We’ve been exploring the issues we’re facing in social media and Dave and I have been talking about how we got here. One of the common issues we continue to see are links that claim to give access to a resource of interest, when in fact it’s a link to a piece of malicious software (malware).

Thinking back to how we got here, I recalled the first time I accessed a resource on the Web. It was with an early browser called Lynx. I went to a website and clicked on a link to a map of a building. Except, the browser couldn’t render the image file, I had to download it and open it with another program. The crude nature of this process made it very clear that the file I was accessing, picture.gif, was exactly that:  an image file.

Today, we access the same resources through increasingly confusing naming conventions. We used to tell people to pay attention to the URL they’re accessing. Today many of these addresses are encoded so that it’s impossible to discern what they are or where they’re located. When we started using Twitter, we had limited character space so we started to shorten the URLs, obfuscating them further.  This has made it very difficult to give guidance to people about safe practices in regard to URLs.

It’s still important to look at the links you’re clicking on and make an effort to determine if the destination appears to be legit.  www.gmail.ru is probably something you shouldn’t trust.

I’m not sure anyone is working on a solution for this and it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. In the mean time, pay attention to the things you CAN recognize:

Do you have thoughts about how to improve the issue with URLs?  Do you know of anyone who’s working on this?

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