Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening (2010)

shadyurl.com

232 pointsmemorable52 comments

Open articleView on HN

Previous discussion:

- http://www.5z8.info/backyard-fireworks-disasters_w0v6qb_hitl...

- http://www.5z8.info/foreign-brides_a7s2us_begin-bank-account...

- http://www.5z8.info/stoleniphones_w7e4ro_whitepower

- http://www.5z8.info/gruesome-gunshot-wounds_f1u0dv_usb-hijac...

Wow, that’s even shadier

For the ultimate effect the post URL should be changed to http://www.5z8.info/super-nsfw_g0v1ba_hot-older-goats.mov

I love this site. There is no good reason to use this, other than to show how crazy the normalisation of URL shorteners really is. You have no idea what's behind a link anymore!

The fact that shadyurl.com is only available over HTTP is perfect icing on the cake. Attention to detail like that really sells the joke

ShadyURL (2010) launched years before Let's Encrypt (2014) so it might have just been too expensive to get a cert?

That was 12 years ago. Do you have 12 year old websites that have never been maintained ever?

This is both hilarious and potentially useful.

There are hundreds of people out there painstakingly training corporate users not to click on links which look like this, with little success. This lets them create evil URLs on demand.

See also: A(x56), the URL lengthener [1]

1. https://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

Don't you mean https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... ?

Very funny.

On a more serious note, I wonder how many thousands of other purely fun sites that offer no useful service have been forever lost. Hosting requires periodic maintenance (e.g. hosting fee payments, domain name renewals, SSL certificate updates). I bet a lot of sites like this disappear after a year or two when their creators either forget about them or are unwilling to continue maintaining them.

Due to this specific site’s dynamic nature, it cannot be captured by the Internet Archive. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

These guys are carrying the torch for you - https://theuselessweb.com/

Oh wow, I really enjoyed this one: http://www.5z8.info/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion.doc_b0n1...

I hate this one: https://checkboxrace.com/

Edit: 01:10:36 if anyone wants to try to beat my first attempt. Shouldn't be hard.

1:35:44 on mobile ... felt like the DOMresponse was a wee bit laggy, but no excuses

More fun than you'd think!

Well my productivity just plummeted.

For URL shorteners, Archive Team (not affiliated with archive.org) has a project called URLTeam for backing them up; https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam

This site, or maybe its predecessor is included. I heard about them from a dekcon talk years ago about geocities getting murdered.

This is great for when you have to send someone a link to something but you don't really want them to open it.

“Our terms of service have recently changed…”

Dear shareholders...

the short links from microsoft onedrive look shady to some people. To be fair https://1drv.ms/u/s!Acj5445VA?e=0QWl does look suspicious

It’s also pointless because they got a cute “short” domain and then the URL itself is long and not typeable.

It fits in sms.

I always double and triple check domains because of short links like this. How are people supposed to know what's okay to click and what isn't when a major vendor like Microsoft conditions its users to click on whatever.

This is perfect for generating the unsubscribe link for email newsletters.

It will be in there as required, but people are much less likely to click it.

Well yes, the whole email will be more likely to get routed automatically to spam.

The best unsubscribe link is one you don't have to click ;)

It's not idempotent - the same source URL entered multiple times yields different shortened URLs. Not sure if that's a feature or a bug ...

Today I learned the mathy definition of idempotent (used above) which is different than the one more commonly used when talking about code: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotence

It’s not clear to me what the difference in definition is - even reading the CS definition on Wikipedia, both cases reference the mathematical definition. What am I missing?

In the imperative sense of idempotent, a method is idempotent with respect to system state, not just its arguments.

It's about repeated calls e.g.

    a.f(x).f(x)

results in the same state as

    a.f(x)

Not about repeated application. E.g.

    f(f(x)) = f(x)

Right. If you think about it as a function of the state itself, the 2 definitions agree. If the function is `f(x, state) -> (y, state')`, then f is "imperitively idempotent" when `g(state) = f(fixedX, state).state'` is "mathematically idempotent"

From your link:

> the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application

Perhaps my maths background is influencing me here, but isn't that the commonly used definition when talking about code?

Not the replied-to user, but I also wasn't aware of the mathematical definition and my understanding of idempotency was that the main point was that performing the same idempotent operation multiple times wouldn't make a difference in terms of __side effects__ (for instance, not charging a user twice when accidentally submitting an idempotent request twice).

Yep, this is the meaning I was referring to.

The function f is idempotent, if f(x) = f(f(x)).

For this URL shortener, if http://www.5z8.info/super-nsfw_g0v1ba_hot-older-goats.mov (from above) points to http://shadyurl.com/, then shortening http://www.5z8.info/super-nsfw_g0v1ba_hot-older-goats.mov should also return http://www.5z8.info/super-nsfw_g0v1ba_hot-older-goats.mov. It's not enough for it to always return the same URL for the same input (which it also doesn't appear to do).

Seems like a feature since it says try again when you create a link.

Not deterministic then

Since I typically find short urls suspicious and frightening, especially in text messages from short phone numbers not in my contacts, this headline illustrates a third form of idempotentcy.

That just means it’s not a well-defined function (i.e. each input is mapped to only one unique output, which is not the case here).

As other posters write, “idempotent” means that recursively applying the function returns the same result, e.g. f(f(x)) = f(x). (The site is also indeed not idempotent, since entering a shady URL will not return the same shady URL.)

In particular, it's not well-defined because it's nondeterministic/randomized.

Coincidentally I like your username.

Am I the only person who finds shortened URLs suspicious and frightening already?

> Am I the only person who finds shortened URLs suspicious and frightening already?

No, you are not the only person. That is statistically impossible.

It's as if certain webmasters go out of their way to make URL shortener domains as sketchy as possible. I once saw something like virus-basket.biz.ru in an SMS and obviously didn't click it.

My corporate email got a msg which simply said few things, like Hi, Hello, blah blah blah, & then said, "to get hacked click here". The email was from mcrosoft (in the text, I didn't check any headers).

Does not recognize the URL of the website of my wedding as being a valid URL (wedding TLD and a ç in the domain name; I guess the problem is the ç)…

EDIT: It does not recognize the denormalized URL either (xn--…), so maybe it’s the wedding TLD.

The generated URL domain (5z8.info) is blocked by OpenDNS (Umbrella) under the Web Spam category. I can't remember the last time something slipped past my own DNS filters to get blocked upstream.

http://www.5z8.info/ip-stealer_c7y3xy_horse-slaughter

This made my day lol, thanks for sharing it.

This is great!, I mean its dumb, but it made me chuckle. Will I ever use something so silly? Of course I will.

i love this website! http://www.5z8.info/animated-gifs-of-train-accidents_e2s1wx_...

"How to gratuitously bring more distrust and fear into the world."

.info/guns...exe

Reply on news.ycombinator.com