By @edent · bit.ly CyberSecurity · 4 comments · 250 words · read ~780 times.
TicketMaster has joined the long list of companies to lose their customers' information. As is common, they sent out an email to warn poor sods like me who might have had our details snaffled. Their email is particularly poor and contains a delightful example of how not to communicate issues like this. See if you […]
Continue reading →By @edent · bit.ly privacy · 450 words · read ~541 times.
I've been ranting about Bitly for years! The ubiquitous link shortener had an interesting "feature" - add a + to the end of the URl and you could see all the statistics for the link. How many clicks, referers, location of users. Here's a blog post I wrote about it way back in 2011. I […]
Continue reading →By @edent · bit.ly emoji · 2 comments · 150 words · read ~562 times.
Popular URl shortner Bitly allows users to customise its links. This means you can have all sorty of weird and wonderful character in there. For example: bit.ly/ó¾°ó¾° You can also use Emoji! bit.ly/☹ bit.ly/♐ Well, OK, not all Emoji. If you try to use most of them, the Bitly system craps out and generates broken […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Amazon bit.ly phishing security · 3 comments · 650 words · read ~353 times.
Phishing is the devious practice of tricking users into giving away their usernames and passwords to fraudulent sites. It is big business, and the best defence against it is constant vigilance. I'm going to walk you, step-by-step, through a scam that targetted me today. Along the way we'll see how to avoid falling prey to […]
Continue reading →By @edent · bit.ly gchq · 250 words · read ~494 times.
The British intelligence service GCHQ has been on Twitter since January 2016 - however they only sent their first tweet today. GCHQ@GCHQHello, world. bit.ly/GCHQhello❤️ 1,612💬 453🔁 010:02 - Mon 16 May 2016 As I never tire of saying, Bitly is a terrible at keeping your data private. Simply add a + on to the URL […]
Continue reading →By @edent · bit.ly facebook · 3 comments · 300 words
Analysts estimates are always interesting to read - especially if you know the real statistics which they are trying to prophetize. Even when someone releases "official" statistics, they're usually hard to verify independently, and even harder to analyse by region. Benedict Evans - who I've had the pleasure of meeting at Mobile Monday - published […]
Continue reading →By @edent · bit.ly qr trains tickets · 200 words · read ~612 times.
Earlier this year, I blogged about seeing these QR codes appearing on some train tickets. The campaign itself wasn't that great - a poor call-to-action and a decidedly mobile-unfriendly site - but I was interested in how many people had scanned them. Thanks to bit.ly's practice of exposing everyone's statistics, we can see exactly how […]
Continue reading →By @edent · bit.ly goo.gl NaBloPoMo privacy statistics url · 2 comments · 200 words · read ~724 times.
I'm not a big fan of URL shortners - bit.ly, t.co, goo.gl, ow.ly, etc - I understand the need for them, but they seem to offer a fairly poor service in terms of privacy and usefulness. Take this recent example from Vodafone. Aside from the obvious downsides (user doesn't know where the link will take […]
Continue reading →By @edent · advertising bit.ly facebook mobile stats · 350 words
Facebook has been getting a lot of criticism for its lack of mobile revenue. A fact it tried to hide from its IPO. Much ink has been spilled, but is it really necessary for Facebook to worry? Here's a quick case study. Facebook has, in its infinite wisdom, decided that I would be interested in […]
Continue reading →By @edent · advertising badvertising bit.ly qr QR Codes statistics stats trains · 250 words · read ~1,236 times.
No, I'm not talking about Masabi's innovative technology, but of this rather odd bit of advertising found on the back of a train ticket. There's no specific call to action - but there's not much space to play with. Let's give it a scan... sigh A non-mobile site. With an Adobe Flash plugin in the […]
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