Dwayne and others, does anyone know how people managed to do this:
www.tinyurl.com/dick www.tinyurl.com/cunt
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At base, this is a pretty simple trick though some interesting sleight-of-hand may be involved to acheive the effect.
Essentially, you create either a dynamic DNS reference or a server-hosted resolution table that resolves these URLs to the target server. Now the question is, since tinyurl creates incremented links (each user's request for a "tinyurl" increments the somewhat random address count up by one), how do you force the insulting text you want to appear within the URL?
I can imagine three ways, though I'm sure others are possible: 1.) a simple spoof -- it's not a tinyurl generated link at all but a dummy up which uses tinyurl as a cover -- it's still dyn dns'ed to the VP's site of course but not through tinyurl's server resolution 2.) The link's are generated with the cooperation of the TinyURL staff ensuring consistency instead of randomization 3.) Someone has created an algoritm (perhaps PHP based) to shape tinyurl results into a desired form.
I tried to Sam Spade the URLs (samspade.org) to get a comprehensive trace but good old Sam has been suffering from performance issues and attacks so there were no results. And of course, since the URLs dyn dns to the Veep and wife no URL to IP translation produces useful results (ditto on nslookup, dig and traceroute).
A bit of a mystery for now.
Regarding URL shorteners...
I now use Make a Shorter Link --
http://makeashorterlink.com/about.php
Unlike TinyURL and similar services which obscure the target, Make a Shorter Link presents you with the URL of the page you're about to view when you click on the shortened link and gives you several seconds to agree or disagree to pass through.
For example, here's the Make a Shorter Link version of a long URL to a Cisco page about their VPN 3000 concentator --
http://makeashorterlink.com/?A27D21668
Note how, once you click the link, it displays the original URL --
<http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/vpndevc/ps2284/prod_technical_documentation.html
>
and then gives you the option of begging out before being automatically forwarded.
This is a simple but effective anti-pr0n and other unexpected annoyance technique.
.d.