The other day in a Facebook Messenger group chat I tried to link to https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ as a joke, but Messenger kept blocking it. It's quite overzealous with its blocking.
The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
121–130 of 157 posts
Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Okay, but then what? Host your sites on something other than 'www' or '*', exclude them from search engines, and never link to them? Then, the few people who do resolve these subdomains, you just gotta hope they don't do it using a DNS server owned by a company with an AI product (like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon)?
I really don't know how you're supposed to shield your content from AI without also shielding it from humanity.
Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
#123I 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?
I actually forgot that this had been done before until you mentioned 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.
Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
#124It would've been top-notch if it actually sometimes just used Outlook/O365 or similar vendor's "safelinks" redirector that they use.
Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
Yeah I meant using it as an experiment to test with two different links(or domains) and not as a solution to evade bot traffic. Still, I think it would be interesting to know if anybody noticed a visible spike in bot traffic(especially AI) after sharing their site info in that thread.
I didn't: no traffic before sharing, none since.
Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
#126Please don’t use 3rd party relays for your URLs. It’s bad enough to have your own server, domain, etc. as single points of failure and bottlenecks without adding a 3rd party into the mix, who either themselves or someone that takes over their domain later track users, randomly redirect your users to a malicious site, or just fail. I know people have fond memories of long ago when they thought surely some big company’…
This! I've run into very frustrating examples of legit sites doing that, for no defensible reason at all.
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!
Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's possible the current website is older, or that the creator doesn't know about better alternatives. (Also, they do produce rather short links, unlike some of the others, which don't pass as "URL shorteners". Though not sure whether that's relevant.)
Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
#128I can't tell if the website works as advertised because I don't want to open the generated links
Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get a wildcard cert and use it behind a reverse proxy.
Okay, but then what? Host your sites on something other than 'www' or '*', exclude them from search engines, and never link to them? Then, the few people who do resolve these subdomains, you just gotta hope they don't do it using a DNS server owned by a company with an AI product (like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon)? I really don't know how you're supposed to shield your content from AI without also shielding it from…
Don't have any index pages or heavy cross-linking between pages.
Re: The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been browsing this site for a decade plus and this idea was new to me. Maybe the author is in the same boat. Edit: I see referencnes to shadyurl in the comments and I have heard of that, but probably wouldn’t have thought of it.
Fair. I’d think they would look for prior work beforehand, but that’s perfectly valid. https://xkcd.com/1053/ Again, this was not a criticism, but a genuine question.
I can’t speak for the author, but this strikes me as the kind of thing you might not want to check prior work on. It just seems like a fun little project and sometimes seeing that other people have done it can be a bit demotivating.