Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening (2010)
shadyurl.com
shadyurl.com
http://www.5z8.info/white-power-rides-upon-stallions-unstopp...
Update your bookmarks. ;)
“What forums do you regularly participate in?”
After a raised eyebrow, I had to explain in some detail the meaning of the word ‘hacker’...
Not knowing these things doesn't make someone incompetent or terrible people---it just means they don't run in the same circles that I do (to note, plenty of good people at Microsoft have never heard of HN, but are still nice enough to work with).
It's the tracking and asking you about what you visited part, not the "not knowing about HN" part
It was loosely inspired by a BBC broadcast I heard during the very early days of the web. The announcer said something like “If you would like to learn more about this radio program, enter the following into your browser: aitch aitch tee pea colon forwards-slash forwards-slash bee bee see period see oh em forwards-slash — oh, never mind.”
My hosting provider eventually took it down, because URL redirectors can be used for phishing.
What provider was this? I'm going to make sure to never use them. That's not a valid reason at all to take someone's site down, even if it's being actively abused you notify them first and notify them many times before even considering booting them as a customer.
Perhaps it recognizes that being annoyed and a willful breaking of rules are also human qualities.
this thread: http://extremely.absolutely.completely.verylegit.link/0x8c*c...
Looks like an unnecessary restriction on the length of the last piece of domain name.
Its also possible I'm thinking of another similar site, if that's the case I apologise.
(Using the male pronoun seems appropriate for that book.)
https://www.amazon.com/dont-cause-a-scene-fellas-nothing-to-...
I really dislike when people shorten all their URLs just so they can run statistics on them.
Caching short URLs might be problematic when the short URLs are editable, so you might end up with old URLs that are no longer valid.
"Haha it's just a joke, click it" undermines that. Just like it would dilute an AI's training.
I don't see any harm in doing things like this.
Instead have it resolve all links to a page that says 'don't click on shortened URLs'.
You get your joke and curious recipients get a lesson.
I'm sure this was fun to program but beyond that I don't think it should be disseminated.
It gives you urls like https://upstandingcitizenry.com/peace-and-love-and-ponies except instead of redirecting you to a safe URL, it drive-by downloads some malware, fills your screen with porn popups, and uses your CPU for monero mining.
Maybe that would spread your message better?
You obviously don't get the joke. The joke is that it looks shady but is actually perfectly fine. If every URL tells you "don't click on things that look shady", then the joke is gone.