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Do Tiny URL Services Weaken Net Architecture?
Indus Khaitan writes "Thanks to twitter, SMS, and mobile web, a lot of people are using the url minimizers like tinyurl.com, urltea.com. However, now I see a lot of people using it on their regular webpages. This could be a big problem if billions of different links are unreachable at a given time. What if a service starts sending a pop-up ad along with the redirect. What if the masked target links to a page with an exploit instead of linking to the new photos of Jessica Alba. Are services like tinyurl, urltea etc. taking the WWW towards a single point of failure? Is it a huge step backward? Or I'm just crying wolf here?"
Such hacker services are intimately and irrevocably linked with the dangerous idea of so-called "Poxie servers". These are highly illegal hacker tools which enable terrorists, spies, rap stars and other "free-thinkers" to hide their subversive activities from the FBI. As I learned from comments to that well-written and informative article, the worst offender is a nebulous and troubling underground program which goes by the shadowy name of "Apache".
So, what can we do against this, the greatest threat to our great nation in these post 9/11 times? Well, I have a modest proposal. We must impose our will by bringing in the death penalty for heinous hacker crimes and ban tools such as 'Linux' and 'Mozilla' which only have one purpose. You are either with us, or against us.
Let's say I had a service that would shrink a given domain name to a sequence of eight base-64 symbols. This gives me sixty-four to the power of eight different unique names.
That's 281,474,976,710,656 different unique names that can point to somewhere on the web. Even if each eight-character shrunken name was assigned permanently then it is difficult to see how you could ever run out of names.
So in short the answer is that these name shortening services are not going to damage the web - provided the links they provide are permanent.
Another thing to chew on is what service does Google provide? To me, it's the ultimate URL shrinker. I remember one domain, www.google.com, and then from there I can go to anywhere else through a search-able database of links.
Has Google damaged the web? I think the benefits out-weigh the problems. Search Engine Optimisation firms are damaging the semantics of the web in reaction to the power of the search engine but there can be no doubt that far more sites get exposure because of search engines than without them. On the whole, I'm willing to deal with Google spammers because the quality of the links is still high in-spite of them.
URL shrinking services are the same. They have benefits and drawbacks. If you're listening to web-radio, it's far easier to give a shrunken URL which your listeners can jot down in a few seconds than spend thirty-seconds on a much larger URL.
With shrunken URLs everyone wins! If you're not interested in the URL, that section of air-time is done within a few seconds. If you want to go to the URL, you have less to write down and less chance of making an error.
The drawback is that the URL has no semantic meaning. I personally think the semantic meaning is less important than getting the URL out there.
Simon
If your security software doesn't take this into account, then you need to change your security software. I mean, what if someone made a popular web page, and then changed it to redirect to a malware infector website?
Stop the brainwash
With tinyURL, you can preview the URL before you open it. Example: http://preview.tinyurl.com/87d. Just add the "preview." as a subdomain to the "tinyurl.com".
So yeah, you are crying wolf.
:(){
http://tinyurl.com/preview.php I've had it turned on since the days of people hiding goatse.cx behind TinyURLs.
indeed
This also weakens Google pagerank.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Nobody knows how long exactly the service is made available. Please do some long-term thinking before using this, esp. in public forums. More than once, I couldn't follow those stupid mini URLs for whatever reason. They're just bad. More criticism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL#Criticism.
Have you ever seen a SharePoint URL? I've yet to see one less than like 200 characters... tinyurl.com is used because its such a cluster. Once again... Microsoft forgetting about those tiny details.
I'm not sure why you'd put a tinyurl on a web page, where you could just embed the URL in a link using href, like this (oh, the temptation to link to goatse was great, but I resisted). Even if the URL had been enormous, it would not have changed the size of the "like this" hyperlink, and the full URL would have remained embedded in the page.
The only place where I use tinyurls is when I want to send links to people in e-mail, the recipients might not all be using HTML-based mail programs (or webmail), so the clickable link solution might not work, and the original URL is large and might get broken into multiple lines. Plus, when I send a tinyurled link, I always say what it is and swear to the recipients that it's not goatse or a Rick Roll. Well, unless it is a Rick Roll, of course, but my favorite (OK, only) Rick Roll target has e-mail that can receive hyperlinks, and I find more clever ways to surprise him.
