Since it became the default URL shortener for Twitter, Bit.ly has been growing like crazy. And as we learned from Spider-Man, with great power, comes great responsibility.
Bit.ly has started warning users of potentially malicious sites, based on information it has about URLs being shortened. For example, if you click on this link, you’ll see the message that reads, “Warning – this site has been flagged and may contain unsolicited content. The content of this web page appears to contain spam, or links to unsolicited or undesired sites.” It then gives the following suggestions:
Close your browser window
Notify the sender of the URL
Or you can also continue on to the link, at your own risk, if you click another URL on the page.
And this do-gooding likely plays into Bit.ly’s greater plans to become a more Digg-like destination for content.
Bit.ly is apparently pulling this malicious site info from StopBadware.org and antiphishing.org, just as many other services do.
That’s a great step in protecting us!
Yeah, that’s really great. Bit.ly is looking out for its users.
Too late. Quality sites like http://anonboard.com have long ago blocked tiny URL redirectors for this very reason.
That’s different than doing the blocking passively so I don’t have inform myself of every goddamn malicious source. nobody cares about anonboard.
Thumbs up to bitly!
Yeah, its better late than never. At least they made an effort in the right direction. Be positive people especially “i lold” (whatever your real name is).
Protecting us? I used bit.ly to make short URL’s for myself to different pages on my ebay store, so I can quickly check inventory without having a dozen 80+ character links in my favorites… bit.ly tagged every one of them… I asked them why I was flagged, still havn’t got a reason… Considuring these are personal links that I havn’t advertised to anyone, and they just goto my own webpage…what are they protecting me from???
That’s really smart of them. It would be cool to see them do more cool things like this…
I would like to see some form of link analytics. It would be really cool if I could use it to see how many times links are getting clicked!
Add + to the end of any bit.ly URL, you’ll see lots of statistics.
Thank you so much! Can’t believe I didn’t know this—it’s even in their slogan.
If you use tweetdeck you can switch on tracking for url shortners to see how often they’ve been clicked
Add + to the end of the bit.ly link
I think Yahoo at one point or another deployed a similar “url checker” flagging malicious links.. I wonder if Biy.ly can leverage off that same technology? Sad to see that such a great service needs to spend time, talent and $ to stupid spammers.
Actually, they are using existing blacklists such as stopbadware – the same that Google uses.
I dare ya: http://bit.ly/4REK4
I dare you too. http://bit.ly/Ufpxw
Don’t click on my link – http://bit.ly/6xZjA
I heard bit.ly was asked to make all TechCrunch links show this warning, along with a photo of Ev shaking his fist. Doesn’t seem fair.
Hahaha!
Is TinyUrl still kicking?
Nope…. not so tiny by today’s standards!
um… i just get taken to a website called “deals n cash” when i click that link. it tries to get me to enter my email address – no warnings from bit.ly
is this some sort of scam post?
Safe.mn has been doing this from day one: http://safe.mn/2 . This URL shortener does a lot of security checks on both the URL and the conyent.
Phishtank would be another good source.
I’d be worried about false positives.
This is awesome! Great idea.
link to antiphising.org …instead of antiphishing.org ..is that a joke ? wrong site
heh. thanks
This is a win for the users. Well done Bit.ly. I hope other URL Shorterner services do the same.
Other services do. As an example, see a list here of services that responded to SURBL’s “An Open Letter To Operators Of Redirection Sites”: http://www.surbl.org/redirect.html
Ironically, on their warning page they misspelled the link to the anti-phishing website.
It should be “antiphishing.org” but it now reads “antiphising.org”.
Interesting idea… and YES, TinyURL is still alive and well. I use Bit.ly when posting from TweetDeck and TinyURL when shortening links in my personal emails. Both work great! thx for the + tracking tip guys.
David
http://www.FinancialPlanning202.com
Goatse, anyone? LOL.
This is old guys!
This has been in effect for over two months, at least, as some of the twitter accounts I’m following were linking to their blacklisted domain and throwing up the bit.ly warning. Nothing new.
This is about time. Tiny URL are becomming a major enabler of spam. The other problems is the fact that spamers steal others peoples email address and use it as their own address to send out junk. Is there any defense against that?
I think a lot of the links which are promoted by bitlynow will fall in this category
http://twitter.com/bitlynow
This is an great move by Bit.ly. Looks like they have a set plan to overthrow Digg. The warning is useful and is sure to win the good will of users.
The use of URL shorteners in email spam is becoming much more prevelant recently, so this is certainly a good thing. Lets hope that other URL shortening services follow suit (although I think some do so already) so that its not just twitter users who are protected from this spam.
That is good business in letting people know first up front before they click more links to other pages
That’s nice, we can rely on bit.ly
This is what URL shorter service should do. Because sometimes link from URL shorter redirect clicker to malicious sites. Is bit.ly already beat tinyurl?
Sounds like a good idea.
They should check their resources. Today I posted a link on Twitter to an article about stopping school bullies. bit.ly flagged it.
The site is a Christian based family friendly website. Never spammed and never will. Listed as a Childsafe site. Their mistakes can hurt legitimate websites.
My art studio tour website started showing a warning today from bit.ly, and also all the links from this website are also showing a warning if linked from bit.ly. How do I find out why this has happened and how to fix it? I can’t use bit.ly any more on twitter. I have been linking this website from bit.ly for about 7 months with no problems. There is nothing suspicious about this website. It is about a community art studio tour, and the website has been on the web for the last 8 years. Anyone have any ideas about this? As the organizer for the studio tour, that is happening in March 2010, I am very concerned that this website has been compromised. I did a malware check on google for it, and it came out clean.