Question about abbreviated URLs

[Relztrah]

I included several URLs in my router website filter to prevent my son from going there. I use OpenDNS which filters out a lot of the know garbage, but other websites are questionable.

Anyway, I have seen on Twitter and elsewhere that there is an abbreviated or tinyurl method of shortening a website to a few characters. There's a technical name for this which escapes me.

So suppose I want to filter out http://www.donteventhinkaboutit.com/ and put that URL in my router's website filter, will I also have to somehow figure out the abbreviated forms of the URL and inclue them? I suspect that these abbreviated URLs are automatically generated by Twitter or whoever, and random.

Any ideas?

[Cuc Tu]

I think the URL shortening services are redirects to the actual sites, so your website filter should still block them.

I'm not positive, so maybe test it...

[Paul Komski]

will I also have to somehow figure out the abbreviated forms of the URL and inclue them

TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com/)'s are created as often as you like and not made by Twitter etc. If they were to hop through the router it would be dead easy to create another different one if the router managed to block it.