msplinks

my myspace and msplinks related traffic doubled today. it must be that school's been out for a while and they're getting bored.

answers to a few questions from my server logs:

• where does the justin come from?
  i'm from the southeastern end of washington state, but i currently reside in utah county, utah.
• is your space cooler?
  yes, my space is cooler than yours.
• how do i carry a loaded gun?
  i wouldn't suggest carrying it in your pants, unless you want to become another strange google search result

Note: Myspace recently changed the way they make msplinks. This tool prob'ly doesn't work anymore...

a while back i mentioned that MySpace and msplinks do dirty things to links.

this bugs me a bit, so i've been trying to figure out ways to mess with 'em. i've got nothing good so far, but in the process i noticed that MySpace doesn't generate a new link for each address (like TinyURL, for example). instead they encode the address in the msplinks url. so an address can be encoded into a msplink even if MySpace has never seen that address before.

while i was playing with msplinks, i created a converter. put any url into it, and it'll spit out a msplinks address. i haven't figured out anything particularly devious to use it for yet, but if you come up with something let me know.

have fun kids :-)

msplinks address converter after the jump.

MySpace has been redirecting all external links in comments through msplinks.com for a couple of months. Msplinks turns any posted link into a redirect, supposedly in an attempt to cut down on spammer redirects and phishing.

From Tom:

Hey everybody, we just launched another program to stop dirty spammers from hasseling[sic] you. When you input a link in myspace it may be converted to a redirect link.... They still point to their original url, but let us easily turn off links to spam, phishing, or virus sites. booyah!

Until a week or so ago, only links in comments were redirected through msplinks. This fit well with the explanation given in Tom's message. Now external links in profiles are redirected through msplinks as well. The effects of this change are drastic and somewhat sinister.