Imagine your wifi box gets backdoored.

Imagine your ISP's router gets backdoored.

Imagine if the server you got your bash from gets backdoored.

Imagine if the rails repo gets backdoored.

Imagine if the plant where apple images the macbook HDDs gets backdoored.

Imagine all the people, living for today...

(But yeah, personally, I'd forgo the bit.ly part as its unnecessary.)

I could also imagine that someone wired up my car to explode, but there's a reasonable level of paranoia. Link shorteners are fairly frequently used to hide the true destination of a link.

Although, I wonder how hard it would be to set up some text with CSS that looks like one string, but is actually another. e.g. the user would see

    https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contributions/install_homebrew.rb

but when copied-and-pasted is revealed to actually be something like

    https://raw.github.com/mxel/homebrew/master/Library/Contributions/install_homebrew.rb

Libya has traditionally been known as an incredibly corrupt regime, but since Ghaddafi is gone, who knows how things are run these days. My guess is, like it was before they gave him the boot, if you slip the right guy some cash, you can change that link all you want. Might be a different guy though, probably closer to the source, and the price is likely to be a lot lower now that there are less beaks to wet.

You can open it up in web browser and view the code. Goes right here: https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contribu.... I'm not sure how it could be more transparent.

Or even better, the Lybian goverment siezes it.