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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?"
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.
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
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.
This also weakens Google pagerank.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
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.
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 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.
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.
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
...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!
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.
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.
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
How ironic -- as of this writing, the urltea service is down. Slashdotted?
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 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.
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!
Of course, that means that no short URL's handled by this service can be accessed anymore.
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.
:Quote "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."
Are any links on the web truly permanent?
Illiterate? Write for free help!
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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?
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.