If you're running a lot on social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook, you'll see countless shortened links or shortened links.
By the term abbreviated link we mean that link uses some proxy service that does nothing but redirect you to real website when you click on it.
This might make sense on Twitter where the artificial 140 character limit exists, but in general it's a very dangerous habit that has no real benefits, other than reducing the number of characters a link appears on screen you.
The risk, therefore, is that you can not know who the link is leading. One who uses the Bit.ly service looks something like this: http://bit.ly/1GuRuGr and does not reveal anything about his destination. There is a risk that you will be dragged into dangerous sites.
The feature is too much used for phishing, or by sites that try to attack your computer in other ways.
You can of course prepare your system somewhat to reduce the risks. The softwares security they can help and protect you from many dangers, but there cannot be a 100% protection against all threats.
How can you protect yourself?
Use common sense. Who posted the link? A trusted friend, or a page or person you know little about?
While this may help you a little more, it does not work with the shortened links. Of course you may have already noticed that these links may also come from friends you know very well, but they have had the misfortune to deceive themselves.
Hacked accounts usually start sending malicious links to all account buddies.
How can you discover the destination of a link?
As you can understand from the above the best choice is being able to see what's behind a shortened link, without having to click and go to the web page.
So here is where the tools that will help you come into play. With a search on its extensions Chrome and Firefox shows amazing results. There are tons of extensions for Chrome that reveal links automatically, but none available that work in Firefox.
The majority of Firefox add-ons that reveal links are dating from 2012, and none of them works
Chrome users can choose it LinkPeelr for example, which discloses abbreviated links. It supports a wide range of services such as: t.co, bit.ly, is.gd or ow.ly to name a few.
If you use Firefox?
Firefox users can use an online service to LongUrl, rather than an extension. It's an online service that you can paste the shortcut links to uncover their final destination.
It's not as comfortable as Chrome's LinkPeel, which shows the actual links when you move the mouse over the shortcut but it's better than nothing.
The service had created an add-on for Firefox sometime, but has not been updated by 2009 and so it does not work in the latest versions of the browser.
An alternative is the service Unshorten which also reveals the destination of the link.
