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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?"
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
This also weakens Google pagerank.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I'm wondering... is that blog kinda satiric? Or are they serious?
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.
Did someone say that running out of names was a likely problem? Why did you even raise that issue?
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
Let me rephrase that: "in short, the straw man problem I raised is not really a problem. There is no problem except perhaps for the real problem." Yes: the permanence of the link IS the issue raised by the summary above. What if these sites go down? What if they change their behaviour? What QOS have the people creating these links contracted for?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.
Yes but: if there exists another search engine with the same features and a similar algorithm to Google's, it can be used as a stand-in. But if I build a new URL shortening service and put it on a different domain, it is completely useless for interpreting pre-existing tiny URLs, because it lacks the database mapping hash keys to URLs.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.
Now we're bringing search engine optimization into it. What's that got to do with the topic at hand???
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.
Thanks doctor obvious. Yes, URL shrinking services have strengths and weaknesses. Like gasoline. And t-shirts. Let's discuss them instead of going off on tangents about SEO and hash space sizes.
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.
This is a drawback for the user, but has nothing to do with net architecture. Please read the short summary above and discuss the topic at hand!
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.
You didn't even read the summary, did you? The issue is that services such as TinyURL might start doing bad things, such as pop-ups, malware, and so on, or that they might be taken offline for a bit, causing many links to stop working properly. Who cares if there is a preview option when the service itself is compromised?
Everything is subjective.
Will you also fix uncountable numbers of existing links to TinyURL? If not, the problem remains.
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Are any links on the web truly permanent?
This should be modded insightful.
I don't use tinyurl or other such services in any of my web sites or blogs, but I do have plenty of other links that end up being broken after a period of time regardless, and I myself have taken down pages that others link to, thereby breaking their links. It happens.
I don't think using tinyurl on a blog is the proper way to use that service (it's really intended for things like discussion forums or blog comments, where long url's would break the page), but then there are plenty of other things that a lot of people do wrong on web sites these days that I think are a lot more egregious to the overall "health" of the web. Like, say, creating massively long url's in the first place. Remember when every page on the web used to have a nice descriptive, static, short url? That's the way the web was originally designed, and there used to even be the equivalent of "best practices" documents floating around talking about what your url's should look like. Now that everything is database driven and dynamic, we get urls that won't even fit on one line of an email (and are therefore broken when they arrive in an inbox), and that say nothing whatsoever about what the page they're linking to is.
This is a much bigger problem than worrying about some links eventually being broken - links get broken anyway. But the url's themselves have fundamentally changed how we use the web, and that's what forced us all into using tinyurl in the first place.
Flamebait because I question a suspect assertion? The mods must be fucking stupid.
Just because someone has the right to do something doesn't mean it's right to do it.
In this case, I agree with the GP. Uninformed idiots are going to think this stuff is real, then they're going to go around spewing, "You know what the Republicans think? Get this!" And all the sudden a lot of ignorant people are voting based on satire that went above their head. The author may have a right to do it, but that doesn't make it right nor in the best interest of the country.
- Most people would not be knowledgeable about this
- The website would have http://tinyurl.com/87d rather than http://preview.tinyurl.com/87d
- The surfer, being unknowledgeable, would just click on the damn link, rather than carefully paste it into his addressbar, and add preview in front of it.
Seems pretty obvious to me, but knowing the moderators here, I guess I'll be modded down into oblivion for pointing this out.Say no to software patents.
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?
Flamebait because you used a FUD attack against a humorous comment.
I'm not one to actually know whether Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635.SR1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.1b actually means the server is running Unix or *nix, but to criticize the assertion that they use Linux without giving any information about what it actually means is pure FUD.
Questioning an assertion is one thing. Questioning an assertion that is most likely true (most apache servers run Linux) without providing contrary evidence, when the validity of the assertion is inconsequential (it's a joke) is flamebait.
There, I took the bait. Are you happy now?
Just because this comment is inflamatory in and of itself does not make it bait for more inflamatory comments. On the contrary, it appears, once stipped of its bias, to be quite insightful.
Here. Let me help with that.
If the average american wasn't so brain dead and crazy there wouldn't be a question. It's their own fucking fault for being idiots. Seriously, you can't make up the kind of bullshit that these people actually believe, but some people do get pretty close.
Now, don't bother modding me up unless you mod parent up as well;with a preference for modding parent.