Bad hyperlinks!
Recently I published a post
about my annual Christmas Quiz, which you can find here. It contained a link to send an email to
enter the quiz. That email address is xmasquiz2020@gmail.com
If you click the link above, your
device will open your default email application (this may be your browser, in
which case it will probably open in a new window) and open a blank email with
that address in the Recipients box.
However, I copied most of the
text from this post (entry requirements for the 2019 quiz), so it contained a
link to xmasquiz2019@gmail.com (last year's email address). I
noticed the inconsistency and changed the text, but the link remained the same.
What do I mean by this? Try clicking the link below, and this time look more
carefully at the Recipients box.
Pretty trippy right?
So why is that happening? It's
because the link and the text are two different things. That's how the link in
paragraph 3 says "this post" instead
of https://lowerviewpoint.blogspot.com/2019/10/xmasquiz2019.html
You can view the code that makes
this work by doing one of the things in this link (it varies between browsers and devices so putting them all
in would take too long).
The incorrect link above uses the
code below:
<a
href="mailto:xmasquiz2019@gmail.com">xmasquiz2020@gmail.com</a>
The href section is what the link
goes to, and the bit in between the angle brackets (I genuinely had to look up
what these are called!) is the text that you see. Here's another example, this
time with a URL:
EVERYTHING ABOVE THIS POINT IS
LIGHTHEARTED BANTER. EVERYTHING BELOW IS SERIOUS AND TO DO WITH CYBERCRIME.
IT'S GOOD TO KNOW ABOUT THOUGH, AND I'VE TRIED TO KEEP IT SHORT
This is called URL spoofing.
Unlike what I mentioned above, which is just a harmless accident, URL Spoofing
is often associated with a type of hacking called phishing. You might have
heard of phishing; it's when someone emails (or sometimes calls) you,
pretending to be your bank.
They then include a link to input
your details in which looks legitimate, but the site you are on will actually
just be stealing your information to either use or sell. You can avoid getting
scammed by looking closely at the URL when the page is open, or even better by
looking at the link before you open the page.
You can do this by using
right-click>copy link address and pasting into a Word document or somewhere
else or hovering over the link (doesn't work on mobile devices). On mobile, you
can press and hold a link, then copy link address.
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