Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

A pet project of mine for a couple of months now, McAfee’s secure-short URL service went through a viral launch last week and has taken flight!

Leveraging McAfee Global Threat Intelligence, McAf.ee lets you create short url’s which are checked against our databases of known spammy, dangerous, malware hosting, bot control etc sites prior to being show. A while ago there was a glut of dangerous short links circulating around Twitter, Facebook etc – this is something McAfee can proactively do to help offer a little more safety in our online lives.

You can create a short URL for any site, but when someone clicks on it, if the site is flagged as dangerous we throw up a warning page to give users a chance to back out before visiting.

This service was created by the McAfee Office of the CTO, which I am part of – the team is charged with looking into and creating innovative test projects, which, if successful can be rolled into the more traditional McAfee Business Units. It means we have a little more freedom to go out on a limb and try new ideas out.

You can find more information, and of course comment and add feature suggestions, or report issues on our forum http://mcaf.ee/about

I’d love to have your feedback, and, as of now I’m proud to say you can find my blog at http://mcaf.ee/simon (smile!).

Update – Larry Magid from CNET NEws called me to interview me about the service, he was very gracious and published a great writeup of the service. He also recorded the interview and made a podcast available. Boy, I hate hearing recordings of myself.