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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?"
To borrow a term from one of the fine America-loving comments on that bulletin board, I think it would be appropriate to call "TinyURL" type services "Pixie Servers".
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
It's people like you who take the fun out of the internet.