The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by jimnotgym » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 10:14 AM UTC

zakki wrote: post #42

Is this suspicious: https://microsoft.c1ic.link/0B7jqd_invoice.vbs ?

I think Microsoft have their own version of this

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.

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

#72

Post by cuechan » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 10:31 AM UTC

arjvik wrote: post #18

My favorite link of all time: https://jpmorgan.c1ic.link/logger_zcGFC2_bank_xss.docm Definitely not meta

With Firefox on Android it simply says

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.

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

#73

Post by kzrdude » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 10:32 AM UTC

phoe-krk wrote: post #61

I wouldn't call it a shortener, since most of the links it creates are longer than the originals. What would be a good name here? A URL redirector?

It's an asymptotic link shortener

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

#74

Post by Yeri » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

cuechan wrote: post #72

arjvik wrote: post #18

My favorite link of all time: https://jpmorgan.c1ic.link/logger_zcGFC2_bank_xss.docm Definitely not meta

With Firefox on Android it simply says 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.

NextDNS is blocking it too (https://google.c1ic.link/lottery_qrdLCz_account_verification). The reason is that Google Safe Browsing considers that site as unsafe.

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

#75

Post by victorevogor » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 10:39 AM UTC

Just wondering. so you bought c1ic.link and web-safe.link. That's very cool

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

#76

Post by gala8y » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 10:42 AM UTC

postalcoder wrote: post #50

jnrk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, the downside is that people might not even see your site at all because they’re afraid to click on that suspicious link.

Site should add a reverse lookup. Provide the poison and antidote.

Bitly does that, just add '+' to Bitly URL (probably other shorteners, too).

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

#77

Post by devsda » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 10:50 AM UTC

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 :)

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.

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

#78

Post by dizhn » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

Firefox is freaking out on some of these. It's hilarious.

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

#79

Post by briandear » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 11:08 AM UTC

devsda wrote: post #38

postalcoder wrote: post #23

There may actually be some utility here. LLM agents refuse to traverse the links. Tested with gemini-3-pro, gpt-5.2, and opus 4.5. edit: gpt-oss 20B & 120B both eagerly visit it.

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

How is AI viewing content any different from Google? I don’t even use Google anymore because it’s so filled with SEO trash as to be useless for many things.

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

#80

Post by vhurg » Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 11:16 AM UTC

Please 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’s URL shortener would never be taken down and learned from that when it later was.