 is 1,84467 × 10^19 or 18 quintillion. Plenty enough for all your tracking needs. (particularly if you recycle ’em)
not necessary
only on share links
?? only on shortened links (not)
started in august
Posted in an incompleate state More to come.