Tempest in a teapot.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
If that thing is broken then don't use it. Moreover, exactly how frequent does anyone use one of those tinyurls or any equivalent service? Personally I do not even know when it was the last time I clicked on one of those.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
The web is made of trillions of dead links right now. As it is I have to change some bookmarks because the authors have changed their websites and don't allow linking to certain sections. Whole websites go offline. Domain names expire. forums change. Even if it is nothing more than on a new server, Data is constantly moving on the internet.
If you expect all information to stay exactly where it was 5 years ago then you have misunderstood the web.
Mod me down if you wish, but if you can't tell the difference then you will never know the difference.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
A Firefox plugin that recognises a TinyURL (etc) and then uses a popup to identify in a tooltip the actual URL and title of the webpage. - ~~~~
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Actually I don't click those "tiny" links. I mean you don't know where you are going and who knows if it is one of those worthless "get a free ps3" referal systems! I mean I just don't give others the chance to get points!
Codefile Defected to another Hexadimal Range refresh your CHAOSTACK.NLM file with a new copy
Hi,
Because of the possibly fragile/temporary nature of such links, and because rogues might hide behind them, I refuse to by or sell Google ads (on AdSense or AdWords) in my normal course of business that use a TinyURL or other redirector. I want you know who the buyer/seller is before potentially damaging my reputation by association with someone who won't even use a 'real' URL...
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
The problem will be if the sites that redirect that URL go out of business or are unreachable for any reason. Then all of the URLs are broken. It would be like a a section of DNS melting. What would be even worse is if the URL redirect site never came back online. Its a risk for people using the service.
.cn. It has to apply to lots of other sites, but I haven't done any experimenting. Still, all those sites are junk. They just clutter up the search engines.
However, the latest problem I am seeing a lot of is scraper sites (that immediately redirect) from China. A couple more of them pop up every day and all they are doing is trying to lure clicks via a search engine, then redirect the websurfer to a hostile/ad-laden page when they click on the link.
I noticed it when somebody brought it to my attention about my site, but the practice has to be systematic. Try going to Google and search for "badmovies.org" entries in the last 24 hours. Bet you see a lot of obvious junk sites that end in
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
Are services like tinyurl, urltea etc. taking the WWW towards a single point of failure? Is it a huge step backward? Or I'm just crying wolf here?"
That I've seen, very few people put permanant links in TinyURL (or similar) form on their web pages. When making an actual link, the length doesn't much matter.
People use these shortened links as a short-term length reducer for mediums such as email or blogs (while you could argue both have some degree of permanance, the vast majority of them fade into obscurity within a month). In that sense, even if TinyURL went down for good, it would cause almost no problems - A few thousand people might, if they cared enough to bother, resend the link using a different shortening service.
As for ads or malware - I would point out that you can have legitimate sites, with full-form URLs, annoy you with ads or fall to an attack and serve malware for a few hours. But if you worry that much about it - Just don't use shortened links. Simple as that.
...whichever part of the corporate email system that decides to stick hard line-breaks in. At 80 columns. Our staff send emails with long URLs, people complain they can't get to the page, the link gets reposted as a tinyurl...
If the tinyurl people put a timelimit on the short link it wouldn't be so bad, since people would know it was purely temporary and so wouldn't use them in permanent situations...
Need a perl script that 'de-tiny's your web pages - goes through the HTML files, looks for tinyurls, queries to find the real target, and edits the page.... Ah, except nobody's web page is a bunch of static HTML anymore.... But you get the idea!
Bad webpage designers will get what they deserve in the event of a catastrophic failure.
Good webpage designers will not be adversely affected; it may even help to get some of the crap of the Web.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Do URL shrinkers make matters worse? Maybe. But on the other side the web has always been a single-point-of-failure architecture. If the webserver hosting your content is down, your content is no longer reachable on the net. Things get worse when you only have only a few webserver/provider that are hosting stuff, youtube, facebook, myspace and friends host a ton of content, if they ever go down, you lose a whole bunch of content. Sure, they have plenty of redundancy and are pretty stable so its unlikely to happen for longer periods of time. But you still hand over a hell of a lot of control to a tiny few companies.
Solution? Turn the web into something where you refer to content instead of servers. Request documents by their MD5/SHA1/whatever checksum and whatever server has that piece of content sends it to you. You no longer have a single point of failure. Freenet, Bittorrent and a bunch of other P2P tools are already doing it in one way or another, because it is simply a more failsafe and faster way to handle content distribution. The days where everybody had his own little webserver are long over and it might be time to start addressing this issue on a big scale.
