Re: Ansible 444 -- July 2024

On 7/1/24 12:02 PM, David Langford wrote:

EDITORIAL. Being routinely paranoid about links that don't go where
claimed, I was a little slow to vote in 2026 Worldcon site selection. The
email from the voting subcontractor ElectionBuddy Inc shows the URL as
'secure.electionbuddy.com/' followed by the promised 19-character voter ID
-- but hovering over the link reveals it as 'go.electionbuddy.com/' plus
some 200 characters of alphanumerical gibberish. No doubt there are vitally
important security reasons for this....

 
This is a universal problem with mailing list services these days. They
include an image element just so the sender will be pinged every time
someone opens a message. The links all contain personalized tracking
information. In many cases they don't even go to the alleged
destination, but to a URL that may, if it feels like it, redirect you
there after sucking out all the personalized information, or could take
you somewhere else for all you know.