[IP] Re: use of tiny url

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: Kent Borg [kentborg@borg.org]
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2008 6:28 PM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] use of tiny url

Another risk of tinyurl is that it is not private. As an experiment I
asked for a tiny URL for aol.com and got http://tinyurl.com/5v2u, I then
decremented it and tried http://tinyurl.com/5v2t, and
http://tinyurl.com/5v2s, etc.

Interesting pages can come up. One page is a Google search of a phone
number, there were a couple pages about import/export. One page seemed
to be looking up details of a prison inmate. One page was an index of
software bug exploits.

Tiny URL, to produce tiny URLs, uses a dense name space. Explore that
space and you will find stuff.

Even if you don't ever give out a tiny URL, the very fact you asked to
be issued with a tiny URL makes it essentially public, anyone might
happen upon it. Don't point to anything you don't want known.


-kb

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