URL shorteners

Yes these sites that let you shorten a large cumbersome URL to a set of 4-6 characters, popularly used by twitter.

One such URL shortening service bit.ly was blocked by open dns (a very popular free DNS service). So everyone who was using open dns as their DNS servers were greeted by a warning page telling them it had been blocked as it was a phishing site.

It was fixed within half an hour of being reported. It would appear that the person(s) who reported the link, failed to realise it is a url shortening service and just reporting the bit.ly url would block every single site using this service.

So my suggestion is, don’t report the bit.ly link, report the link it re-directs to.

I have also suggested in a tweet to @opendns they educated those that report these bit.ly links to actually click through and note the link it re-directs to.

Before you jump up and down and say I’m crazy. You can install a firefox plugin that enables you to preview the site that bit.ly re-directs to, including the URL and the site contents.

Yes report such things, but please learn how to report them in a proper manner.