Railroaders place to shoot the shit.

Uke · Cured

Amtrak nooz

Snippy · Force Majeure

Tr0LL? Can you help Snippy out, ol' buddy?

Uke · Cured

California this time. Stockton. Idiot driver stalls vehicle right on a set of rails used by Amtrak. Who else?

Car is smashed by train running at usual speed... Driver escapes ta do it again another day.

http://fox40.com/2016/02/06/amtrak-train-hits-vehicle-stalled-on-railroad-tracks/

From 81 characters to a TinyURL which has a length of 26 characters: http://tinyurl.com/hx4zas8

Calvin · Upgraded Condition?

They're known as short links, shortened URLs, and Tiny URLs. Whatever you call them, their purpose is the same. Link shortening services such as Bitly, TinyURL, and over 200 others, allow users to take a link that might be too long to post within the confines of a twitter post and generate a shorter link that redirects to the longer URL that the user wants to post.

You could take a long link such as:http://netsecurity.about.com/od/newsandeditorial1/a/Facebook-Security-5-Things-You-Should-Never-Post-On-Facebook.htm
and use a link shortening service to make it into a nice short link that looks like this:http://tinyurl.com/82w7hgf

Not only does the link not look anything like the original, it completely obscures the intended link destination.

There is no way by looking at the short link that you can tell what the intended target link is. All you see in the short link is the link shortening service site name followed by a string of seemingly random numbers and letters.

Why is this a bad thing? If I was an Internet-based bad guy and wanted to trick you into visiting a link that would install malware on your computer, you would be more likely to fall for clicking http://tinyurl.com/82w7hgf then you would be for visiting http://badguysite.123.this.is.a nasty.virus.and.will.infect.your.computer.exe. The tiny URL doesn't have anything in it that would tip you off to the fact that it is a malware link

Bad guys love using link shortening services to hide their malware links.

Before you click on that random short link you saw on Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere, you should use a link expansion service to inspect it so you can decide whether its destination is somewhere you really want to go.

Fortunately, there are a couple of sites and tools that can help you learn where the hidden path of most any short link leads without having to visit it.

Untiny.me is a link expansion service that lets you input a short link, such as the example above, and see what the destination link is, without you having to visit it. You simply copy the link you want to check out, go to the untiny.me site, paste the shortened link into the search field, and it will show you the intended destination of the short link.

LongURL is another link expander / extractor that is simple to use. In addition to the LongURL website that allows for link expansion, LongURL also features a LongURL Mobile Expander Firefox Browser extension that allows you to hover your mouse over a shortened link which then shows a pop-up tool tip that displays the true destination of the short link. This saves you the hassle of having to visit LongURL's website every time you want to inspect a link.

Hopefully, in the near future we will see more browser integration for link preview expansion and maybe someday we will see destination link scanning, where the destination link is compared to a list of known bad URLs so we can be warned before we make the leap of faith to visit an unknown site

Uke · Cured

Do you run links/URLs through thse services? You post a few You Tube clips in the chat, and other forums.Are all of 'em suspicious, or is it better to NOT post URLs?

Most of the links posted by yers truly are newspaper headlines, or news links from the sources.

Calvin · Upgraded Condition?

I dont post shortened url's, I dont click on shortened url's.

Some shortened url's are a security concern.

Its like the bad section of town. Most of the time you can walk thru unscathed, But, then that one fateful trip

when ya happen to meet a crazy crack whore who has no money and needs a fix.

Snippy · Force Majeure

OK, the crazy crack whore is there after you clicked on her pretty EZ-open door and stepped into the vestibule.

There's bullet proof glass between you and the crack whore. You just stepped in off the street. She doesn't know your name, social security number, or even your fetishes. You'd have to tell her that. What does she have besides your IP address and all that entails?

-- Edited by Snippy on Monday 8th of February 2016 12:53:47 PM

Calvin · Upgraded Condition?

But can you trust shortened links? The risk is that they (usually) dont give you a hint of where they lead. That unknown destination could be a phishing site or a malware download. While shortened URLs are useful for everyone using social media, they also give scammers and identity thieves an easy way to reach you and your data.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/url-shortening-yet-another-security-risk/

There are two main problems with link shortening services. First, they make it easier for attackers to distribute spam and phishing attacks because the actual destination URL is not displayed. Second, because link shortening is frequently used with social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, there is an inherent trust that the link will be legitimate.

When I receive the above link in its entirety, I can easily see that the actual destination domain is pcworld.com--especially if I am using the Internet Explorer 8 browser which highlights the true domain as a defense against spoofed sites and phishing attacks. However, the TinyURL alias tells me nothing about the destination and could lead me to a malicious Web site.

Attackers can also circumvent many security controls by using URL shortening services. The URL shortening domains are trusted by default by firewalls, Web filters, and spam blocking tools which makes it more difficult to identify and weed out links that lead to malicious destinations.

Uke · Cured

Well that's it for 'tiny URLs.' or using the shorteners. From now on, it's the whole deal, or nothing at all! Last post, a Krispy Kreme Donut article, but not the URL to the post. Nope! Just the chopped/shortened text, and a pic.

That's all folks!

Snippy · Force Majeure

So far, Snippy is still trying to figure out how they are going to do anything even if it downloads a file.

If it's a phishing site, don't do anything. It would all happen after you opened the link and did something else....

Calvin · Upgraded Condition?

Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network was almost impossible. All you need to build your own URL shortener is a 30 lines PHP script and a 4 to 6 characters domain name. Many services launched, relying on providing analytics for a domain you dont own to differ from the competition.

Update 201405271101: actually, link shorteners are older than Twitter even though the micro blogging service made them bloom like flowers. From HN discussion about this post:

No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unwieldy, and are thereby difficult to type; they also have tons of punctuation, and are at danger of being mangled by various transports due to line wrapping, escaping, and character mapping.

Twitter becoming huge, spam and malware became a real problem for the company. To fight both of them, Twitter launched t.co, a URL shortener they apply on every tweeted link. Not only does t.co shorten links, it also check checks for the target site sanity and warns the visitor accordingly.

Applying t.co to every link posted on Twitter would have been OK if people did not keep using other URL shorteners, but they didnt. The ability to chain services to push a link on Twitter led to some URL shortening madness that hurts the user experience and silently breaks the Web

Yesterday, I clicked on a bit.ly link someone had pushed to Twitter using Buffer to broadcast a link from Pocket. The Pocket to Buffer to Twitter workflow is a pretty common one, but this time, the madness went too far.

Lets see what happens when you click on that link:
1.In your Twitter feed, you click on a link that appears like the final destination.
2.Youre actually sent to Twitter URL shortener t.co.
3.t.co redirects you to j.mp, Buffer default URL shortener.
4.Jump redirects you to pocket.co, Pocket URL shortener.
5.Pocket.co redirects you to getpocket.com to get the initial link.
6.Getpocket.com redirects you to bit.ly, the URL shortener that was initially used for your link.
7.Finally, bit.ly redirects you to the original site.
8.If youre really out of luck, you fall on a landing page asking you to subscribe to the site, with a « access your article » link.

URL shortener

Requests

Latency

1 t.co 2 (DNS + HTTP) 200ms
2 j.mp 2 (DNS + HTTP) 400ms
3 pocket.co 2 (DNS + HTTP) 200ms
4 getpocket.com 2 (DNS + HTTP) 200ms
4 bit.ly 2 (DNS + HTTP) 400ms to 2s
5 your site 2 (DNS + HTTP) Depends
**TOTAL** **14** (DNS + HTTP) just to access your site main page (without CSS, Javascript and images) **1.8s to 3.4s** just for redirections

1.8 to 3.4 seconds are spent in redirects before you can access the page. For the record, Amazon says that 100ms of latency costs them 1% in sales, and Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%.

I love spending 4 to 5 seconds staring at a blank page while Im redirected in an endless loop. No one. Ever.

This is both an extreme case and an « Im (feeling) lucky » one.

You usually dont control the company behind your URL shortener service. They can be overloaded. They can delete or lose your data without even telling you. They can disappear just like tr.im did a few years ago. Every time this happens, you lose a part of the return path to your link. It means your content becomes inaccessible.

In fact, when youre using a URL shortener, you give away part of your content to that company. They can decide to build a paywall to your links, put your content into a frame so they can add advertisement to them, censor them if they dont like what you publish and I probably forget a few things.

I know this makes people very skeptical because the theory says a link on Twitter has a life expectancy of 24 to 48 hours, so lets play the SEO card. All URLs shorteners dont use clean 301 redirects. Some of them use 302 redirects so Google believe the redirection is only temporary. That way, the shortener actually gets all the juice your site should have got instead.

How to avoid breaking the Web

Indeed, there are a few ways to limit the madness. The first one is easy: when pushing a link on Twitter (or anywhere else), always post the expanded version of the link.

If youre using Buffer, there is a settings tab that allows you to disable the URL shortening so only Twitter t.co will apply.

If youre using Pocket, never use their « tweet this » feature, as there is no way to disable their 2 redirections (!) URL shortener. I may be wrong, but the 301 then 302 redirects look like some nasty black hat SEO tactics.

And indeed, the most obvious one: dont use a URL shortener, or any Scoop.it like site when you post a link. Ever.

But

Most massive link pushers will tell you their little brother will die from cancer if they dont use a URL shortener.

Heres why.

They use a URL shortener to track trafic and « engagement » to their content: how much clicks were generated from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin without an access to the sites Google analytics. Thats because figures are more important than people who read their content. In other words: spam.

They use a custom URL shortener with their own domain because thats what people see on Twitter so they can build their brand. They dont really care about people actually reading what they tweet as long as they spread the love. In other words: spam

So, lets finish this way: there is no acceptable reason to use a URL shortener either on Twitter or anywhere else on the Web. Theres been a recent debate lately on how nofollow links were killing the Web. URL shorteners are worse.

So lets finish this way: there is no acceptable reason to use a URL shortener either on Twitter or anywhere else on the Web. Theres been a recent debate lately on how nofollow links were killing the Web. URL shorteners are worse.

Railroaders place to shoot the shit.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.
It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Gah. Your tab just crashed.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.
It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Gah. Your tab just crashed.

This is the official end of my post.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.
It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Gah. Your tab just crashed.

This is the official end of my post.

This is the official end of my post.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.
It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Gah. Your tab just crashed.

This is the official end of my post.

Railroaders place to shoot the shit.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Gah. Your tab just crashed.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Gah. Your tab just crashed.

This is the official end of my post.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Gah. Your tab just crashed.

This is the official end of my post.

This is the official end of my post.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Gah. Your tab just crashed.

This is the official end of my post.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.
It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.
It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.
It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.

Hmm. That address doesnt look right.
It looks like the link pointing here was faulty.