We should never have needed services like TinyURL. But certain insane webmasters went nuts and started creating URLs that were just way too long. All web sites should use only short and reasonable URLs with the path name part limited to no more than 12 characters. Shorter domain names and shorter email addresses would help, too.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I don't believe they necessarily weaken the net architecture, seeing as how they are essentially the same as how the net was built in the first place. I mainly view them as a shortcut for people who don't know how to use an href tag or for people who don't understand copy/paste (the ones who think you need to retype the whole url into the address bar if it's not linkified). One semi-legitimate use I can think of is forums (or email clients) that add spaces/line breaks to raw addresses that aren't contained in an href tag (hello slashdot!).
This guy's the limit!
I use curio.us for my small links.
Sure, but they state on their website that a TinyURL "never expires", so what is the problem? :-)
It won't happen to you, relax.
How ironic -- as of this writing, the urltea service is down. Slashdotted?
Doesn't make any sense whatsoever if it's in an "A" tag. Can put any name on that anchor where people can click.
By the time one generates the tinyurl, one pasts it in the html code.
It's good for telling it somebody over the phone or in a hard copy document - the 6-something characters are much easier to copy off than the long links. That's short term use - anyone putting it in a web page is lazy and asking for trouble.
They're not used as much as you think, only for asininely long links.
I hate sigs.
You should know better.
Deleted
Who are the primary users of tinyurl.com? Professionals? Corporations? No. Generally, it's a userbase very similar to the MySpace, YouTube, chat, and fan site userbases, and the world will not end if those links are broken. Well, except maybe for some nerds waiting in anticipation for the next batch of Britney Spears beach pics.
OK. So what if a corporation or government office is using tinyurl? Fire the IT staff. Do it now.
Last point. If you have a web host and you control the domain (or the path on the domain), it's rather easy to simulate tinurl. Example:
www.blahblahblah123.com/orders/products/listing/1/AYZHEKF/view.cgi?blah=blah&blah=blah&blah=blah&blah=blah.....
map to
www.blahblahblah123.com/1
use an Apache redirect, document.location = $url, or meta-refresh tag.
Camping on quad since 1996.
I think people are forgetting about printed computer magazines - e.g. Linux Journal, APC, etc. They have a restricted column magazine format, and they often use TinyURLs when publishing links.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The article is crying about a situation which does not exist. People aren't using TinyURL and consorts, they use regular URL's. Regardless of whether it's on personal webpages, or online fora, or IRC, I've never seen any of these "tiny" URL's. (Except on Slashdot, where one dares not click them. Perhaps Submitter-san has lurked on Slashdot too long and forgot that there's more to the Internet?)
I used to work for a large company providing technical support. Unfortunately the company I worked for was probably one of the worst offenders of having exorbantly large URLs for even the smallest of things. As a result it didn't take long before many coworkers began creating and providing these tinyUrl's to give to customer's over the phone, and initially the action was supported by the company. However before long the practice was put to a complete halt not because of the potential that the tinyURL would lead to a goatse page or anything of that sort, but because every link created and clicked on by our technical support agents and customers provided TinyURL with a tracking of what was being viewed and accessed (and possibly refferenced). Suddenly making for a great way to harvest and collect marketting data. And even if it's not a practice currently being used, the parent company of TinyURL appears to be far from highly stable, finacially secure company. (Though this is conjecture mainly based on website design and actual market that they target)
-- Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
Add tinyurl-like service to EACH web server (at least to the good ones...) Each user, external and internal will be able to add url to this mapping, as long as on the site (with some integrity checking) It can be used automatically when compiling a page with many pointers to other pages in the site (with queries, etc.)
This will solve the single-point-of-failure problem, and also will keep the URLs more "readable", at least the domain-name part.
Of course, that means that no short URL's handled by this service can be accessed anymore.
I use a tiny url in an email, temporary web page, on irc, etc., somewhere that I'll get feedback or otherwise find out from the receives that its not doing what is expected. Then I know and the receivers knows.....NOT TO USE IT ANYMORE!
...oh wait they do.... http://rafb.net/paste
When there is enough call for a clean tinyurl service, many of them will pop up. Divide and overcome the unexpected..
For such things as IRC such as for code development, ie freenode python, I'd imagine the network would enable some sort of tinyurl
Site wise, there is nothing stopping a site from providing such a tinyurl service to its users. For example, you visit a message forum and for use in the message forum you have such a service or method, ohhhh wait, there is a universal one.... it uses html to do it, like using html here on slashdot for example wordurl using "a href=".....
