Just wondering…
Url-shorteners are quite fashionable these days.
So,
http://www.caiman.us/scripts/fw/f3703.html
Suddenly looks like: http://goo.gl/txCS9
(there are about 80 ways to shrink urls,so I'm not focusing on the Google URL Shortener)
What's wrong with the "old-fashioned" way?
Destructivator (free game)
Even if you’re not the Twittering kind, you’ll find them on Facebook,Youtube,on forums,blogs etc…even on the Gotd comment page…and in some of your emails lately.
Now there’s nothing wrong with a bit of eye candy.
Problem is if you hover over them, they will not display the link in full ,so you don’t know exactly what or where you’re about to be linked to.
Also spammers are starting to use shortened urls too as well, pointing to Viagra,extensions,pron, dating sites and malware pages.
One of the options would be not click on any of them links(but eventually maybe you might miss out on some valuable information on webpages)
Another option is to ‘translate’ the shortened url and/or use a browser extension to display the link in full whenever you feel the need to.
I found these to be usefull:
-http://untiny.me to extract urls
-the RealUrl addon for firefox
So, how do you avoid clicking on shortened (malware) links ?
