My Evil Short URL Loop

As I recently documented in my DEBUT article; I have my own short URL service called RLE. I works by adding small strings that redirect. It starts with one character strings like 1-0 and a-z, before presumably moving to two characters and so forth.

Right now I’m still in the one-character zone, and I’m being a bit miserly about where I’m using these decadently short URLs. I recently needed one for a text message I had to send. Shortly after showing that link, I had to take it down; thus leaving “rle.me/c” as a useless short URL. This was a bit heartbreaking; until I decided to do something funny (yet somehow even more useless) with it!

My original broken short URL is http://rle.me/c
http://bit.ly/xOAlv points at RLE
http://ow.ly/nJ28 points at Bitly
http://tinyurl.com/nchced points at Owly
http://icanhaz.com/arleym points at Tiny URL
http://is.gd/2NKIE points at I can Haz
http://doiop.com/gekq61 points at IS GD
http://dwarfurl.com/b7778 points to Doiop
then after a visit to PHPMyAdmin…
http://rle.me/c points to Dwarf URL to complete the circle…

Now when I go to any one of these links it ridiculously goes through all of the links. Why, you ask? Why not! … this will probably last until one of the companies sees what I’ve done and kills that link.

It’s fun, since Owly adds a bar everytime through. I love watching the status bar. Man.

I need to pay more attention in massive conference calls.

UPDATE

A friend tells me that this is basically a microcosm of how a DDOS works. I didn’t realize it was that evil.

Categorized in: Personal

This post was written by ArleyM