To accompany Sunday’s look at Twitter tools that unmask shortened URLs, here are some utilities that reveal the true destination of shortened URLs outside of Twitter. I’ve shortened five URLs, including one YouTube link, with the five URL shorteners that were used the most in tweets within last 24 hours. http://bit.ly/7VFyx http://tinyurl.com/m44knh http://is.gd/19RUq http://ow.ly/fBXz http://tr.im/ppYe [...]
In light of last week’s hack that redirected over 2 million shortened URLs to an unsuspecting blog post, this is a good time to look at how to find how to unmask a shortened web address before clicking on it. After all, malicious web sites could be lurking behind those tiny URLs … or worse. Let’s start [...]
Over two million links suddenly pointed to my sOCial Sunday post on Jon Lansner’s blog yesterday morning when someone exploited a security hole in the free Cligs URL-shortening system. So what’s the problem? For starters, Google could misinterpret this as a spam attack and penalize the blog. Since the post was on Lansner’s blog, I [...]
A quick visit totinyurl.com/Obama brings up the front page of British tabloid The Sun. That web address is what Tinyurl.com calls a “custom alias.” It works great when I wan to tell someone where to find my Google profile: tinyurl.com/ksablan. That’s much easior to remember than www.google.com/s2/profiles/102516730109910018503, or a cryptic address that most URL-shortening services produce. But you [...]
