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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Past related threads:

ShadyURL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579931 - Sept 2020 (5 comments)

Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16791029 - April 2018 (68 comments)

ShadyURL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572679 - April 2016 (2 comments)

Shady URL: Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134868 - Feb 2010 (21 comments)

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Fixed them for you:

    1. http://www.5z8.info/freeporn_m9o0wv_nic_cage_naked
    2. http://www.5z8.info/manhunter_n7f2qq_double-your-wang
    3. http://www.5z8.info/bombbuilding_x7j5jc_boobs
    4. http://www.5z8.info/winamp-cracked.exe_o5m1zq_-49exploit-begin--

Yikes, that really does create a visceral response.

Honestly the .info is the most frightening.

I dunno, ds.gd or whatever Discord uses takes the cake for me so far.

.gg? Stands for "good game". Haven't seen it get much use.

ddg.gg is duckduckgo.com. I use this all the time.

duck.com is cooler imo

They should use it as their main domain

Why is that the most frightening part? (Genuinely curious) I tried to look up the original intent of the .info domain and found the following on Wikipedia: "Info is the only top-level domain that was explicitly created and chartered for unrestricted use, although various other TLDs resulted in this situation de facto." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.info

Almost every time I've seen uBlock Origin block a whole page from loading, and requires adding an exception to browse to it, it's a *.info domain.

Not sure this is still the case, but for years newly-registered .info domains were deeply discounted, i.e. $0.99 or $1.99 for the first year. This made them very attractive for cybercriminals who wanted throwaway domains that weren't needed for more than a year, since they'd be added to spam/malware blacklists within days.

The result was that .info gained a very bad reputation. Since it was so popular among bad actors, but never became very popular for legit sites, for many users the vast majority of times they saw a .info domain it was something nasty.

Exactly - .info and .biz are forever etched in my mind as nothing but scams and spams. I know it has spread beyond that but the original usage was highly tilted toward those.

like bitcoin

FWIW, .biz always has seemed unprofessional-sounding to me. Why that was ever created with the intent of being a legitimate domain is beyond me. It cast a shadow over the whole process of creating those new domains at that time, almost as if ICANN was in on all the shadyness from the beginning. It was as if the WHO or UN started adopting warez terminology — you'd start questioning whether they were what you thought they were.

Kinda wanting this option for all URLs, be a massive time saver

These look mostly NSFW, except for the WinAmp one. To me really scary would be something along www.bankofamerica.5z8.info/bank-login

Specially if my name, email or username is part of the url...

To be fair, it's part of quite a few URLs, just usually called "fbclid" or "ref" or "utm_*" or encoded in a cookie.

See also the recent related URL Lengthener -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27156106

It came up recently too in the discussion about a url lengthener: A URL Lengthener https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27156106 - May 2021

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