Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)
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I was a theater projectionist, back when you had 20 minute reels you had to constantly change, while babysitting two high-voltage, water-cooled, carbon arc projectors. Sometimes the film would break and you’d have to splice it. So when the theater got a print in, you had to count and log the number of splices for each reel, then the next theater would do the same and retire the print when it got too spliced up (plus, sometimes if it was the last night of a run, some lazy projectionists would splice it in place with masking tape and then you’d have to fix it). Sometimes you had to splice in new trailers or remove inappropriate ones as well.
Anyway, you counted splices by rapidly winding through the reel with a benchtop motor with a speed control belted to a takeup reel while the source spun freely. Then, while letting the film slide between your fingers, counting each “bump” you felt as it wound through. I was told to ground myself by touching the metal switch plate of the speed control knob with my other hand. One night I forgot and let go until my hair started rising. I’d gone through most of the reel at a very high speed and acquired its charge.
I reached for the switch plate and shot an 8-10” arcing discharge between the plate and my fingers.
Lesson learned, I held the switch plate from then on.
The amperage of static elecricity discharges like this can be quite high, tens of amps is common.
So walking across a carpet and getting a shock can easily be tens of amps at thousands of volts, and we're just totally fine (because it's for a tiny fraction of a second).
styropyro made a fascinating (if terrifying) video about it
Never, ever again.
I quickly learned to hold my machine keys ring (3 inch wide ring) and tap it to the slot machine frame. Often a three inch violet spark would jump and I could even feel my clothes move. One time I even causing one of the slot machine player tracking system to reboot, it was that or me better it got the hit.
A manager said at a casino they used to work at they would spray fabric softener on the rugs to alleviate static. I don't know if it worked or not.
I strongly suspect instead is that there was a spot where you could really feel the e-field, and people just through rumor and story telling morphed it into "the wall".
The big problem here is that it's described as a wall and not a progressively (quadratically) increasing field.
But what if there actually are network effects propagated by charge carrying particles in a suitably humid environment that turn the power of 2 into something else? Even a power of 3 could be perceived reasonably as a wall at human scale.
It's not "I want to believe" so much as "it feels like the maths might allow this under odd but reproducible circumstances" (my relevant background here is in math-physics and specifically analytic solutions to the relevant PDEs, which do have some very odd solutions). Would be nice to see people try.
There are differences between effects we can observe between ideal point charges and ones that only emerge as network effects when propagated across a network of less than ideal point charges that at least merit some investigation.
Perhaps humans feel resistance/repulsive forces non-linearly?
Makes me think of magnets, too - when you have two strong magnets oriented so they repel each other, and try to get them closer, the effect is very strongly non-linear and, unless you're intentionally pushing the magnets together with significant force, can feel like it turns on almost instantly.
That's got to be the key here. Human perception is known to be logarithmic in so many other ways.
To be powerful you need an incredibly high voltage, to be dense you need the positive (holes, as they say) and negative charges to be close to each other.
If you could get 5MV between two plates that are a foot apart, that e-field would be insane an probably could do all manner of sci-fi. But it would flash over and equalize in a picosecond. Even if you had some kind of god tier power supply supply that could support a constant 5MV, you would just end up with a dense wad of plasma vaporizing everything.
It might be but an urban legend, but the phenomenon sounds way too fun to not look into it (or to stop spreading it should it turn out as false, kinda like Santa)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/10/23/217918/x-rays-ma...
(Even if that feeling is misplaced and uninformed)
I feel like if it was real, 3M would have immediately diverted a bunch of money into working out how to commercialize it, and we'd have evidence of that.
You would be amazed at the level of hazard people are willing to accept. For example, I recall running one machine, a 300 ton press with an 84"x54" bed and 24" of stroke. It was 25 feet tall and we nicknamed this one Optimus Prime. When Optimus was warmed up he would spit warm hydraulic oil all over the place. A nice fine mist along with a slurry of hydraulic rain drops would cover the area. The solution was to wear Weimao hats made out of disposable cardboard.