Since there are so many ways to do this tiny url idea and at various levels of control is there really a problem?
That is what he is talking about, NOT urls you get from verbal sources, presumably the verbol source for a shortened url would make sure that that url is valid when it is broadcast.
He is talking about links that are on the web itself, where there is ZERO need to make a url short. Your browser doesn't care how long the url is in the link you click on and for the poster there is an extra step involved in creating the short url so why bother?
tinyurl is a tool but some tend to use tools to fix problems that don't need fixing. If you build your website out of tinyurl links you got issues. It is not how the net is supposed to work.
Take slashdot, why on earth should the links in a story go via tinyurl? It creates extra data, it stops people from inspecting the url at a glance and for what?
The web already breaks down because so many sites keep changing the way their pages are organised so that old links don't work anymore. Try finding stuff that is a couple of years old, you start running headlong into the dead link mess. Not because the site itself is gone, but the site no longer can handle the requested url.
Why add another layer of complexity?
Use shortened urls when you got to give them verbally, but if the url is distruted across the net in the first place, what on earth is the point of shortening it?
Remember, if everyone uses tinyurl, all that needs to happen is that these servers go down for some reason and BOOM, there goes the internet.
Very smart people went out of their way to make DNS truly robuust and host multiple servers around the world to make sure the internet works, and then some idiots think that they should add another unneeded layer on top run by a tiny company?
Oh and another thing, most radio shows simply tell people to go to their own site and then click on the second story to get a url out there. What is an easier url Myradio.com read the second story OR tinyurl.com/3yaodz The myradio url will have been broadcasted countless times already as parts of the promo, in the case of webradio it is how you found the bloody radio in the first place.
With tinyurl you have to introduce a completly new url followed by a meaningless string. Yup, that is much easier.
No, the tool has its uses, but just because you got a hammer does not mean everything becomes a nail.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
. . . And what if people rely on MySpace.com for their entire email, communications and contact services, thereby relegating their entire existence to a single third party point of failure!
Oh wait . . .
Should we be similarly worried about DNS services? Maybe I should stop being so dependent on www.google.com...time to browse to 72.14.207.99.
I don't really see this as a big deal.
If I need to give a semi-long to long URL to someone where they'll have to properly type it in, these services are great. Their future usability doesn't matter. In cases where the URL is being posted digitally, I can't imagine how shortening the URL would ever be worth the chance of breakage it introduces. They're also a PITA because others don't easily know where it leads. Sure, there are ways to find out, but they are never as simple as mousing over the link as works in any browser for a normal URL.
I miss 1997 when the internet was a geeky thing... Go away everyone!!!
I like fat chicks, you insensitive clod!
if people don't want their URLs shrunk (by some service that may be down, or at least bottlenecked, on any particular day) they should write concise URLs.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Perhaps the OP had semantic, human-readable URLs in mind, but I actually think he's referring to an issue that I haven't seen touched on in comments here.. what happens if the TinyURL service changes their business model, or even goes out of business? At that point, the nature of every link that is filtered through them is changed.. or just simply broken.
If every link went through a smallified-URL-redirection service, and then that service was shut off.. bam, no more intarweb (until everyone could recode their links, of course).
- CB
what, what?
These services are pretty useful for sneaking links past automated link censorship systems. The example I most commonly encounter is users who want to embed content on their myspace pages from sites like imeem.com, which is apparently such a threat to the myspace monopoly that you can't even mention the text 'imeem.com' on myspace. So people use it to make the imeem media players work on myspace (of course they have to use a service other than TinyURL because that's also banned by myspace for this reason). Now that's a pretty tame example, there are probably more important sites where the links get censored for information control reasons, so at least against one type of automated censorship the short URL services help strengthen the interner.
I'm pretty sure that when Google indexes pages with known URL-shortening-links that it keeps track of both the shortened URL and the destination. They probably do this mainly for link tracking purposes, but if TinyURL ever shut down they could use this info to create a service that can keep TinyURL links working (probably just built into the Google Toolbar).
In the beginning, URLs generally had some logic to them, you could get some understanding of the site from the URL, and by doing so, you could remember the URL.
:-)
Then we got into things like Active Server Pages and generated content, moving on to today's web where most content on most sites is managed by this massive complex back-end system. As a result, URLs are these butt-ugly sequences of random characters that are hard to use, hard to type, hard to remember.
