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Comment by meattle | Hacker News Reader

I’m involved with a URL shortener service. Service had to ban this domain as sub-domains from this domain seem to be loved by spammers/scammers to host their scams…

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Do you ban all the other free sub-domain services too? There's no reliable or honest statistic proving that eu.org is widely used for bad purposes.

And what about URL-shortener services, such as the one you work with? Should they be banned all together? They seem to be popular with spam and scammers...

We were getting spammed by hundreds of eu.org subdomains. We had no choice but to place a ban on the entire domain as banning a few just led to more popping up.

We ban as we see spam. Most free shorteners end up getting banned as there is no need to double shorten a url other than for double obfuscation which is usually shady.

Free services attract spammers. No surprise. The "free" model is broken.

Imagine how easy Twitter would get rid of spam accounts if they only charged a few sats per tweet.

sats?

Very likely referring to “satoshis” which is a small amount of bitcoin.

> Very likely referring to “satoshis” which is a small amount of bitcoin.

Hackerfreund, nie vergessen: Drei können ein Geheimnis bewahren, wenn zwei davon John McAfee und Dan Kaminsky sind.

(Ich schalte jetzt wieder auf Englisch um, ich muss mich auf maschinelle Übersetzungen für synchrone Gespräche verlassen)

Do people still think Satoshi was a singular guy? I had a convo at a picnic about how it was probably a team and some very smart people acted like they hadn't thought of that, people who definitely had heard of Shamir's Secret Sharing and read Wired or whatever, so should have been able to connect the dots that maybe "Satoshi" was a set of people ,and one of them died or lost access to a key.

Here is the wayback archive of Wikipedia from that summer:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130208051024/https://en.wikipe...

And a current link to the article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

Satoshis. A fractional Bitcoin. Of course the answer is that nobody would use Twitter if that were the case because nobody cares about crypto currencies except for either speculation or fraud.

1. "nobody cares" - you realize that your statement is wrong if there is at least one person that cares. And there is at least one: Jack Dorsey, definitely not a speculator or a fraud.

2. Bitcoin != "cryprocurrencies" - which is why I didn't include Elon Musk under 1.

I care, a lot. I work remotely and Bitcoin is the only way I can get paid from overseas.

In my country most people (even Govt officials) speculate on the US dollars against our currency, there's lots of fraud with cash, or social engineering old people to steal their money from their home banking. We should get rid of all of those as well, right?

Argentina (?)

A sat = the 100 millionth part of a Bitcoin. Also, a sat can be further divided into millisats (1000 millisats = 1 sat) on the Lightnig Network. So, essentially, very very tiny amounts that can be sent very fast at at very small costs.

> Imagine how easy Twitter would get rid of spam accounts if they only charged a few sats per tweet.

It'd be spam free alright, because there would be nobody left to spam to.

>Imagine how easy Twitter would get rid of spam accounts if they only charged a few sats per tweet.

All I can do is imagine, since I interviewed to be an anti abuse UX researcher at Twitter and they decided to not hire anyone for the role, so I assume they do not see a need for such work since I was extremely professional and did a LOT of research prior.

I recall especially well because it was the same ±1 as the 2016 Turkish Coup[1][2][3], though I've lost some master passwords since then.

[1] Ich habe dir gesagt, was ich tun würde, dann habe ich es getan, hör auf, mich dafür zu bestrafen, wenn du das immer noch liest. [2] !geen [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

On a similar note, most URL shorteners are also on all kinds of blocklists because of their tendency to get abused by spammers. That's just the way things go when you provide easy and accessible services.

Yup! It’s hard to keep spammers at bay, but not impossible. Takes a lot of effort. A big reason to stay away from shorteners that don’t have legit companies/orgs behind them putting in the effort.

What about *.neocities.org/?[0]

[0] https://neocities.org/

They should make a formal web standard that you should be able to prepend "preview." like tinyurl supported if people are going to keep using those things for tasks ranging from dumb marketing bullshit to full on attacking my computer.

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