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?"
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.
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
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
Um...
Tools > Options... > "Mail Format" Tab > "Internet Format..." Button
Under "Plain text options" > "Automatically wrap text to xx characters
Of course, that means that no short URL's handled by this service can be accessed anymore.
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.
And you can tell it's Linux because Apache only compiles on Linux?
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".
Most of the time, no, but the w3 recommends that they be. See Cool URIs don't change.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Tinyurl now has a preview feature http://tinyurl.com/preview.php needs a cookie though.
Nice to see that url expands to goatse.cx or wherever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
No, it doesn't. At least not to the linked site. Google is smart enough to understand 301 redirects, which tinyurl uses.
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.