[Novalug] Administrivia: don't use URL shorteners

Roger W. Broseus rogerb@bronord.com
Sat Jan 10 14:32:31 EST 2015


This might be a stupid question but is there a url shortener that you DO 
trust? Is tinyurl.com know to be "nefarious," a source of spam or a tracker 
that passes info to others?

Too bad there's not a way to create shortened urls w/o using such a service. 
Your example is a good one.

Roger W. Broseus - Linux User
     Email: RogerB@bronord.com
     Web Site: www.bronord.com

On 01/10/2015 01:57 PM, Rich Kulawiec via Novalug wrote:
> There are some interesting counterpoints in those responses.  I don't
> think any of those use cases apply *here* though: I presume everyone
> on this list is sensible enough not to use Outlook (gack!) and this
> isn't Twitter (thank goodness).  And yes, I realize that the various
> three-letter agencies in this country have quite thoroughly backdoored
> pretty much anything they want, but the same may not be true of other
> countries, particularly those with limited budgets.  And it's certainly
> not true of the many spammers who are behind quite a few of the
> shorteners, so I'd rather not assist either of those by handing them
> usable intelligence deliberately.
>
> Of course it's possible to go the other way: a financial institution
> that I do business with sent me a URL today that's 1229 characters long.
> No doubt a wealth of information is encoded in that, but given that
> they're merely announcing a policy change, surely something far less
> byzantine would have sufficed.
>
> ---rsk
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