'Human Error' Briefly Kills All Shortened Twitter Links
from the ick dept
Twitter has been trying to push all links through its t.co link shortener system, which is actually quite annoying. It's experienced some downtime in the past, including earlier this week when a bit of "human error" by the registrar who handles the .co domain made the entire t.co domain dead to the world, basically breaking all of those links. Apparently someone at the registrar responded to a phishing complaint by accidentally killing the entire domain... and with it countless URLs. As security researcher Mikko Hypponen pointed out in response to all of this:t․co downtime illustrates how shortlinks make the web more fragile and harder to archive.Indeed. While they're handy given Twitter's artificial limits, and can be useful as a poor man's tracking system for outbound links, on the whole, they seem to cause a lot of problems. Too many times I've had links go through multiple shorteners and fail along the way because one of them hiccups.
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Filed Under: human error, link shortener, registrar, t.co
Companies: twitter
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Ah, humans
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
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Re: Ah, humans
All that happened here is that a huge number of links that would have pointed to a huge number of URLs, ISPs, countries and hosts were redirected through a single one instead, and when that failed, everything did. Hopefully, they were aware of the risks and the balance they made before they made that decision, and it's up to them to re-evaluate their future strategy.
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Re: Re: Ah, humans
Do you think the Enron traders who rigged California's energy market �were aware of the risks and the balance they made before they made that decision, and it's up to them to re-evaluate their future strategy� ? When the lights go out over a large area, it's statistically certain that people will die. But Arthur Andersen is now Accenture.
How about the investment bankers who rigged the mortgage market with CDOs? Are those guys re-evaluating?
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Re: Re: Re: Ah, humans
If so, I'd suggest you seek help, or at least a sense of perspective. If not, I'm not sure what you're even trying to do here.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Ah, humans
I have a massive amount of serious reading to catch up on.
TTYL.
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Re:
Using "a href" would make the links bigger. (code for link + code for visuals )
Shortened links on twitter, are a redirect service.
The actual url is shorter. (completely different url)
The shortened url's hosts, give you rollover info on the location of the link.
I agree that html formatting would be nice, so would more characters, but it's twitter, a micro blogging network.
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Re:
I hate it, however, when shortened URLs appear on regular web pages and in comments. They're opaque, so I can't see where the link is taking me, they allow my clicking of the link to be tracked, and they do indeed make things more fragile by introducing another point of potential failure.
My trivial protest is that I never click on them.
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Re:
http://t.co/123456 ?
or...
http://199.59.148.12/123456 ?
I'll give you some time to figure it out.
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Re:
;)
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(2) All shortened links are vulnerable to future breakage. However, we obviously cannot dispense with shortened links, because they are the only way to exchange references on the shortened web.
In order to convince me there is something wrong with using shortened links, you have to convince that statement (2) is false, despite the fact that statement (1) is obviously true.
Good luck with that.
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Using a url shortener where unnecessary is the quintessential example of putting all of your eggs in one basket. Sure, any given domain can go down, but using URL shorteners means that now one domain going down takes down all the links using that shortener.
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Poor managerial skills form the supervisor? Maybe.
Bad decision in allowing the employee to access what he broke? Surely.
Making a huge deal out of nothing? Absolutely.
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