Another machine was a 50+ year old roll form machine. How I did not lose my life on this machine is beyond me. Modern machines feed the material automatically and have clutches and brakes with optical sensors so they can stop on a dime. This one literally used inertia and a massive flywheel to function. You got the rollers spinning and fed the material into the first roller, then as it came out you had to guide the material into the next roller. Manually. In between spinning rollers. With your hands. And the machine had a 1,000lb flywheel that gave the whole thing intertia. You only needed to give it throttle once, and the whole machine would spin for 30+ seconds whether it was forming material, or your arm, or whatever. Chances are it would have sucked an entire human into the rollers on one blip of the throttle. And the coup de grâce was the throttle was a 50lb lever on a swing pivot. If you drop this lever to turn the machine OFF, it would bounce with gravity and bounce itself back on. This is not a third world country. These machines are located in Newburyport Massachusetts.
I was a lot younger back then, but to this day that is how helicopter engine are made. Those antiquated tools are more important to the major aerospace companies than any operator they've ever had.
Wouldn’t it be much more likely for someone walking into such a space to become a lightning rod rather than a fly in a spider web?
One thread about this in 1995, and then the phenomenon is never seen nor heard about again . . .
Which is just conspiratorial thinking. It also ended as soon as people posted pictures of stars and planes as "evidence" and insisted that the evidence was still valid because "the aliens are just appearing as planes". It also ended the moment r/UFO threads showed up on the front page of reddit and normal people who thought this MIGHT be something got to see the insane mental gymnastics of the people insisting we should pay attention to it.
Oh no, I've said too much.
ANTEC '97 Conference Proceedings, CRC Press, pages 1310-1313.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/SPE_ANTEC_1997_Proceedi...
The thread is based on a conference talk and journal publication that preceded it.
The reason this particular case hasn't been reproduced is just because it has no practical application, requires a lot of equipment, requires the equipment to be intentionally improperly operated risking damage or injury, and it's extremely expensive to test.
Nobody is going to willingly tool up an environment capable of running a mile of 20 foot wide PP film at a thousand feet per minute, then purposely ungrounding the equipment, and run it at 100+ F and 95+ % humidity for hours, days, or weeks. Just setting it up would cost millions of dollars and running it may cost millions more.
Surely somebody has done at least that.
Are these sorts of heat index values feasible for a plant environment? The line about 100/95 seems almost hyperbolic, which doesn't help with credibility in my opinion. Maybe I'm missing something.
So just a typical summer day in Texas
This is in large part why historically industrialized factories tended to be concentrated in colder, higher latitude regions until the 20th century. Without refrigeration the work was far harder and more exhausting for the workers and that limited efficient use of labor.
A lady on 3rd shift who ran my machine had a near death incident and the company swept that under the rug along with plenty of other seriously concerning practices.
AMA!
Throughout much of the Southeastern United States, we regularly see Summer temps above 100F (37C), and humidity up to 90%.
One of the two Marine Corps training bases is in South Carolina where temps and humidity are often near these values and sometimes crest them.
Most of Florida frequently passes these values every Summer.
While it is not comfortable, I can assure you, most humans are able to exert themselves without being killed in minutes from this kind of exposure.
35°C at 100% humidity is about the human survivability limit (at 6h exposure). This makes a lot of sense because humans generate ~100W of heat, but require their core temperature to stay constant-- if the environment is too hot and evaporation ineffective because of humidity, then your thermoregulation just breaks down and you die, just like from high fever.
Remember that when you get a fever, your internal body temp can jump to 103+ and stay there for days. Even at a wet bulb temperature above 110, it's going to take time for your internal temperature to heat up to that level. There's nothing "potentially in minutes" about it for humans that are used to the heat.
Sure, you do eventually have to get somewhere cooler. But a wet bulb temperature of 105F is not going to be fatal for a well adapted human even after a few hours.
