Cool trick - they're using HTTP auth URLs[1] so that the @ sign is doing a lot of the heavy lifting (plus some clever unicode slashes). It's an old school phishing trick, with the additional layer of looking like a genuine zip file.

Not sure if this trick would be too effective in real life, Firefox and likely others will give you warnings when logging into a site like this, as this form of HTTP auth is way deprecated. However, this is the strongest example against .zip I've seen yet though, from someone who didn't buy into the initial panic.

Side note - I'm using .zip for something legitimate! https://HN.zip is a little weekend project for an offline-caching read-only Hacker News (I lose reception in the Subway a lot so it makes it easier to navigate). It's not done yet though - still pretty rough around the edges. Maybe in a week or two I'll do a Show HN and see if anyone cares.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Authentica...