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

LLM led scraping might not as it requires an LLM to make a choice to kick it off, but crawling for the purpose of training data is unlikely to be affected.

Sounds like a useful signal for people building custom agents or models. Being able to control whether automated systems follow a link via metadata is an interesting lever, especially given how inconsistent current model heuristics are.

I can confirm Mistral refuse to traverse the links

That's less a URL shortener and more a URL dodgifier.

The key point here is "not shortening"

I got one where the called script ended in ".pl" and I had a flashback to the 90s. My trousers grew into JNCOs, Limp Bizkit started playing out of nowhere and I got a massive urge to tell Slashdot that Alan Thicke had died.

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.

Imagine using this as your personal website lol

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.

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.

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.

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.

The author posted this project on reddit a few days ago where they mentioned their motivation: "I have a coworker who is constantly talking about the glory days of ShadyUrl, but that website has been down for several years at this point, so I figured I would create an alternative."

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.

shadyurl a whole bunch of different incredibly shady domains that were used at random. it was beautiful.

That's just the ambient creepiness of the internet. It's a creepy place!

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

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!

https://jpmorgan.web-safe.link/flash_7KzCZd_money_request

I love this version and I hope you do too.

well played sir

Thought this might be it... I clicked it anyways haha. I will need to update the Rick roll url on my nfc implant with this new link!

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/

I also tried that and got https://twitter.web-safe.link/BUuLrg_document.zip

Squared:

https://c1ic.link/ad_k9OFWW_redeem_gift.bat

Digg is back?

Edit: looks like you need an invite code.

Bummer

I don't appreciate how AI generated this website looks.

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time

It's an asymptotic link shortener

Same here I took a six character url, and it turned into at least ten.

URL lengthener. :D

link obfuscator

Am I missing something, or would these essentially be implemented via DNS records? It's not clear to me that keeping the links in a database would be necessary at all (unless the DNS records are what you mean by "database")

I got https://microsoft.web-safe.link/cZ17Xn_claim_gift_card.msi for this article. What do you get?

I added google.com and it spit out https://twitterDOTc1icDOTlink/install_Jy7NpK_private_videoDOTzip

Interesting that it spit out a .zip url. Was not expecting that so I changed all the “.” to “DOT” so I don’t get punished for posting a spammy link despite this literally being a website to make links as spammy and creepy as possible.

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.

I've been at a company that internally sends out fake links that log the user and links to an educational page on internet safety.

I honestly don't mind too much since it's a once a year thing (hacktober) and honestly companies should be trying to catch out employees who click any and all links.

Fun!

I always end up making my own, they're so simple to write.

Saves using one of the "free" ones which looks like its free but you're actually on a free trial, then you can't access your links after that trial expires.

Way to miss the point of the project!