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by manigandham 3008 days ago
What is poorly handled and what should've been different? The security issue seems to be the obfuscation that is offered by all URL shortners and redirects, and most email links usually have several layers of them.
2 comments

Which raises the question of the purpose of link shorteners anyway.

They are usually so obscure and jumbled that reading them out loud to someone would be slow and awkward ( "that's goo dot gl, no e" ). So what is the use-case?

They're still shorter, and less likely to line-wrap and break older clients. They also help to obfuscate certain tracking info and/or protect them from tampering.

Also you can set a custom shortname in almost all of them, if it's available.

SMS is one case where we use them. Shorter links mean we could fit notifications into typical 140 characters limit for single sms
> So what is the use-case?

They allow tracking.

See my post a couple minutes ago - it routes to a completely different domain that, until I read this article, had no idea was related to google.

I don’t expect that from a major provider like google or Apple, Microsoft, etc.

It's the same domain. The only difference is the subdomain partitioning by app.

Original: https://goo.gl/abcde

New: https://yourname.app.goo.gl/abcde