Google is killing yet another service: the Google URL Shortener. As Dare Obasanjo comments on X, any links using the goo.gl shorter will break after August 25, 2025.
When Google offers a service, millions of people use it and it becomes embedded in every corner of the internet — and then when Google kills a service, countless things break, and it causes a whole lot of inconvenience for a whole lot of people.
Unfortunately, Google doesn’t seem to concern itself with this pattern, and now it’s killing the URL shortener just like it killed the One VPN service, the Google Podcasts app, the Google Hangouts app, and many others.
And yes, the correct term is “killing,” not “sunsetting.” Oh, and if you’re wondering what else Google has killed over the years, there’s a website for that.
https://twitter.com/carnage4life/status/1814109968918008075?s=46
Now, technically the Google URL Shortener service has been dead for a while — it stopped letting people create new links in 2018. However, in that announcement post, it did also say “while most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.” That’s Google’s bolding, not mine.
Fast forward six years, however, and Google is now telling us all our shortened links are going to return 404s after August 25, 2025. Well, great, thanks Google.
To make the transition easier for us, from next month on, goo.gl links will start displaying an interstitial page when you click them, reminding you that they’re going to break in a year. Except that those interstitial pages will probably break any redirect flows and mess with social metadata, so — well, those particular links will just break next month, I guess.
On a serious note, if you still have any goo.gl links lying around for whatever reason, you can use one of the many other link-shortening services out there to replace them or just leave them long if you’re concerned about their security. And do it soon, because interstitial page or no, people are bound to forget about it if they leave it too long.
Anthropic has officially filed to go public, and buried inside its S-1 is a blunt warning about the technology at the center of its business. The maker of Claude AI says advanced AI could cause everything from large-scale cyberattacks and geopolitical instability to catastrophic or even existential risks for humanity.
The warnings take up a surprisingly large part of the filing. Axios notes that more than 90 pages, or roughly a third of the prospectus, focus on risk factors. Many of them warn about what could happen as AI systems become more capable and autonomous.
AI giants have a growing autonomy problem on their hands. A new Axios report has revealed that Anthropic's Claude recently accessed publicly available Georgia vote count without human authorization, sparking fresh concerns about AI security ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911