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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?"
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
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.
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.
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/
...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!
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.
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.
Camping on quad since 1996.
I think that's exactly the point the submitter is raising: Say you post a link on slashdot to some random website. When I stumble over your post, coming from a search engine, in five years, the chance for this link to still work is p(x), the probability of that random website remaining live for 5 years.
Now, if you used tinyurl for your link, the chance for the link to not be broken by then is p(x)*p(y), where p(y) is the chance of tinyurl surviving the next 5 years. Since p(y) is less than 1, this lowers your chance to send me this little piece of information forward to in five years time.
The internet is built on dense connectivity, with no single node being able to uniquely control access to a large part of the whole net. Tinyurl works against this principle. If someone switched off tinyurl now, 54 Million links would break in an instant, all over the web, with no chance to correct them all automatically.
In other words, to return your ad hominem attack: If you expect Tinyurl to stay exactly where and what it is for the next 5 years, you have misunderstood the web.
Hahahaha! That was so funny I had to check something about that site... Server: 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 Yup, for all their hate of Linux, they use it. I wonder if they know?
"You're awefully cute, but unfortunately for you, you're made of meat."
Thats true, but there is a key difference between moving around links on a site and a service like TinyURL going offline, namely, a lot of times you can track down where the page is now if it is just moved. For instance if I wanted to go read an article posted at example.com/march2003/article.html it might not be there, but there is a decent chance that I could search the site and find it at example.com/03-2003.aspx because I know where it used to be. For TinyURL I just have a random hash. Google and the Wayback Machine don't cache the TinyURL links, but often have old web pages. There are many times where I can track down the original site for a dead link, but if a tiny url service were to go off line then good luck.
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.
Your point is well taken, and very revealing.
The problem with these United States is that the leadership is dreaming up bullshit of what they think that others must actually be thinking, and worse yet, they now actually believe what they have invented.
Let's take torture for example: The Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) manuals were designed to prepare soldiers, sailors, and marines for what *might* happen if they were captured. There was some knowledge of past torture techniques employed by enemies, but the manuals and the courses emphasized that there was no way to really know what might be encountered.
It makes sense, so far: "You'll be executing missions in a largely unknown environment, so we'll prepare you for the worst in case you are captured." We'll just skip over the psychological trade-offs for the sake of argument. At least they went beyond, "Just give them your name, rank, and serial number per the Geneva Convention." It was wisely recognized that not everyone respects the Geneva accords.
Recall that torture is widely recognized as a very unreliable method for obtaining accurate information. It is well known that gaining trust is far more effective--although there are many trade-offs to consider here, too.
Now let's examine the present torture programs: Someone has taken the SERE materials and skipped over the bits about whether or not the methods described are being used by presumed enemies. This much has been assumed to be true. The really foolish move was to use this assumption to justify the use of torture. Not only does this approach ignore the data which show that torture produces unreliable intelligence, it casts "enhanced interrogation" as a sort of revenge for imagined offenses. One has only to read the comments posted to news stories about torture to see that the justification for torture--and other atrocities--is the presumption that enemies have also done so. Perhaps it is naive to hew to the values which are taught in public school with public funds, but I believe that great nations and great people do not stoop to the level of those with whom we disagree. The philosophy of winning at any cost doesn't scale: What if winning costs you everything--or more than you have?
This is only one example of how terrorism has adversely affected governments and public opinion in what was once a group of free countries. I'm not saying that terrorists planned this in some grand scheme, but their actions have most certainly produced terror among those that we the people have trusted to exercise wisdom in place of fearful reaction. Imagining things about one's perceived enemies is, by definition, immature behavior. Would that we could actually have mature and sensible leadership, in place of sensationalist fools who lead the general population down a narrowing tunnel of darkness and distrust. I hope that the human race survives into another Renaissance, rather than fulfilling its own invented idea of an Apocalypse.
My father became very cynical in the wake of poor decisions he'd made, and began to blame others for what was his own responsibility. Within a decade of his death, he literally said, "People are out to screw you. You've got to screw them before they screw you."
He died bitter and penniless, having isolated himself from all of his friends and most of his family, in great pain, with profound regret, ravaged by the pain of cancer for which he refused to seek treatment, and confused by the spectre of Alzheimer's disease. It would appear that the grand experiment known as the United States of America is determined at present to make the same journey.
What you resist, persists. Eventually, you become what you resist.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
Internally at Disney, our tiny URL service is already called "Tink".
Bollocks. The web was not created so that people could create volatile temporary pages and that shouldn't be what it is today. It's just stupidity and laziness on the part of developers a lot of the time.