Twitter Starts Routing All Links Through New Anti-Phishing Service

[bill]

From the it's about time corner...

Trust And Safety [blog.twitter.com]

Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we'll be able keep that user safe.

[bloke in a box]

I'm amazed that its taken this long.

[rogerd]

I agree, bloke, this is long overdue.

[pageoneresults]

Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts.

This only applies to DMs and Email Notifications. They've not yet interfered with URIs in public Tweets.

I've been thinking about what this does and it really opens up a can of worms. I saw an article yesterday discussing the benefits of this and that the 301 > 301 > 200 passed full link juice when the original URI Short is converted again via Twitters new service. They're just adding to the cluster, the hair on my neck was tingling when I saw that second 301. I don't know about you but I feel that second 301 is where loss begins, the first 301 is lossless.

If this ever does go to public Tweets, I think there will be some major fallout. The more I think about it, the more I KNOW they wouldn't do that. No, I think they need to address it further up the source chain, not with another layer of potential technical malfunction.

[JS_Harris]

Twitter is beginning to feel less like "instant freedom of speech" and more like "big brother is watching you, freedom is an illusion" all the time.

we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links

That begs the question - and what else? bad as in illegal or bad as in non compliance with someone elses agenda?

HUMOR - I read the article and it thanks the builders of this new service. Out of curiosity I checked to see what these builders were tweeting and this is the latest tweet "Anybody know of a good hard disk recovery service? I suck at backups." Be afraid!

[MWpro]

Twitter is beginning to feel less like "instant freedom of speech" and more like "big brother is watching you, freedom is an illusion" all the time.

This observation is hardly warranted for the mere implementation of an Anti-Phishing Service...

[leadegroot]

@pageoneresults I agree - I can see the hard core users not liking this in public tweets, which reduces the system's profile overall if they walk.
I don't spam, but I do like to see my url in my links.
Heck, I don't like clicking shortlinks myself because I can't see where they go! (From that point of view, it would make more sense to me if they unwrapped the short urls in DMs!)

[JS_Harris]

MWpro you're right but it wasn't an observation, it was a description of feelings about Twitter. It FEELS like twitter caught a lot of people off guard with the freedom and immediacy of their wonderful new product in a very short amount of time and the world is scrambling to put the reigns on it.