All the owner of that blog would have to do would be to change his post to look like a normal robots.txt file and he could happily ban Google (or Yahoo, or whoever) from crawling any page on bit.ly.
No crawler I know of accepts a redirected robots.txt from an alternate domain for rules about the original domain.
Is that part of the robots.txt RFC or just a happy security coincidence? The bit.ly issue seems like a pretty bad bug that ought to be fixed.
You also might be able to fool Google Webmaster Tools or other utilities into thinking you own bit.ly. One of the authentication methods I've seen used was the creation of an empty html document in the root directory.
The 1994 original proposal is silent on what to do with any unexpected response codes/types.
The 1997 internet-draft (never an RFC) suggests the redirect should be followed, but the potential confusion that could cause has meant few, if any, crawlers have followed that guidance. It's more likely to be a webmaster configuration error than real intent.
That is true, but it must still mess things up to have robots.txt redirected. It would appear that Google and other bots won't have any way of reaching the real robots.txt.
And what about sitemap.xml, atom.xml, and other typical files that could also be redirected?
"And what about sitemap.xml, atom.xml, and other typical files that could also be redirected?"
Why not try it? As of this writing, both of those go to other places.
I checked the other one that lept to mind, favicon.ico. Bit.ly appears to have hardcoded it (probably in apache configuration or equivalent for whatever server they use), however, try http://bit.ly/faviconico and look at the resulting URL. Looks like a few things were tried by the same guy. Now, pwning the favicon would have been cool.
Most corporate email travels via Exchange with Rich Text, so the 80 character limit doesn't apply. That's just what "normal users" use; rightfully so.
For us hackers: When sending plain text messages, you should encase urls in <angle_brackets> to prevent breaking and especially the trailing period problem like <www.google.com>.
You forgot: Lotus Notes. Mishandles html emails so much, the new Outlook is pure perfection compared to it. (grumbles over having to implement a complex receipt email for a company that uses Notes internally).
Hundreds of thousands of "direct" hits, and hardly any actual referrers. Looks like bit.ly is counting crawlers as hits. Not too surprising given the lack of validation elsewhere.
No crawler I know of accepts a redirected robots.txt from an alternate domain for rules about the original domain.