Short URL Security

How many of you have ever clicked on a shortened URL and ended up somewhere you didn’t expect? Let me re-phrase that. How many of you have ever clicked on a shortened RL without checking it?

Hands up please?

I thought so – and yes, my hand is up too.

An example of a shortened URL is:  http://bit.ly/hGaMPU – this one will take you to my previous post. It’s full URL is: http://www.churchtechy.com/2010/12/why-i-love-cisco/

The problem with these shortened URLs is that they could literally take you anywhere and mostly you wouldn’t know until you got there.

Why this is bad I’ll leave for the comments section if you can’t work it out, but suffice to say there is a solution. Most (but not all) URL shortening services offer a way to preview where the URL will take you. So using my example service of bit.ly you simply add a + to the end of the URL. This takes you to bit.ly’s site and not only does it show you teh full URL, it will also show you some stats about the URL (which may be useful to bloggers wanting to track how popuular their links are).

The problem with this approach is threefold:

• first you have to remember to do this
• second, not every URL shortening service offers a preview
• and last but not least is that each service that offers a preview uses differing methods to do so.

So how does one overcome the mystery of the shortened URL?

Enter LongURL.

LongURL is a plugin for Firefox or Chrome browsers and works by contacting the LongURL service and de-mystifying the URL’s so that they appear in full.

And that’s it.