Check out the heat index page I linked above, or this similar one from OSHA: https://www.ohsa.com.au/services/heat-stress-monitoring/.
People adapt to it and can tolerate longer spans in it but it's still super taxing and requires regular breaks if you are doing any amount of serious activity. And of course lots of fans and anything else that can raise the evaporation rate and heat dissipation help.
The jokes ngl sound like the exact type of humor you'd expect from people who work out on the floor. Basically "oh well that's fucking horrifying, I bet we could make some money selling tickets".
100+F + 95% relative humidity will literally kill people, regardless of adaptations. Fans won’t help.
Fatal core temperature ranges are so close, even baseline metabolic heat can kill someone from hyperthermia in those conditions.
[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10010916/#:~:text=F....]
In a general environmental sense, current estimates have 95F outside temps and 95% relative humidity being the point where mass die offs of mammals start to occur. It’s a major concern with global temperature changes [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0913352107].
Skin temperatures > 95F (which will occur if air temp is 95F or higher and there is no evaporative cooling ability) inevitably lead to hyperthermia even in fit and acclimated individuals - even at rest
Most of the time, people just don’t realize what the actual relative humidity is. ‘Terribly humid’ is usually more like 60% RH.
95% is saturated, often foggy/misty.
‘At least it’s a dry heat’ in Deserts, which allows people to survive high temps, are often 5-10% relative humidity or even lower. There, the biggest challenge is staying hydrated enough to sustain the rapid loss of water. In some situations it’s possible to lose a gallon an hour. But it’s possible.
In 95% RH, that gallon makes no difference and you’ll flat out die instead.
Remember, when people get sick it's not typically fatal for them to hold a body temperature of 104 degrees, even if sustained for more than 24 hours. Being in a work environment at 95+% relative humidity and 100F is going to be unpleasant, but as long as you are well adapted to it and you get to somewhere cooler within a few hours you are going to be fine.
People push well beyond a wet bulb of 105F in saunas all the time, often sustained for 30+ minutes. I think if you had yourself ever been in a room that's 110F and 100% humidity (meaning it's literally raining continuously from condensation) you'd realize that it's really not that extreme of a temperature, and that it takes hours for your core to heat up to a place where you will be at risk of dying.
I’d argue you just haven’t actually been in those types of situations either. In that case I think they estimated 110ish air temps.
But maybe I’m misremembering - I heard it from the investigating safety officer though.
I have yet to see anyone actually able to work or function in actual 100% humidity and 100+ degrees temps for more than a few minutes before having serious problems.
I’ve seen plenty of people have problems in 60% humidity which everyone agreed was terrible. Mostly heat stroke.
People’s core temp is already just a hair under 100F, and even at rest are producing 100ish watts of thermal energy. It really doesn’t take much for it to start spiking if cooling is literally impossible.
That of course requires a strong fan blowing and regular, heavy hydration to sustain but it's feasible. So it's workable in an industrial environment where you can adjust the environment enough to get by but outdoors in large wild spaces like the Grand Canyon (as per your example) it's unlikely to be survivable for long.
And notably in an indoor environment there is a big difference between an operator running a machine or vehicle and an individual under heavy exertion. The added thermal stress of heavy exertion makes it less survivable as well.
So in the end it only really works in factory settings because:
- There's no sun to add radiative heat.
- There's fans and ventilation to maintain evaporative cooling.
- Workers can take regular or semi-regular breaks in a cooler or lower humidity environment to recover some from the thermal stress and to recover water and electrolytes.
- Those workers can limit their activity to rates of exertion/heat production that don't exceed the limited evaporative cooling they have access to.
As soon as you remove one of those advantages or increase the temperature much above 100F or increase the RH above 95%, survivability becomes way less likely.
If we assume that you are putting out 100 watts, you've got 3 hours at a wet bulb of 100F before you start having risk of death (if you are well adjusted to the heat).
