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Do Tiny URL Services Weaken Net Architecture?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Nov 18, 2007 09:08 AM
from the huge-gigantic-massive-insignificant-concerns dept.
from the huge-gigantic-massive-insignificant-concerns dept.
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?"
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Search: Google Unveils goo.gl URL Shortening Service 242 comments
eldavojohn writes "The Sultan of Search is unveiling a new service (currently only available for Google Toolbar and Feedburner) that will tackle a very old problem usually solved by bit.ly or tinyurl — URL shortening. Now, we've heard cries for sanity to prevent potential issues (like what if tr.im had shut down and broken millions of links?) but with one of the goliaths of the industry jumping in the ring it looks like URL shortening is here to stay. And a quick note for people who enjoy privacy, goo.gl explicitly states: 'Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.' You didn't think Google was going to sit back and let bit.ly harvest juicy data on 2.1 billion links that were clicked in November without trying to corner some of that action to make their ad suggestions more accurate, did you?" Google's shortening service is called Goo.gl.
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A related and important question (Score:3, Funny)
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 [shelleytherepublican.com] for heinous hacker crimes and ban tools such as 'Linux' [shelleytherepublican.com] and 'Mozilla' [shelleytherepublican.com] which only have one purpose. You are either with us, or against us.
Re:A related and important question (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:A related and important question (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:A related and important question (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with these United States is that the leadership is dreaming up bullshit of what they think that others must actually be thinking, and worse yet, they now actually believe what they have invented.
Let's take torture for example: The Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) manuals were designed to prepare soldiers, sailors, and marines for what *might* happen if they were captured. There was some knowledge of past torture techniques employed by enemies, but the manuals and the courses emphasized that there was no way to really know what might be encountered.
It makes sense, so far: "You'll be executing missions in a largely unknown environment, so we'll prepare you for the worst in case you are captured." We'll just skip over the psychological trade-offs for the sake of argument. At least they went beyond, "Just give them your name, rank, and serial number per the Geneva Convention." It was wisely recognized that not everyone respects the Geneva accords.
Recall that torture is widely recognized as a very unreliable method for obtaining accurate information. It is well known that gaining trust is far more effective--although there are many trade-offs to consider here, too.
Now let's examine the present torture programs: Someone has taken the SERE materials and skipped over the bits about whether or not the methods described are being used by presumed enemies. This much has been assumed to be true. The really foolish move was to use this assumption to justify the use of torture. Not only does this approach ignore the data which show that torture produces unreliable intelligence, it casts "enhanced interrogation" as a sort of revenge for imagined offenses. One has only to read the comments posted to news stories about torture to see that the justification for torture--and other atrocities--is the presumption that enemies have also done so. Perhaps it is naive to hew to the values which are taught in public school with public funds, but I believe that great nations and great people do not stoop to the level of those with whom we disagree. The philosophy of winning at any cost doesn't scale: What if winning costs you everything--or more than you have?
This is only one example of how terrorism has adversely affected governments and public opinion in what was once a group of free countries. I'm not saying that terrorists planned this in some grand scheme, but their actions have most certainly produced terror among those that we the people have trusted to exercise wisdom in place of fearful reaction. Imagining things about one's perceived enemies is, by definition, immature behavior. Would that we could actually have mature and sensible leadership, in place of sensationalist fools who lead the general population down a narrowing tunnel of darkness and distrust. I hope that the human race survives into another Renaissance, rather than fulfilling its own invented idea of an Apocalypse.
My father became very cynical in the wake of poor decisions he'd made, and began to blame others for what was his own responsibility. Within a decade of his death, he literally said, "People are out to screw you. You've got to screw them before they screw you."
He died bitter and penniless, having isolated himself from all of his friends and most of his family, in great pain, with profound regret, ravaged by the pain of cancer for which he refused to seek treatment, and confused by the spectre of Alzheimer's disease. It would appear that the grand experiment known as the United States of America is determined at present to make the same journey.
What you resist, persists. Eventually, you become what you resist.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Change software! (Score:3, Insightful)
View URL before open it (Score:3, Informative)
So yeah, you are crying wolf.
Re:View URL before open it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
With tinyURL, you can preview the URL before you open it. Example: http://preview.tinyurl.com/87d [tinyurl.com]. Just add the "preview." as a subdomain to the "tinyurl.com".
Yes, but the problem is that the surfer has to manually add preview for this to work. In reality:
Seems pretty obvious to me, but knowing the moderators here, I guess I'll be modded down into oblivion for pointing th
TinyURL offers a preview of the URL. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:TinyURL offers a preview of the URL. (Score:4, Funny)
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This also weakens Google pagerank. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Don't use those services (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I think it's unfortunate that TinyURL is even necessary. A lot of URLs are needlessly long, and the other strike is that email programs and web forums that do break up URLs shouldn't be breaking them into multiple lines or otherwise breaking them - it shouldn't be necessary.
SharePoint URL (Score:2)
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I only use them in e-mails (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some broken e-mail clients (i.e. Outlook) may do this. Those clients have numerous other problems. The solution is to not use them, and to tell your correspondents not to use them. A proper e-mail program will not break a word midway even if it exceeds 80 columns.
(Those same stupid email programs don't break sentences at 72 or 80 columns. Why do they break words?)
I tend to not follow tinyURL links -- I like to know what domai
Well... other media use Tiny URLs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which has always made me wonder why they don't simply provide a link to their own site, from which you may be redirected. For example, SpiffyPC Magazine might be doing a review on the new XYZ 123 motherboard, and configure spiffypc.com/XYZ123 as a referral link.
Actually, given most magazines' enthusiasm for advertisi
This article is pure nonsense. (Score:2)
cry wolf young child, for no one believes you (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:cry wolf young child, for no one believes you (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, if you used tinyurl for your link, the chance for the link to not be broken by then is p(x)*p(y), where p(y) is the chance of tinyurl surviving the next 5 years. Since p(y) is less than 1, this lowers your chance to send me this little piece of information forward to in five years time.
The internet is built on dense connectivity, with no single node being able to uniquely control access to a large part of the whole net. Tinyurl works against this principle. If someone switched off tinyurl now, 54 Million links [tinyurl.com] would break in an instant, all over the web, with no chance to correct them all automatically.
In other words, to return your ad hominem attack: If you expect Tinyurl to stay exactly where and what it is for the next 5 years, you have misunderstood the web.
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Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Solution (Score:4, Funny)
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There are other worrisome web problems (Score:4, Informative)
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
So just don't use them. (Score:2)
That I've seen, very few people put permanant links in TinyURL (or similar) form on their web pages. When making an actual link, the length doesn't much matter.
People use these shortened links as a short-term length reducer for mediums such as email or blogs (while you could argue both have some degree of permanance, the vast majority of them fade into obsc
Blame outlook or exchange.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
It balances out (Score:2, Insightful)
Good webpage designers will not be adversely affected; it may even help to get some of the crap of the Web.
Web was always single-point-of-failure (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Just ban long URLs (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
weaken? (Score:2)
urltea down (Score:3, Funny)
TinyURL in a web page? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
No. (Score:2)
Sanity Check (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's happened already (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, that means that no short URL's handled by this service can be accessed anymore.
Compact URL Services As An AntiCensorship tool (Score:4, Informative)
The solution: (Score:4, Funny)
OMG! (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:I don't think they do (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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but what about links on the web itself (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Slashdot signatures (Score:3, Insightful)
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Nice to see that url expands to goatse.cx or wherever.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 w
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Most of the time, no, but the w3 recommends that they be. See Cool URIs don't change [w3.org].