Christopher Smith wrote: > John H. Robinson, IV wrote: > > > > There are ways to easily verify where a redirect goes, without venturing > > to the target of the redirect, or to see who owns an IP address. > > > > % lynx -dump -head http://www.decenturl.com/132.239.180.101/tubgirl | grep > > '^Location: ' > > % whois -h whois.arin.net 132.239.180.101 | grep '^OrgName: ' > > > Yes. When you put it that way, there is really no point to decenturl.com > at all. It is a wonder anyone uses their service.
I'm not certain if that was sarcasm or not. I find the url-shortening services to be very useful. If you have a long url (some of the ebay and amazon urls can get very long) supplying a shortened url will prevent problems with line wrapping. In IRC, clients can wrap long lines in funny ways, so again a shortened url is highly useful. In the kernel-panic channel (server: chat.freenode.net channel: #kernel-panic) we have a bot, Prospero, that will submit your URL to TinyURL and return the result. This way everyone knows that the TinyURL is legitimate. I just don't blindly trust any shortened url that is not supplied with the full url. If both are supplied, and the shortened one is to a shock or spam site, I know to not trust the sender. Thankfully, it is very easy to check the target of the shortened url. -john -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
