Now here's a useful link (thanks to Mikko Hypponen for the tweet that brought it to my attention).
I've made the point several times here about being cautious about URLs shortened by bit.ly, tinyurl and the many others. Which is why when I flag our blogs and papers on twitter, I normally use tinyURL or sURL to shorten links if I need to, since I can force a preview of the expanded URL using those sites.
However, http://longurl.org/ lets you see the expanded version of a shortened URL before you go there. TinyURL will let you do this for tinyURLs, and sURL doesn't give you a choice about seeing the expanded link before you access, but again, this only works with sURL's own links. However longurl.org can expand URLs from a long list of other URL shorteners – see http://longurl.org/services.
David Harley
Director of Malware Intelligence