If TinyURLs weaken Net architecture, then I'd say it's time to let -that- net architecture collapse. We're getting the web we deserve
dave
Why do all these Ask Slashdot posts make the assumption that there can only be one of some technology? I haven't seen any websites where all links were to tinyurl.com, but it's already killed the Intarwebs with this person.
Are doors ruining climbing out of windows in modern houses? Are the comb/brush lobbies stifling bed-head from becoming the next hot fashion look? The sun rose this morning, is this the end of all nights forever?
Isn't tinyurl performing a redirect to the actual (long) URL ? :).
Google or some other crawler would index the redirected page so really nothing bad happens.
If such a service inserts malware during the redirect, people would probably stop using it.
Hyperlinks on web pages don't live long anyway - a link is probably relevant for a year or so.
So in my opinion there's nothing to cry wolf about.
I think Ajax/Flash only sites are a greater risk to the indexed/hyperlinked web structure as we know it, but that will probably sort itself out as it always does on the net
You know, you didn't link the most important part of the article, the new Jessica Alba photos.
There, I got them here for you: http://tinyurl.com/6qdym
Or are we scraping the bottom of the barrel here?
I use http://isk.nu/ its the shortest lenght one I've found so far.
Huge URL.
Apparently, the author of those informative articles on Linux and Mozilla, Tristan Shuddery, had lately fallen from favor with God and other people posting on the same blog. In fact, Mr. Shuddery is now literally at the top of God's people hitlist ("God wants them dead because they harm America!"). But God's people still "feel compelled to pray for the soul of the treacherous and traitorous Tristan J. Shuddery" even though they "feel as if even You would be willing to let Satan keep him".
I am just not good enough at these people's twisted logic, but as a naive reader it leaves me wondering if the earlier "godly" exposures of OSS movement by Mr. Shuddery were really coming from God or not?
Big URL are usually broken in most email clients. When you want to communicate an URL ina printed form, shot URL becames handy. Regarding see it them as a SPF, I think we need a free script to install it in our own webserver.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
Personally when I post / send a link I put both in the message: the real one and the shortened one.
If the real one does not work (e.g., because of wrapping), people can still get to the destination. Of course if they don't trust me they can simply copy and paste the wrapped URI into their browser manually.
Generally I find that URIs can be about 72 characters before start being hard to e-mail and IM. The real solution is for links to be non-crappy: anything that has huge ranges of hex characters or UUIDs is dumb. Anything with the CMS' name it is is also silly, e.g., store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore: if the hostname is "store.apple.com" then "AppleStore" is redundant, do you really need "1-800...", or to have "WebObjects"?
If you're in charge of your company's web presence and you have crappy URIs then you're incompetent and should be fired.
What if a service starts sending a pop-up ad along with the redirect. What if the masked target links to a page with an exploit instead of linking to the new photos of Jessica Alba. Are services like tinyurl, urltea etc. taking the WWW towards a single point of failure?
What if the tinyurls start coming to life and jumping out of our computer monitors and strangling us? And then they recruit the help of Terminator robots from the future? And then the entire planet explodes due to death ray?
More seriously: As long as they work fine, people will use them. When they start not working fine, people will stop using them. That's all there is to it.
Comment of the year
So instead of emailing him this:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&r ls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=C1m&q=you+just+ can%27t+believe+me+when+I+show+you+what+you+cannot+see&b tnG=Search&meta=
I just dump it into tinyURL with this as the result:
http://tinyurl.com/2sr7kh
Frankly, the tiny URL is fine. I'm not worried about the tiny URL going to a page that no longer exists - heck - the web is a very mercurial thing, and pages come and go at the drop of a hat.
I think TFA is henny penny garbage.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I view URL's as API calls to remote systems, all that URL shrinking services do is wrap that function call into a format that's easier to type from a cell phone or IM session. So, as they are currently implemented - no, these services do not weaken 'net architecture.
However, like an API wrapper they do include the possibility of creating side effects on call, e.g. the potential for abuse exists. So what? Everything on the 'net has the potential to be abused. And if your favorite URL shrinking service starts behaving badly, it's not like it would take more than a day or two to write your own replacement.
I personally don't see what is so wrong with URL biting services. Sure, some may exploit them to no good end, but really, the benefits outweigh any possible detriments as I see it.
