Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker) [LWN.net]

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 15, 2016 11:25 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker) by niner
Parent article: Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

I think there's an option to share it with only specific Google Maps users (i.e. with those who have a Google account).

What I don't quite understand is how do they know who created that map?

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Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 15, 2016 19:33 UTC (Fri) by cwitty (guest, #4600) [Link] (1 responses)

"What I don't quite understand is how do they know who created that map?"

If you're talking about the geocacher map, the researchers created the map as a summary of hundreds of sets of driving directions, all starting at one particular residential address. So it seems reasonable to assume that the person who requested all of those driving directions lives at that address.

Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services (Freedom to Tinker)

Posted Apr 17, 2016 20:41 UTC (Sun) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

So it seems reasonable to assume that the person who requested all of those driving directions lives at that address.

Either that, or the researchers stumbled upon someone's malicious prank to inundate said address with dozens of unwanted visitors.

Okay, I'm being a little facetious here, but it could happen!