LongURL and the plugin for Firefox

Technology

URL shortening services are very useful and is great especially for those social networking sites (facebook, twitter, etc.). I have nothing against the use of TinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd, ping.fm and other URL shortening services. I am sharing the information that sometimes useful things are being abused by the bad guys. These bad guys can create malicious links and hide it using these URL shortening services.

For the security conscious individuals out there, they prefer to know where a link will lead them before they click on the link. A very helpful tool for this purpose is LongURL. You can manually enter those shortened URLs in the LongURL site and get the expanded URL. Or if you are using the Firefox browser you can try the LongURL Mobile Expander addon.

Quoting the Firefox addon page:

You should always know where a link takes you before clicking on it. Services like TinyURL.com make that difficult. LongURL Mobile Expander uses the LongURL.org web services to let you know where shortened links *really* go.

This is follow-up post for my fun article on GiantURL TinyURL article.

Hope you find this information useful 🙂

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