If your site is vunerable, it's going to be vunerable no matter what. Anyone with access to a configurable Apache server can create all kinds of crazy redirects to your site, and sophisticated ones too. I don't think anyone looking to do such a major exploit would think of relying on urlbit.us or tinyurl.com.
So, it seems to me that this particular concern is quite a wash, at the very least.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Since those urls are mostly gotten from verbal sources (where the need for short urls is more pronounced), this problem would be solved if only tinyurl refused to redirect you if you came from another webpage (i.e. the referer header was not blank). Why they should do that, though, is a whole other discussion.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Slightly related to the concern for web architecture: it seems that Flash destroys the textuality/interoperability of the web. Given an all-Flash interface, Google or anyone else can no longer parse your document to establish the citation-like links between pages or parse your content. Which is fine, I guess, if you don't want anyone to do that, which amounts to converting all your pages into images. But it essentially turns web pages into standalone programs, in which case you cannot examine their connections or content in a larger scope.
TinyURL only answers a need; the problem is with the web site authors themselves. People only need to create short URLs when the source URL is too messy.
Slashdot (although far from the worst offender) could start a trend here; instead of the cryptic and messy:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/18/1319201
what about:
http://slashdot.org/article1319201.html
Not only is that shorter, it also communicates that it is meant to be permanent and archival because it doesn't have query parameters.
is he using the right context at all? I thought "crying wolf" means lying to someone with a hidden motive and not "just speculating" or "being a little paranoid what might happen next".
No, long URLs weaken web architecture. -Carl
The problem I see is that search engines use links to determine and provide relevant search results. If everyone starts using TinyURLs then the main ingredient for a relevant search return could be lost.
I think the best way to handle tiny urls is to expire them and then email the creator before they expire and allow them to opt to extend them for some period of time. If thy are not extending then they are removed. If you couple that with limiting the length of urls via standards this would be a nonissue.
I've been doing some thinking about tinyurl-like services lately, and I've since implemented WhenGuard, one such service with a time twist. WhenGuard is a content timing service that automatically publishes and unpublishes any Internet content using a time-sensitive URL alias. This alias is known as a just-in-time link, or a jitlink.
Bloggers, music bands, educators and anyone who wants to hold time-sensitive information until a certain time, or to invalidate it after a certain time has passed, can create jitlinks to alias that content and distribute the jitlinks ahead of time to anyone who might be interested. Jitlinks can be used for RSS content as well. If you create a jitlink that publishes and unpublishes around an RSS feed, such as a Twitter feed, you've essentially spliced a 'show' out of an RSS 'channel'. If you combine this with a perpetually caching RSS reader like Google Reader, you've in effect created TiVo for RSS.
Please check out WhenGuard and send some feedback my way from here. I'd be very grateful indeed!
What if... What if... What if someone puts any kind of malicious code at urchin.js (from Google Analytics)? It's been run by billions of users all over the web! Wow, just imagine.
No political analysis is complete without a dash of mind-reading, though it's obviously a tricky business. For example, nothing the Bush regime has said about the motive for the invasion of Iraq stands up to any scruitiny, so we're left with nothing but speculation as to they whys and wherefores.
We know politicians don't always say precisely what they think so predicting future behavior by looking at surface meanings isn't adequate (look up "dog-whistle politics" some time).
For example: I would contend that Hillary Clinton is essentially a pro-war Democrat, and Barack Obama is essentially anti-war -- but you can find statements where Hillary is at least trying to moderate her pro-war stance and you will look in vain for Barack Obama saying "bring 'em home now".
I'm tempted to make this my new .sig:
Its pathetic, and it only undermines legitimate debate. America is worse off because of pussies like you. You should be ashamed of yourself. -- "Anonymous Coward" of slashdot.org
Call me stupid, but why not just have the tiny url service locally at all websites? Then it only goes down if the site that has the link already goes down. It's such a mindlessly simple service, that a very simple php script could handle the production and processing of these tiny urls. Every commercial web host could put up its own service, and any domain that has any database content (nearly all of them) could have a php script on it for tiny urls. (Example, http://slashdot.org/t/w3hwaj) Why outsource something so simple to a third party?
and this is why everyone should use http://giganticurl.com/
tasty electronic music vittles
Many sites don't allow their images to be loaded from foreign sites (often referred to as hot-linking). They do this to protect their bandwidth. I often find myself making a clone of the image on my own server, and then posting that in my image. imgred.com will do this for you, saving a lot of time.
