h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Trawling through some older pre-Rupert threads I noticed that links in posts were http://www.h2g2.com/

Now, using a digibox you can only access a limited number of sites (namely BBC and CNN). We're stuck behind TeleWest's walled garden, so I was quite surprised to see the above link actually work on the digibox. How this is done and could it be be used to access other sites?

Sorry kow, this isn't the droid you're looking for. The magic is taking place when the link is displayed not after fooling a digibox. So although the text still looks like the original link, the software actually translates the URL to be http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/

It is a bit like all those links where someone tries to force you to use their skin but some code was added to make the real URL under the link text go to your own skin.

Ah, thanks SEF. I guess I'd just better keep looking then.

I wonder what one of the SSO redirections would do? It might be rather nasty of course (locking up the digibox) and the BBCi team may have fixed the "feature" already. So even if it worked now it couldn't be relied on to exist in another week.

There's only one way to find what it would do I suppose.

Well tell me a URL which you can't normally reach then and I'll try to make you a dodgy link for it. NB I am not guaranteeing in the slightest that this will work.

Yahoo or google would be good places to start I guess (msn isn't digibox friendly at all). It either works or it doesn't, if it does great, if it doesn't at least we'll know.

OK, dodgy link coming up (it got me there on testing preview):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/signon/mainscript.pl?service=h2g2&ptrt=http://www.google.com/search

No luck with that one, 403 error which is the code for TW's lovely little firewall. The only redirection that worked was for Betsie (which usually doesn't on the digibox) http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/education/betsie/parser.pl/005/www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/ and I suspect that only works because it redirects to a link that does work with the digibox.

Thanks for trying though.

Oh that takes me to the Betsie error page stating: Not on safe list.
It must be this one that works: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/education/betsie/parser.pl/1102/www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2