Shrink that URL

Jacob — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:03:35 +0000

The web is built around addresses to web pages, often called URLs. Sometimes, some of these URL addresses can be quite long. Consider the address to a Google map which shows where my house in Oregon is:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2041+NE+Josephine+Dr,+Hillsboro,+OR+97124&sll=37.09024,-112.412109&sspn=54.79724,118.476563&ie=UTF8&ll=45.540902,-122.985364&spn=0.000749,0.001808&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=45.540753,-122.985334&panoid=XYkzvAe2UII2YNtD0tOp5A&cbp=1,281.96901520324406,,0,5.839042847276948

Not only does that take up several lines, but putting that in an email, instant message, or facebook status could be kind of a problem.

That is why there are several services which can store a long address like the one above, and shrink it down to a small address that is much easier to use. These services store the long address, and give you a short address. When someone accesses the short address, it automatically forwards that someone to the web page at the full long address.

Four of the more popular services that do this are: bit.ly, TinyURL.com, is.gd, and tr.im.

All these services do basically the same thing, but their interface and length of the small URL they give you might be different. As an example, I took the long Google maps URL above and made it smaller using each of the services:

http://bit.ly/3mLLW0

http://tinyurl.com/444lwo

http://is.gd/3nTW

http://tr.im/5jz

In the future, if you see an address like on of the above, realize that it is a shortened URL to somewhere else. If you ever find yourself needing to shrink a URL, go ahead and give one of these free services a try.

For those who want to run their own URL-shrinking web service, look at lil’url, free open source software that you can install on your own web server.

New type of address encoding I got this phishing attach in my inbox. You know,...

New type of address encoding

Jacob — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 13:52:30 +0000

I got this phishing attach in my inbox. You know, one of those that look like they are from paypal or someone, but they really aren’t. They give you links that they ask you to click on, except that the links don’t go to paypal’s server, they go to some other site that looks like paypal and tricks you into providing your login credentials. None of this is new.

What is new is how they are providing the address in the link. They provided the IP address in hex. So if I were to represent the address to my server, it would be: http://0xcf.0×2d.0×41.0×24/

I thought this was very interesting, so I tried it in Firefox and Opera on my mac, and neither were tricked. Both browser’s didn’t convert the hex to the real IP address, so it didn’t work. But it makes me wonder if there are browsers out there that might be tricked by such IP address encoding.

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