edit: gpt-oss 20B & 120B both eagerly visit it.
There is a current "show your personal site" post on top of HN [1] with 1500+ comments. I wonder how many of those sites are or will be hammered by AI bots in the next few days to steal/scrape content.
If this can be used as a temporary guard against AI bots, that would have been a good opportunity to test it out.
My site is hosted on Cloudflare and I trust its protection way more than flavor of the month method. This probably won't be patched anytime soon but I'd rather have some people click my link and not just avoid it along with AI because it looks fishy :)
I agree my tinfoil hat signal told me this was the perfect way to ask people for bespoke, hand crafted content - which of course AI will love to slurp up to keep feeding the bear.
https://jpmorgan.c1ic.link/logger_zcGFC2_bank_xss.docm
Definitely not meta
Deceptive site issue
This web page at [...] has been reported as a deceptive site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.
What's going on? I can't find any setting to disable this.
I shortened a link and when trying to access it in Chrome I get a red screen with this message:
Dangerous site
Attackers on the site you tried visiting might trick you into installing software or revealing things like your passwords, phone, or credit card numbers. Chrome strongly recommends going back to safety.But what I’d like to understand is why there are so many of the same thing. I know I’ve seen this exact idea multiple times on HN. It’s funny the first time, but once it’s done once and the novelty is gone (which is almost immediately), what’s the point of another and another and another?
I have home made url shorteners in go, rust, java, python, php, elixir, typescript, etc. why? because I'm trying the language and this kind of project touches on many things: web, databases, custom logic, how and what design patterns can I apply using as much of the language as I can to build the thing.
I’m not criticising the author or anyone who came before. I’m trying to understand the impetus between redoing a joke that isn’t yours. You don’t learn anything new by redoing the exact same gag that you wouldn’t learn by being even slightly original or making the project truly useful.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. You could make e.g. a Fonzie URL shortener (different lengths of “ayyyyy”), or an interstellar one (each is the name of a space object), or a binary one (all ones and zeroes)… Each of those would take about the same effort and teach you the same, but they’re also different enough they would make some people remember them, maybe even look at the author and their other projects, instead of just “oh, another one of these, close”.
Edit: I see referencnes to shadyurl in the comments and I have heard of that, but probably wouldn’t have thought of it.
Again, this was not a criticism, but a genuine question.
URL Shortener is still one of the most popular System Design questions, building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it, for example.
I agree. But a URL shortener with a twist isn’t just fun, it’s funny. The joke—as opposed to the usefulness—is what’s interesting about it. But when the same joke is overdone, it’s no longer funny.
> building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it
Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, they may have not seen it before, or was bored and just wanted to make a toy.
And it seems like many in HN are in enough a similar boat to me to have up voted it to trending, so at least some people found it entertaining, so it fulfilled its purpose I suppose.
It's a good question though, and I don't think anyone really knows the answer.
I know people have fond memories of long ago when they thought surely some big company’s URL shortener would never be taken down and learned from that when it later was.
For example, the healthcare.gov emails. For links to that domain, they would still transform them with lnks.gd, even though:
1) The emails would be very long and flashy, so they're clearly not economizing on space.
2) The "shortened" URL was usually longer!
3) That domain doesn't let you go straight to the root and check where the transformed URL is going.
It's training users to do the very things that expose them to scammers!
I love this version and I hope you do too.
https://c1ic.link/campaign_WxjLdF_login_page_2.bat
You seem to be able to encode arbitrary text, so long as it follows [A-Za-z0-9]+\.[A-Za-z0-9]+
https://wellsfargo.c1ic.link/TODO_obfuscate_url_8wyS7G_hot_s...
I use them in tests, just for fun: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/blob/master/tests/q...
Funnily enough the domains appear to have been bought up and are now genuinely shady.
Edit: looks like you need an invite code.
Bummer
What would be a good name here? A URL redirector?
Thanks!
In example.com/blah, the /blah part is interpreted by the host itself.
And apart from that I would indeed consider DNS records a database.
While this seems like it would make it harder for them I wouldn't be surprised if scammers eventually try to abuse this service too and I have no doubt that people would happily click these if they found in them in a phishing email, that said I give the folks behind this a lot of credit for having a way to contact them and report links if that happens.
And got https://twitter.web-safe.link/root_4h3ku0_account_verificati...
Interesting that it spit out a .zip url. Was not expecting that so I changed all the “.” to “DOT” so I don’t get punished for posting a spammy link despite this literally being a website to make links as spammy and creepy as possible.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45295898
edit: fixed typo
https://c1ic.link/bzSBpN_login_page_2
Edit: Chrome on Android warned me not to visit the site!
Msn.com Office.com Sharepoint.com Hotmail.com Etc, plus all the subdomains they insert before them. It makes it very easy to create phishing emails that look plausible.
I honestly don't mind too much since it's a once a year thing (hacktober) and honestly companies should be trying to catch out employees who click any and all links.
Eventually we got asked to please make it stop. I asked them to please stop sending fake phishing emails to robots.
Saves using one of the "free" ones which looks like its free but you're actually on a free trial, then you can't access your links after that trial expires.