Slashdot Mirror
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.
Oh for goodness sake. I can't believe I did it again. Using a Wikipedia sig to end a slashdot post. Gotta get off that wikicrack.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
How ironic -- as of this writing, the urltea service is down. Slashdotted?
It's people like you who take the fun out of the internet.
Huge URL.
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
if tinyURL goes down thousands of goatse links will go dead
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Tell me about it. - ~~~~
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.