Some links are long, I get that. I get that you don’t always want to link a page with 50 random letters in it, but they also make me paranoid. Not when my friends do it, but when random people do it. Some of the links might be something interesting, but it’s just not worth the risk unless it’s something like a friend or a major celebrity or company who probably won’t ruin their image by linking to a virus.
Are there any good Chrome extensions that, when you mouse over the link, shows in the pop-up bar on the bottom the actual referent, rather than the tinyurl? (or bit.ly, etc) I’ve looked for them, but they all same to do in-text link replacement, which I don’t want. I just want it to show up on mouseover.
I don’t know if one exists but it may be too slow to do this in a mouseover since a shortened URL may be redirected multiple times to get to the final URL. (I know this since I coded an un-shortener awhile ago.)
I’m curious, were these legitimate shortened URLs? What I mean is, why would a legitimate user created nested shortened URLs in such a manner? That would be an immediate red flag and could be indicated as such after the first request. I use them all the time but I’m not a legit user.
Or do you mean that say bit.ly always tends to serve out multiple 302s before they tell you where you’re going? This seems unlikely as it’s a waste of resources.
The remaining possibility I’m thinking of is that you’re saying that the destination site is doing redirects, possibly bouncing it through a tracking script or what not.
If that’s the case, I think continuing to follow the redirects any further than the last tinyurl.com location defeats the whole purpose: The OP is paranoid about loading viruses (or so I understand) so if the addon is fetching even the first Location: after leaving tinyurl then you’re fetching a possibly suspect URL. Using HEAD alone may eliminate some problems but not all. Seems to me you might as well click the thing.
Me personally, I’m not that worried about drive-bys just FYI. OP’s intent only.
There are at least two such extension for Firefox. I had them for a while, but they never worked flawlessly, probably because I use Flashblock and others. Anyway, you could try one of those. Personally, I’d really like if there was an extension that would give you the title of a YouTube link, so I could just get the joke when someone posts a “look at this” link without having to go there and watch the video. But even if that exists, I’d probably still have the same problem on my system.
They were legitimate URLs shortened in tweets. This was several years ago so I can’t give you a specific example, but if I recall correctly, some Twitter clients auto-shorten URLs. So if you retweet a tweet which contains a bit.ly URL your Twitter client may reshorten it with a tinyurl. 3 redirects was not unusual.