Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

creepylink.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 157 posts

Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

#111

Post by latexr »

postalcoder wrote: post #110
latexr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. But the question is why redo the exact same joke ? Why not come up with another twist (like the URL lengthener) or do no twist but be useful? 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 projec…

A joke isn’t the best example because there are jokes that never changes but the delivery is a sign of mastery. The Aristocrats is like Bach’s cello suite for comedians.

The Aristocrats is a special case where the setup is the joke instead of the punchline. The point is the inventiveness of the journey. If it was told with the same setup every time, it wouldn’t be funny.

Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

#112

Post by wmeredith »

qnleigh wrote: post #55

What's up with the creepy ads on this website? It seems like they are actually sketchy ads and not just fake ads for comedic effect. One shows some scammy nonsense about your device being infected and the other links to a real VPN app.

This is probably the result of a context based ad network serving sketchy adds because of the suspicious url content.

Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

#113

Post by Retr0id »

eythian wrote: post #97
zX41ZdbW wrote: post #95

I would also like to have something like this, but for "vintage" links - something that looks like it was from the late 90s. I use them in tests, just for fun: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/blob/master/tests/q...

There was a "shadyurl". The site itself seems to be long gone, but this'll give you some context: https://www.mikelacher.com/work/shady-url/

There's an example shadyurl link in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14628529

Funnily enough the domains appear to have been bought up and are now genuinely shady.

Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

#114

Post by cubefox »

latexr wrote: post #86

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to make something useless for fun, it’s an interesting idea. 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?

One reason is that not all these websites manage to make equally "creepy" links, even though the basic idea is the same. I remember one version which was a lot more alarming than the current example, with links containing a mix of suspicious content hinting at viruses, phishing, piracy/warez sites, pornography (XXX cams), and Bitcoin scams. I don't remember that website, but the current case seems rather weak by comparison.

Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

#115

Post by stronglikedan »

latexr wrote: post #104
amne wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just someone learning something new most of the time. 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.

Right. But the question is why redo the exact same joke ? Why not come up with another twist (like the URL lengthener) or do no twist but be useful? 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 projec…

If you're learning, it's better to recreate something exactly as it is, so that you have something against which to verify your output. Plus, not everyone is an idea person, and I'd wager that most devs are implementation people, not idea people.

Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

#116

Post by pawelduda »

xlii wrote: post #48
devsda wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish this came a day earlier. 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. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714

I posted my site on the thread. 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 :)

FYI Cloudflare protection doesn't mean much nowadays if someone is slightly determined to scrape the site

Unless you mean DDoS protection, this one helps for sure

Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

#117

Post by latexr »

stronglikedan wrote: post #115
latexr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. But the question is why redo the exact same joke ? Why not come up with another twist (like the URL lengthener) or do no twist but be useful? 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 projec…

If you're learning, it's better to recreate something exactly as it is, so that you have something against which to verify your output. Plus, not everyone is an idea person, and I'd wager that most devs are implementation people, not idea people.

I’d argue that if you’re learning and are so inexperienced you need to recreate something exactly, you should instead recreate something real and useful—of which there are more examples—than one joke.

Plus, I don’t think I’ve seen another of these which is exactly like this (just extremely close in concept), so the argument doesn’t hold.

Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

#118

Post by latexr »

cubefox wrote: post #114
latexr wrote: post #86

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to make something useless for fun, it’s an interesting idea. 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?

One reason is that not all these websites manage to make equally "creepy" links, even though the basic idea is the same. I remember one version which was a lot more alarming than the current example, with links containing a mix of suspicious content hinting at viruses, phishing, piracy/warez sites, pornography (XXX cams), and Bitcoin scams. I don't remember that website, but the current case seems rather weak by comp…

That makes it even more confusing. If you’re making something creepy, I can see the argument for “whatever exists isn’t creepy enough, I’ll do it better” but not the reverse.

Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

#120

Post by KetoManx64 »

aflukasz wrote: post #94
devsda wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish this came a day earlier. 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. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714

AI bots (or clients claiming to be one) appear quite fast on new sites, at least that's what I saw recently in few places. They probably monitor Certificate Transparency logs - you won't hide by avoiding linking. Unless you are ok with staying in the shadow of naked http.

Get a wildcard cert and use it behind a reverse proxy.
Post reply on HN