Hey guys ,Daniel from TwinBytes here with another video tutorial for you.
This time on short URLs that you might receive by an email or through a social
media post and you're not sure if it's something that you can click on safely.
So stick around and I'll show you some tricks how to check out if the URL is safe.
Coming right up...
Alright, so how to know if the short URL is safe to click on? I'm going to
show you a couple of things here and it's important to know if that URL is
safe to click before you click on it because a lot of people will just click
on it and then find out that all of a sudden some advertisements popping up or
warning your computer's infected you need to call Microsoft immediately to
remove the virus, do not shut down your computer. All these scary type of messages.
But you could even have nothing happening at all or at least it appears
as though nothing happened at all, while really something did happen in the
background and it allowed a hacker access to your computer, your webcam, all
your files, who knows what. You have no clue what happened. So if nothing happens,
you should be really scared, and if something does happen, at least you can
see what it is that happened and then you can address that. So let's try and
avoid this in the first place. So if you receive a link from... that's coming from bit.ly
Now it doesn't really come from bit.ly it's coming from someone else who
created the link, but it would start as bit.ly slash and then some
mysterious link or whatever it is. Now to check it what you would do is go to the
website link but adding a plus sign at the end. So don't click on the link. You
want to copy the link, then paste it into your web browser, add a plus sign to the end.
Then press ENTER to go to that site with the plus sign on the end. So it
would look something like this where you would have the plus sign on the end.
Now let's look at an actual example. So if we have one here, we have no clue
where this link is actually going to. So what we'll do is go to bit.ly website
we can copy and paste or copy the link and you can paste it into the web
browser and add the plus sign, once you have the plus sign in there, hit enter
and then we can see the website. It shows us the title of the page and the... so you
got the title down here and you've got the URL over here as well. So you can see
that I created this link and it's going to my website. So if you don't know that
website you're not expecting a link to it you don't trust this website. Who is
this guy? I don't want to click on that link, then don't go there.
There's also links that would come from tinyurl.com
Same kind of thing. Whatever the mysterious link is at the back. So what
you would do is just add preview dot at the front of that URL, and then you can
copy and paste that into your web browser. So whether you add the preview
dot first or copy that link paste it in your web browser and then type preview
dot right at the front of it. So it would look more like this. Then press ENTER and
you can find a preview of the site. So if we got this example here another
mysterious link we have no clue. So we just add preview dot to the
beginning of it and you can see here that it's showing preview dot
it redirects to this website with the sub page of that site as well and you
have a link here to proceed to the website. Now it can also give you a
preview of it, if you enable the feature, which is kind of nice to see what it
looks like because if again, you don't know this website, you're not familiar
with it, it's not a common globally known website address. You'd like to find out a
little bit more about it what is that site. But at least from here you can see
what it is. If it's showing one that's got a real spamy name, like the short
weird spelling of something, then you can kind of just know based on the spelling
that it's a bad site. But if you're not sure, don't click it. Now what about other
short URL services? Well there's pages or websites such as checkshortURL.com
So this one here, you would again copy and paste your short URL into the little
field in here. There's no need to add a plus sign or preview dot or any special
characters to it. You're just simply copying and pasting the link in there
and then hit expand. Now it gives you a big advertisement trying to do a preview
underneath it and if you scroll down a bit then it shows that a website that's
actually going to. Then there's... if that doesn't work, there's also unshorten.it
Now it doesn't matter if you try this one first and then the other one.
But if one doesn't work you have the other one. So again, copy and paste this
tiny URL. I was using that as an example again and then press unshorten it,
and if you look down a little bit, it gives you the title of the page of where
it's redirected to, as well as the actual URL that it goes to. It is trying to load
a preview of the site at the same time. But I'm not getting the preview coming
up in this case. So anyway what if none of these options work and you still
can't figure out where that short URL is going to? The answer simple, just don't
click on it. If you need to confirm if it's something important, you can ask the
person who sent it to you to send you an unshortened version of that link, otherwise
just assume it's spam and delete the email and be done with it.
Just ignore it. So anyway, that's my video tutorial or tectorial for you guys this
time on how to find out if a short URL that you received is safe to click on,
before you click on it. If you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up, don't
forget to subscribe and stay tuned for future videos as I try to put out every
single week. I know last week I missed one. There is a lot of stuff going on, but I'm
planning on having another one coming out very shortly. Thanks and see you in
the next one. Bye for now.