And yes, I spend time every month in Saunas and Hammams with extreme temperatures. My favorite room is 195 degrees and 45% humidity. That translates to something like 150 degree wet bulb temperature, and I can happily stay in that room for about 20 minutes. (though 60 minutes would probably kill me). I've also spent plenty of time in Hammams (30+ minute sessions) where the temperature was 110F and the humidity was 100% (which means the entire room is fog and it's constantly dripping everywhere, practically raining). These aren't elite extremes in the sauna world, you'll find saunas close to these conditions all over the world.
If the environment is 95-105f we can assume no external heat transfer, but the environments you’re referring to seem to be well above that.
Based on some quick googling, it seems like surface area is on average 1.6 m^2 for women, and 1.9 m^2 for men. I get lost in the math, but there has to be significant heat transfer if it’s 15+F hotter than body temperature in the room yeah?
I know people who can tolerate that environment for 30+ minutes without injury (And I regularly do 20-25 minute stretches myself), which is why I'm so confident that 105F and 100% humidity is tolerable for a period of at least multiple hours.
Yes, eventually you'll heat stroke and die, you can't just live in a sauna. But it's not going to "kill you in minutes" if you are used to it, which is what a lot of people in this thread seem to be implying.
There was a grain processing plant up in the midwest were my dad worked that had an area enclosed in between building they'd close off access to on the hottest summer days. Light would be excessively focused in that area from other buildings, and moisture from other processes and lack of air circulation lead to deadly wet bulb temperatures.
That was my first thought - the military would be all over this if there's even a remote chance you could build energy shields or something.
Electrostatic precipitators exist but they aren't large. Everything else I'm aware of that works on larger scales fails to satisfy the uniform/gradual aspect.
They found a use for it in particle accelerators to partition off sections that are under vacuum
It can be a tourist attraction you sell tickets to.
You're a couple orders of magnitude too high.
Polypropylene film isn't that expensive. A thousand feet per minute is only 10 miles per hour, which is not that fast at all. Humidity and heat aren't hard to generate in a closed space.
This is the kind of thing that's within the budget of some ambitious YouTubers, not millions of dollars.
It's a fun urban legend. The red flag for anyone who has studied anything related to electromagnetism is the way it's described as a wall, not a force that gradually grows stronger as you get closer. Forces don't work at distance like that.
You also have to suspend disbelief and imagine this force field didn't impact the equipment itself. We're supposed to believe that a grown man can't push up against the field at a distance away from the source, but the plastic film and machinery inside of the field are continuing to operate as usual?
It's a fun urban legend. Leave it be, but don't take it seriously.
It's described as a wall because it's not just running a straight line. The PP line creates an archway where the "wall" is located. That's where the field is most intense. It's noticeable elsewhere but that's the point where as indicated in the paper they can no longer push through it.
> You also have to suspend disbelief and imagine this force field didn't impact the equipment itself. We're supposed to believe that a grown man can't push up against the field at a distance away from the source, but the plastic film and machinery inside of the field are continuing to operate as usual?
This is also addressed in the paper. The lines can run 50-100% faster than it normally does but the faster they run it the more problematic the interference is. So during normal operation they limited it to 750-1000fpm.
You might be taking “wall” too literally. I have no trouble believing that someone would call it a wall even if the force did gradually grow stronger over a significant distance.
I think those two clowns did more to harm scientific literacy than almost anyone else except maybe the Texas Board of Education. Not to mention, Adam is pretty well known for being a tool.
It's not an unusual problem. Anything which moves thin sheets of insulating material at high speed can cause this. And so, there are standard devices for dealing with it.
The simplest is copper tinsel. That's even available at WalMart.[1] There are fancier systems. [2] The static eliminator doesn't have to touch the product. Close is good enough. Maybe 1 inch for tinsel, much greater for the active devices.
[1] https://www.walmart.com/search?q=anti-static+tinsel
[2] https://www.takk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-TAKK-ca...
An odd phenomenon being rare and hard to document is neither proof nor evidence of absence for it existing.
By contrast that same "panic" would probably have been framed as UFO's and an alien invasion pre-smartphone era.
