Bastardizing the Drake
equation, if only a fraction of
the people using twitter used it to send urls to each other, and only a
fraction of those urls were artificially shortened by a url shortener, and
only a fraction of those shortened urls were actually hyperlinks to Rick
Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, and only a fraction of those Rick Astley
hyperlinks were in fact not to Rick Astley videos, but instead phishing attack
hyperlinks to Mills On The Hill Fish and Tackle Shop in New Market, MD,
hosted on a RedHat 5 server at a local Mom and Pop ISP compromised and
hardened by multiple attackers over the years but now serving free embedded
javascript with every page inserting iframes from choose-your-own-nationalist-
conspiracy-theory-ok-chinese-attackers, and only a fraction of the twitter
users likely to find such links by searching for hashtags actually click on
them, the Internet as we know it would come to a screetching halt, please
can’t someone do something about these urls shorteners?

Still with me?

Some of these arguments are very good, and thorough. Or at least thorough. Oops, I mean thorough. Most are echos of As Web communication shrinks, so do links, by Rachel Metz at the AP.

Sorry, skip the foolish advertising business model of free dull razor blades,
with every cut sponsored by Punch The Monkey and jump to the existing url
shortening sites that are trying to reduce the risk posed by our straw man.

Preview images sound cute, I’ve never used them. I could preview a thumbnailed
malicous pdf for you, would that help?

Auto-unshorteners sound neat too and I’ve seen twitter clients that use their
API’s to some success, but they are just that – secondary services that some
clients have.

New shorteners like safe.mn do more, but how much more? I
was able to validate that safe.mn refused to shorten an old link in my spam
quarantine, but not a new one.

How safe is safe enough? Does our straw man actually have a brain? How much
protection does the culture of associative trust so prevalent on twitter
reduce the risk that a given shortened url will actually be evil?

It won’t be the next link you get from a new follow consistent with their
posting history about that-thing-for-which-you-followed-them that gets you. It
will be the next #amazonfail meme. It will be thousands of opportunistic spam
accounts bubbling up a Trending Topic
with helpful links. Or it will be innocent meme followers, linking to their
blog hosted on the same server as Mills On The Hill Fish and Tackle Shop,
or, etc.

Hyperlinks never had any trustworthiness. URL shorteners seem like a great
opportunity to add trustworthiness. Is anyone going that direction?
Safe.mn seems to be heading in the right direction, but
they make some bold claims.