I can't understand why people would use tinyurl on their own site. I'm always wary of such links, because I never have any idea where they lead. But, I could see people using imgred on their own sites to save on their own bandwidth. That seems to be a much bigger concern.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
The only reason these USEFUL services exist is because so many LAZY web designers use ridiculous URLS
Encoding the Lords Prayer in an URL is not the smart way to do things
Instead of BITCHING about a SOLUTION, perhaps we should embrace it?
Make some standards, perhaps even set up an architecture where shortened URL links like this are shared among many servers?
Kind of like time servers for example..
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Using such an URL minifier service effectively prevents automated software to properly gain information about relations on the web. So increasing using tinyurls will increase relations to the tinyurl service, but the real destination is actually cut off from the source. This, and the problem of a single point of failure, would certainly tell my common sense not to use this service.
http://rurl.org/ is another less known short URL service which I prefer since it is pretty short and simple to remember. http://rurl.org/1m8 is an example link that points to /.
http://www.tinyurl.com/1 - Works
;-)
http://www.tinyurl.com/2 - Works
http://www.tinyurl.com/3 - Works
http://www.tinyurl.com/4 - Works
http://www.tinyurl.com/5 - Connects to site, but site gives an error.
Conclusion: 4 out of 5 TinyURLs say it will still work.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I resent tinyurl not for this hypothetical threat, but for cheating on google's image labeling game. Instead of legitimate labels, they plug in the deterministic output of a zippy the pinhead phrase generator, others do the same and, so, far outscore us mere mortals.
Blah blah blah a bunch of opinions about a topic that doesn't matter.
If you want to make sure that the web works adhere to standards, fix your fucking links and while you are at it fix your DNS.
There are a lot bigger problems (lame delegation anyone?) that need to be addressed. Who gives a shit if some hacker wants to create a tool that shortens URLs?
I guess I am wasting time bitching about this.
Go ahead, mod me down. I check slashdot every 6 months to see if the content has improved and it becomes more like 4chan everyday.
How come shellytherepublican.com has asked necraft not to list her services?
She's hosted on theplanet.com in case any of you guys who hacked mAnn Coulter's site want to know but a simple whois can find that out.
Why? Laziness on the part of the writer, I believe.
While often the ability to give a descriptive link to something is nice, the advent of forum software (or e-mail or IM) which automatically hyperlink any text that looks like a URL means that it is often easier to just type out http://www.example.org/foo/bar.html . Pasting it in is easier for the writer, and also allows the reader to SEE what the link is before highlighting it. The hierarchical nature of URLs enables savvy users to already have some idea what they are getting ("Hmm, that URL has 'goatse' in it
Hyperlinks are an awesome tool, and of course nothing stops someone making a deceptive link (which has one anchor and descriptive text which lists a different URL), but
So -- that brings us to TinyURLs, and clones thereof. It's good for use on the mobile phone (though I don't know why I'd want to use the web from mine
As for a single point of failure
Oh-oh...
Guess it's time I changed this tiny sig / tagline!
- Ecsad Essemal
The Hexadecimal TV-REMOTE!
Just this morning I received my first phishing email containing a TinyURL (quoted below). Even my mom is pretty good at suspecting domains like www.citiba-n-k.com, but how am I supposed to get her to beware of a generic TinyURL when she is used to getting legitimate ones from friends and family?
Of note, the preview indicates that this particular TinyURL has already been discontinued for a TOS violation (probably the one against spamming/phishing).
Ut Tensio, Sic Vis
There is no country in the world free of idiots who can't tell satire from reality.
That's one of the dangers of literary devices. The question is whether the danger of using the literary device outweighs the danger of refraining from using it, and that's nothing a person can find any good rules of thumb for, I think.
Are these bookmark urls prepared by the webmaster (guessing), or are does the site provide a page where its users can submit/register bookmark urls?
The latter might be a good idea for many sites. Some sites might even benefit by trying to find some algorithm for making it possible to look at and/or look up existing bookmarks.
Once again, HTTP/301 redirects are already taken into account by google pagerank. This is well known SEO.
For example, most sites redirect users to a canonical version of their site. Go to www.slashdot.org, and you are 301 redirected to slashdot.org (no www). This causes links to either version to contribute to slashdot's pagerank. This also works across domains, e.g. linensnthings.com to lnt.com.
Pagerank is "earned" by the final redirected destination, not the actual linked site.
tinyurl uses 301 redirects. Thus, google doesn't have to change anything to cover their redirects.
