Here is a great article! It would make you much smarter! CLICK NOW!
Really, its a good read! and it will not damage your windows as much!
Or how about those great links – would you click any of those? They are highly recommended!
http://5z8.info/getPersonalData-start_p6m3w__init_download
http://5z8.info/worm.exe_z6o2f_-php-deactivate_phishing_filter-48-
(Maybe – the last one actually looks promising).
If those links look suspicious to you, why are you clicking links that look like this?
Do you know where they lead you to?
As you could see if you followed the very first link above, the Wikipedia entry for URL shorteners has plenty of pros, but enough cons to counter them. My number one is that the obscurity of the URLs makes them dangerous as it removes a layer of sanity checking that you go through when you are about to click links. Also, they are widely used by spammers and phishers as they easily negate one of the basic features of spam filtering – scanning URLs against blacklisted sites and terms, so they are quickly becoming the phishers holy grail. Not to mention the fact that those links are at the mercy of an intermediate service provider, which might be temporarily down or simply out of business, and then you are stuck with a bunch of dead links that you can not even reverse-engineer on Google.
The explosion of URL shorteners brought to you by the likes of Twitter ( http://5z8.info/backyard-fireworks-disasters_y1t6m_this_persons_account_has_been_hacked ) was driven by technical constraints (like the legacy limitation of 140 characters due to SMS message size), but instead of limiting the usage to the edge case of SMS (or actually doing something to fix, or better, retire the SMS system) we embraced this as a godsend. The shortened URLs are all around.
This brilliant service, ShadyURL, illustrates those points in the best way possible (I don’t think they intended to, though).
Stop creating shortened URLs, period. Its bad for us. And when you get a shortened URL in your Twitter or email, be very careful when you follow it. Lastly, if you want to spread this awareness further, use ShadyURL to send links around.
And by the way – the above links are some of the mildest and least offensive ones I could generate – I am suspecting that most of the URLs won’t pass your basic spam filter.
My name is