7 ms·
Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening (2010)
- bryanrasmussen 9y agofunny, but seems in the end a damaging joke.
- jstanley 9y agoWho is it damaging? I think it's funny, with no caveat.
- dingaling 9y agoNontechnical users whom we are trying to train to parse and understand URLs. And to avoid those which are outside the norm, even when received from known contacts. "Haha it's just a joke, click it" undermines that. Just like it would dilute an AI's training.
- zingmars 9y agoIf the user isn't looking at the URLs then no way a joke like this is going to change heir habits. If anything, they might notice when it's pointed out and they might consider looking at the URLs in the future, though unlikely, as a single experience isn't enough to be habit forming.
- bryanrasmussen 9y agoYes, my point, really anyone who looks at urls if this became prevalent couldn't trust their intuition - maybe trusting intuition isn't a good thing anyway. For some reason though I got minus 4 points for what seemed like a reasonably clear and uncontroversial observation.
- jstanley 9y agoIt's just a joke. It's not going to become prevalent, and nobody is going to use it for anything serious. I don't see any harm in doing things like this.
- pjc50 9y agoI think the whole point of the joke is that URL shorteners have already made it impossible to look at URLs and intuit anything about where they lead and how reliable they are. e.g. the "t.co" through which all twitter links are blinded.
- bryanrasmussen 9y agoI didn't get that but it does add another dimension to the joke.
- dingaling 9y agoIf so, why permit any arbitrary target for this 'joke' tool? Instead have it resolve all links to a page that says 'don't click on shortened URLs'. You get your joke and curious recipients get a lesson. I'm sure this was fun to program but beyond that I don't think it should be disseminated.
- pjc50 9y agoshrug It's the web. Any link can redirect you to any other link.
- jstanley 9y agoPerhaps we should start a rival service. It gives you urls like https://upstandingcitizenry.com/peace-and-love-and-ponies https://upstandingcitizenry.com/peace-and-love-and-ponies except instead of redirecting you to a safe URL, it drive-by downloads some malware, fills your screen with porn popups, and uses your CPU for monero mining. Maybe that would spread your message better? You obviously don't get the joke. The joke is that it looks shady but is actually perfectly fine. If every URL tells you "don't click on things that look shady", then the joke is gone.
- dwighttk 9y agoprobably improve a real AI's training
- cellover 9y agoI think it's rather interesting because you can use it as a canary like service of some sort and plant some shady URLs that lead to unique resources you have logs for.
- bryanrasmussen 9y agothat sounds interesting but in what scenario would you really use it?
- lotsofcows 9y agoThe example looks funny but I'm not giving free training to Google's AI just to try it out.
- ben_bai 9y agoOT: I did, it asked me to select traffic signs. No picture had any. Not marking anything is not an option. So I marked 2 traffic lights and a gas station sign. Accepted. :(
- written 9y agoEven random clicking on these "select X" captchas works. You'll just get a longer run around, until AI gets bored and lets you in. Perhaps it recognizes that being annoyed and a willful breaking of rules are also human qualities.
- more-coffee 9y ago(offtopic) I just click all the wrong blocks.
- cdelsolar 9y agoWhy? Is there really a sizable subset of people out there who willfully screw with these algorithms?
- lostlogin 9y agoEverywhere I go has it at the moment, but strangely I get the same picture set every time.
- rutierut 9y agoI love that the site itself looks super shady and has no HTTPS
- KozmoNau7 9y agoIt has a bit of that "90s l337 Winblowz h4xx0r toolz" vibe going on.
- lostmsu 9y agoDid not work on https://losttech.software/stack.html https://losttech.software/stack.html Looks like an unnecessary restriction on the length of the last piece of domain name.
- jiveturkey 9y agowish it was just shadyurl.com/foo. that’d be delicious. all the obvious text in the url is just sophomoric.
- jiveturkey 9y agovalid opinions get downvoted on HN? that's sad. oh well.
- sathishmanohar 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ is now http://www.5z8.info/horse-slaughter_o2z4pp_heroin-od.avi http://www.5z8.info/horse-slaughter_o2z4pp_heroin-od.avi :D :D
- wwweston 9y agoThis thread: http://www.5z8.info/white-power-rides-upon-stallions-unstoppable_g4q3za_mercenary http://www.5z8.info/white-power-rides-upon-stallions-unstopp... Update your bookmarks. ;)
- biotin50 9y agoOh my, that's absolutely hilarious! Funny little service.
- narag 9y agoIt was already scary as is. You know, Hacker News.
- zingmars 9y agoThe URL doesn't say 'hacker news' though. There is a site with that in the name (thehackernews), but the URL for this site is fairly tame.
- isostatic 9y agoIt took me years to find this site thanks to the URL
- jen729w 9y agoI have security clearance. This required an interview. “What forums do you regularly participate in?” After a raised eyebrow, I had to explain in some detail the meaning of the word ‘hacker’...
- leoc 9y agoNote to self: in similar situations, avoid entering a digression about how the treatment of pg's friend RTM was totally unfair.