I think the point of TinyURL-alikes is to shorten web addresses so they either look nice, or can be typed in without much fuss. When designing the ideal URL shortcut, you would end up in a circular argument that bounces between TinyURL and DNS, where a TinyURL design will end up as non-distributed URL resolving service. It bucks the authority of DNS distribution, is commercially controlled, had no ongoing commitment, and often has a single point of failure.
The answer simply reduces to this: websites should be designed to be humanly accessible via their URLs. TinyURL-alikes are really just a sticky-plaster on a common design flaw in websites.
I suggest an alternative that's more in-keeping with the web ethos: Websites should be written to publish their own small URLs in places that matter (like 'permalinks'). When used, these URLs are server-redirected to the appropriate content. If a popular server plug-in is widely adopted, then transparent TinyURL functionality (without the associated disadvantages) should soon become widespread... provided your website is not www.averylongexamplenamethatnobodywantstotype.org
PARENT links to GOATSE. You are warned.
I don't think you're crying wolf. Underhandedly adding popup ads and redirecting to ad farms has already happened. Remember cjb.net? It was widely used a few years ago, especially for freebie website with long urls (angelfire, geocities, etc.) Now your-url.cjb.net (which they promised would always be free with no ads) has a popup, another popup, and an interstitial.
Maybe I'm pessimistic but I expect to see tinyurl.com taking the same route in a year or two after they have established dominance in the url redirection market.
I don't think I've even seen TinyURLs outside of print. The only time a TinyURL makes sense is when a human needs to write it down / type it into their browser. So if you're reading a newspaper article or a magazine and they give you a TinyURL it's nicer than a full size URL. That's the only use. If you're using TinyURL online, you're an idiot. That's what links are for. The URL could be ten pages long but the user isn't going to see it on your webpage, they'll just click the link that says, "go here". Once you get to the page, if you really like it, you'll just bookmark it. Maybe you'll cut and paste the URL and send it to a friend. Cut and paste doesn't care how long it is and neither does the bookmarking code. Either way, at that point, the length of the URL is irrelevant.
Now that I'm done ranting I'm going to go read some real news!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Ok here are my 2 cents.
While many spammers and phishers have tried to use tiny url they are not usually successful. I believe that as long as the links are remove quickly by TinyURL, it will not be an effective tool for spammers and other unscrupulous people and will remain safe to use. Tiny URL seams (to me) to be very diligent at removing links that violate its terms of service by removing them quickly. Additionally if someone puts the link in again, it creates the same tinyurl which stays invalid. I personally have never clicked on a tinyurl link that goes to a "bad" place, but have seen several attempts, and they all go to a default page stating the link referred to violates the TinyURL terms of service and has been removed for you safety (or something like that).
Nothing is going to stop ill informed stupid people from doing stupid things on the internet but I see this service as a great innovation and useful tool.
When I see major sites using tinyurl, I think of 3 scenarios.
1: The link dies at some point in the future, annoying.
2: The target is altered at some point in the future.
3: The target is altered in a malicious way.
None of these things are new to the internet.
But the introduction of an intermediary (tinyurl, for example) just adds one more point of failure that no one (essentially) has any real control over.
I think it's a bad idea - I don't care if someone wants to browse from a cellphone or something like that. If a site wants to cater to mobile users then they should provide a mobile version of the page. I shouldn't have MY view gimped because someone's browser out there isn't up to snuff.
(I for one am sick of sites that still assume people have their displays set to 800x600.)
On top of that, I think it just looks unprofessional for a major site to be using tinyurl or similar.
Can we at least have the original link listed as well?
News Headline: Blah
Blah blah over at Blah [links to blah.blah/blah?blah=blah&blah=blah...]. (TinyURL [links to tinyurl.com/blah])
(Of course, just as with any normal link, you wouldn't show the full address in the link text.)
Services like this are fine for some purposes. Sending a link to a Google map from Outlook to mutt wraps to five lines and is a pain to copy / paste -- users invariably copy just the first part of it or don't properly remove the newlines and get a garbage result. However, this is just for temporary things such as the location of the LAN this weekend or what-have-you -- it shouldn't be used as the permanent reference to a site. Websites should use always full length link as they are built to handle that, although it would be better if the site inherently used reasonably long URLs to begin with.
Interesting, considering this recent story about a tinyURL outage:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tinyurl_outage_shows_fragility.php
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Damn! Link please?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random