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Google URL Shortener Opened To the Public
Anonymusing writes "Just what the world needs, another URL shortener, right? Google seems to think so, and it's making its own widely available to anyone — complete with tracking and statistics — for free. As noted on its blog: 'There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you're protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products.' Is bit.ly shaking in its boots?"
As in what's here? http://goo.gl/info/Kjyl#week
I prefer TinyURL because it can give me a preview of the expanded URL.
Like Wave, right?
You realize that while they stopped development of further wave features, it is still available and functioning for anyone who wants to use it?
Got Apathy?
It's about keyspace.
Given 4 bytes of [a-zA-Z0-9] gives you 14,776,336 possible combinations while [a-z0-9] only gives you a mere 1,679,616 possible combinations.
Assuming they'll eventually up the number of bytes up to six (ie. 4 to 6 bytes), you'll get 57,731,144,752 combinations case sensitive compared to just 2,238,928,128 case insensitive.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/162021/
This Firefox add-on (Their homepage http://long-shore.com/ has Opera and Chrome support as well) allowed me to hover the link and see that it was a Goatse link.
Very useful.
Is bit.ly shaking in its boots?
Dunno, I've never heard of them before. Should I have?
Only if you're one of the freaks that uses twitter...
At least with TinyURL you can enable preview :http://tinyurl.com/preview.php
You can also link to the preview, so people won't be fired or offended by NSFW stuff.
I have placed the following in mu bashrc, so I can check others as well: //p';}
check(){ curl -sI $1 | sed -n 's/Location:.*
Not everybody will be able to do that.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Crap. That links to a facebook app that tries to get access to my facebook info. Since you've linked to it twice in the comments on this article, I assume you're a scammer promoting a bogus link to obtain people's personal information.
I find url shorteners to be dangerous. You don't know that it links to. And I find that everyone seems to use them, even the security "professionals" that it really makes no sense.
While I understand how handy they are when you need to share a link with someone in voice or something. But I never click on them from articles or anything. I refuse.
Imagine the Internet is a gun. URL Shorteners are the chambers. A bad link is the bullet.
Now imagine that gun is pointed at your head, and everytime you click on a shortened URL, you are pulling the trigger.
Be seeing you...
This also explains why, until I pointed it out (found by random testing of obvious word+number combos) a couple of hours ago, it only had 5 hits in all that time. It's since had almost 800 in the last 4 hours alone
So blame some google tester - not me. I'm just pointing out the flaws in the system - and there are many. Don't shoot the messenger, mkay?