Monday, July 20, 2009

Tired of Security Nonsense About URL Shorteners Being Dangerous

Am I the only one who is tired of hearing of the security risks of URL shorteners? It looks like the complaint boils down to:

- When using a shortened URL I can't tell what site I'm visiting before I go there

Which I suppose leads to people thinking:

- If only I knew which site I was going to visit, somehow I could avoid security issues

Who believes this anymore? Except for cases of a site that is clear NSFW, does anyone really believe anymore that if they see a URL before they click on it they can somehow divine whether it is likely malicious, has malware, etc? I mean, seriously?

I've seen no fewer than 5 blog posts this week about how to unshorten URLs for many of the popular URL shortening services. Give it a rest already. This isn't a big risk, threat, exposure, etc.