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Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links

#22

Post by yzmtf2008 »

Probably a good chance to inject this here:

You can build your own private URL shortener with AWS Lambda, for a dozen cents a month [0]. I've made some modification to it so that it supports customized short name, but the changes are trivial to implement. You could (should?) also probably consider a short domain name to pair with it, but those are also cheap ($10/yr, perhaps depend on the TLD).

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/build-a-serverless-priv...

Re: Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links

#23

Post by manigandham »

MR4D wrote: post #13

This has been poorly handled. I got an email for my company yesterday with one of these links. Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing attack. Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had. Google is going to see a lot of that over the coming weeks if they can’t improve their communication on this.

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.

Re: Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links

#25

Post by fludlight »

yzmtf2008 wrote: post #22

Probably a good chance to inject this here: You can build your own private URL shortener with AWS Lambda, for a dozen cents a month [0]. I've made some modification to it so that it supports customized short name, but the changes are trivial to implement. You could (should?) also probably consider a short domain name to pair with it, but those are also cheap ($10/yr, perhaps depend on the TLD). [0]: https://aws.amazo…

How fast is this?

Re: Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links

#27

Post by dingaling »

manigandham wrote: post #23
MR4D wrote: post #13

This has been poorly handled. I got an email for my company yesterday with one of these links. Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing attack. Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had. Google is going to see a lot of that over the coming weeks if they can’t improve their communication on this.

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.

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?

Re: Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links

#28

Post by yzmtf2008 »

fludlight wrote: post #25
yzmtf2008 wrote: post #22

Probably a good chance to inject this here: You can build your own private URL shortener with AWS Lambda, for a dozen cents a month [0]. I've made some modification to it so that it supports customized short name, but the changes are trivial to implement. You could (should?) also probably consider a short domain name to pair with it, but those are also cheap ($10/yr, perhaps depend on the TLD). [0]: https://aws.amazo…

How fast is this?

At it's core, this URL shortener is just S3 redirect objects [0], behind a cloudfront CDN. So by "fast", you probably mean one of these things:

1) User clicking on a URL: the latency of this action is mostly determined by the latency of cloudfront, which is pretty fast [1]. (Except in the case of a first-click when cloudfront has to do a pull from S3, which is also not bad [1])

2) Creation of a new short URL: this action is the execution of a lambda function, which in my experience is ~1s in cold-start scenarios, and near instant otherwise.

[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-page-...

[1]: https://www.quora.com/What-are-typical-latencies-for-static-...

Re: Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links

#29

Post by sixdimensional »

techsupporter wrote: post #18
MR4D wrote: post #13

This has been poorly handled. I got an email for my company yesterday with one of these links. Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing attack. Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had. Google is going to see a lot of that over the coming weeks if they can’t improve their communication on this.

> Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing attack. > Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had. At my place of employment, we are instructed to "hover to uncover" every link in an e-mail. Yet every link I get from virtually any automated source reads something like this: "To accomplish the task you need to accomplish, simply visit us at h t t p s: / / examp…

You've just given me an interesting idea for an extension to HTML itself - an anchor tag / link type where the text displayed can and must only be equal to the href value of the link. Additionally, any rendering client could render such a link with a special visual cue, perhaps, to help the user understand that the visible link text should equal the link href value and only the link href value.

Could just be, maybe you could make an anchor tag which is like, " rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com"> without a closing tag, and browsers know to render that where the text displayed equals the value of the href. Additionally, clients could detect such links and give them a visual cue to indicate they are "safe(r)" relatively speaking?

Just an idea that popped in when you said this.

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