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

creepylink.com

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

#91

Post by victords »

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?

A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

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.

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

#93

Post by john01dav »

subscribed wrote: post #87
kzalesak wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that something specifically intended for this, like Anubis, is a much better option.

Anubis flatly refuses me access to several websites when I'm accessing them with a normal Chromium with enabled JS and whatnot, from a mainstream, typical OS, just with aggressive anti-tracking settings. Not sure if that's the intended use case. At least Cloudflare politely masks for CAPTCHA.

I thought that Anubis solely is proof of work, so I'm very curious as to what's going on here.

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

#94

Post by aflukasz »

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

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.

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

#96

Post by Zambyte »

briandear wrote: post #79
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

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.

Try hosting a cgit server on a 1u server in your bedroom and you'll see why.

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

#97

Post by eythian »

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/

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

#98

Post by Zambyte »

jimnotgym wrote: post #71
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.

microsoftonline.com is one of my favorites. Like how can you look any more scammy :D
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