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I remember there was a blog by someone who implemented their own url-shortener and it turned into a huge amount of work fighting spam, scams and malicious actor
by morkalork 1y ago
I remember there was a blog by someone who implemented their own url-shortener and it turned into a huge amount of work fighting spam, scams and malicious actors abusing the system to the point of their domain was being threatened with blacklisting. But then again, if anyone has the transferable skills to handle that, it would be google since they're already battling the same bad people on all their other services.
- kentonv 1y agoBut those problems all went away six years ago when Google stopped accepting new links.
- Maxion 1y agoURLs rot, domains expire. So I don't think the problem went away completely.
- jsploit 1y agoIt's still being abused by people registering expired domains.
- morkalork 1y agoExactly, there is no guarantee that what a shortened url pointed to 10 years ago is the same as today, or even the same owner or administrator.
- kentonv 1y agoOK but the same vulnerability exists if short URLs weren't used -- in that case the link source would link directly to the now-hijacked domain. So why does Google have to care about this? Is it because they're worried that the domain name goo.gl in the link implies a Google endorsement? Seems like they should have thought of that before launching the service in the first place? Still, the frequency of actual abuse must be low and going down over time (due to the data set being read-only since 2019 and actual traffic to these links surely decreasing as time goes on)...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]