- Arnt 9y agoAll the modern SEO-heavy links lend themselves to modification. You can give someone the URL https://www.amazon.com/fnord/dp/0440539811 https://www.amazon.com/fnord/dp/0440539811 and he may say "oh, I've read that, fine book" and won't have noticed anything peculiar about the URL. (Using the male pronoun seems appropriate for that book.)
- tialaramex 9y agoThat's because there isn't anything peculiar about that URL. Are you seeing something in there? Because there isn't anything. Perfectly normal URL.
- vokep 9y agoSame...I'm thinking thats the point? That url must have some kind of SEO-related optmization that isn't obvious?
- bbernoulli 9y agoI think it's the "fnord" part which you can change to whatever you like? https://www.amazon.com/dont-cause-a-scene-fellas-nothing-to-see-here/dp/0440539811 https://www.amazon.com/dont-cause-a-scene-fellas-nothing-to-...
- tialaramex 9y ago#ThatsTheJoke 'fnord' is supposed to be invisible, and you, the reader, are outstanding in that you are resisting this mind-control and able to see it anyway. It's a reference to the novels linked in in the Amazon link.
- arctica 9y agoToo bad I am getting 500 Internal Server Error for all URLs I tried.
- dalore 9y agoNo https version?
- jwilk 9y agoNo, because HTTP is shadier.
- bartl 9y agoIt's slow as mail. I tried an URL several minutes ago and it still hasn't come back.
- nergal 9y agoSeems that it just got hit by the hackernews DoS.
- aranw 9y agoThis is now my preferred choice of URL Shortner for sharing my CV with recruiters.
- lillesvin 9y agoCan't actually generate a URL on the site (presumably because everyone's trying at the moment) but it reminded me of https://verylegit.link/ https://verylegit.link/ which does something similar.
- eXpl0it3r 9y agoIs there an addon that will retrieve the redirects in a "sandboxed" way and then ask you if you want to visit the original URL? I really dislike when people shorten all their URLs just so they can run statistics on them.
- gruez 9y agoyou can't avoid the statistics gathering because you need to contact their server to get the full URL. the best you can do is look for workarounds (goo.gl has a details page if you append .info to the end of a link, not sure whether that gets recorded as a visit). either that, or you have some sort of centralized service that caches short URLs so they only need to be visited once.
- eXpl0it3r 9y agoI don't really mind being tracked, I'm more interested in knowing what site I'm visiting before I actually visit the site. Caching short URLs might be problematic when the short URLs are editable, so you might end up with old URLs that are no longer valid.
- natej 9y agoHa, that's great! Fun idea. I recently made a URL shortening service that generates a random adjective/noun pair, and I specifically looked for a 'clean' set of words. I would've never thought of doing the opposite :) http://shrt-url.azurewebsites.net/ http://shrt-url.azurewebsites.net/ https://github.com/natejenson/url-shortener https://github.com/natejenson/url-shortener
- Bromskloss 9y agoI note that "juvenile" and "toucher" are present.
- Keloran 9y agothis just reminds me of https://verylegit.link/ https://verylegit.link/ this thread: http://extremely.absolutely.completely.verylegit.link/0x8c*cracked$93moneygram!bitcoin!javaexploit.min.css.malware.exe http://extremely.absolutely.completely.verylegit.link/0x8c*c...
- dabber 9y agoIf I remember correctly, the author of this site hangs around here and last time the site came up he had mentioned there used to be a free API but it had to be taken down because of constant abuse by scammers. Its also possible I'm thinking of another similar site, if that's the case I apologise.
- osteele 9y agoThis PHP code https://github.com/osteele/wideurl.com/blob/master/wideurl.php https://github.com/osteele/wideurl.com/blob/master/wideurl.p... turns e.g. http://osteele.com/archives/2006/04/wideurl http://osteele.com/archives/2006/04/wideurl into `http://w-i-d-e-u-r-l.com/aitch-tee-tee-pea-colon-double-slash-oh-ess-tee-double-ee-ell-ee-dot-see-oh-em-slash-aye-are-see-aitch-eye-vee-ee-ess-slash-two-double-zero-six-slash-zero-four-slash-doubleyou-eye-dee-ee-you-are-ell`. It was loosely inspired by a BBC broadcast I heard during the very early days of the web. The announcer said something like “If you would like to learn more about this radio program, enter the following into your browser: aitch aitch tee pea colon forwards-slash forwards-slash bee bee see period see oh em forwards-slash — oh, never mind.” My hosting provider eventually took it down, because URL redirectors can be used for phishing.
- piracykills 9y ago> My hosting provider eventually took it down, because URL redirectors can be used for phishing. What provider was this? I'm going to make sure to never use them. That's not a valid reason at all to take someone's site down, even if it's being actively abused you notify them first and notify them many times before even considering booting them as a customer.
- AnnoyingSwede 9y agoSite is soo slashdotted right now..
- cypherg 9y agohttps://verylegit.link/ https://verylegit.link/
- limaoscarjuliet 9y agoConfirmed tool's promise: the "shortened" url to my company website has been immediately blocked by our big brother firewall citing internal policy :-)