So, we did have a good discussion here about link shortening, but in it we missed talking about one important point, which is that we were about to launch link shortening! Here is the townhall link again in its new format:
Shorter, eh? See We're launching Linkshare short URLs and static site hosting! for the announcement.
(Kaloyan had a great point earlier up about avoiding making a honeypot of secrets. We have tried to avoid this with this link shortening system. The way this works is jvgihxcuwlxv2o26duuiohfbk6ya is actually a Base-32 encoded encryption key for the original longer URL. We store the original longer URL encrypted, identified by the hash of the encryption key. When we receive a shortened URL, we hash this shortened key, find the encrypted, longer access grant, then use the shortened key to decrypt it. What this means is we actually can’t load or decrypt these saved access grants until someone actually accesses them, making this much less honeypot-like. The link sharing server is doing the decryption of the file content server-side still, so we intend to work through full end-to-end encryption (javascript, client-side) later).