Which is frankly where they always belonged.
To be fair, if one includes religions this is significantly more than half the population. Add in astrology, psychics, ghosts, crystals, auras and other common 'woo' and it gets higher still. Sadly, HN is not a representative population sample. Skeptical non-believers are still a minority in the modern world.
Unfortunately those networks of trust are easy to corrupt, not for everyone, but for a large number of people.
Bad news: this has gone completely mainstream. We're deep into government by conspiracy theorists.
A default mode of skepticism is best, however the story of this incident didn't trigger my "Yeah, probably not" reflex. It is based on known physical principles and the extremely unusual context seems in the ballpark of sufficient to potentially cause something like this. So my assumption was this was an extremely unlikely edge case that happened "that one time."
It's also not something which strikes me as being a thing people who work in a large 3M factory would lie about.
What exactly does it repel against a human? And why would it repel instead of discharge?
Big Foot, sadly, has been displaced by climate change and was forced to relocate to Canada
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299441 (2018)
The non-anomalous effects, like high electric field readings, could linear
The wall only effects living things- birds, bugs and people
My guess is that the wall is mediated by the nervous system and muscle contractions, which unlike electrostatic forces, are free to have thresholds, nonlinearities, and psychological effects. Basically, everyone involved was getting zapped all to heck and any subjective experience is plausible downstream of taking a megavolt to the spine
In the most 2016 update the relative says it's common to see weird effects from the spools. If it's so common it should be reproducible I would think, yet I've never seen it done.
My guess is that this happens in nearly all large-scale production systems but goes mostly unobserved.
I don't recall what that means.
You're pretty unlikely to get academic papers when the required setup involves having 100M+ clients geographically dispersed. And it's going to be very hard for peers to reproduce your findings.
It would be much more convincing if there were more cases that weren't economically significant. A strange property of chemistry that only comes up when money and lawyers are involved seems inherently suspicious.
There really is a peer-reviewed paper saying that there are five crystalline forms of the stuff. ("Elucidation of crystal form diversity of the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir by high-throughput crystallization", Applied Physical Sciences, Feb 2003).
It really does seem that in 1998 the more stable Form II suddenly started coming out of the factory, with lower solubility and such bad oral bioavailability that the oral capsules were withdrawn from the market until Abbott figured out a new way to make the drug. (I think they were already moving from a capsule to a gelcap and the gelcap didn't have the same issue? Just reading … this is not such a good source perhaps but lovely bare HTML: https://www.natap.org/1998/norvirupdate.html )
Not unobserved. Unremarked maybe? It's expected behavior that leads us into personification of systems e.g. calling ships 'she' or talking about temperament between similar machines on a line.
-- [0] - Which was well-known around the time of that event, and at its peak of popularity when the report in the article was filed!
As a side note, always test any global-scale torrent system for package distribution carefully, as sometimes the code can have "accidentally n**2" network usage that only shows up when you have a worldwide grid of clusters.
One of the weirdest power scavenging solutions I ever saw used a spark gap and a bespoke transformer to make a reverse Tesla coil - taking the very high, very brief voltage spike of a static discharge and stepping it down to create low voltage over a a longer interval. They attached it to their shoe.
Yes, but while the voltage is very high, the energy stored is very low so I don't think it makes any sense to try recover it (there's probably much more energy being wasted by poor insulation of the heated offices or stuff like this).
However, a crucial aspect of this phenomenon remains unclear: how does the charge maintain its containment? What prevents the opposing charge from breaking through the insulating barrier and neutralizing the charge? A fascinating analogy from the Boston Science museum offers some insight. Picture yourself inside a gigantic, electrified sphere – akin to a Van De Graff generator. If your charge polarity matches that of the sphere, you'll experience a repulsive force, pushing you toward the center. The harder you try to reach the sphere's edge, the stronger the repulsion becomes.
This phenomenon becomes even more intriguing when considering the context in which it allegedly occurred. A company renowned for its innovative prowess, 3M has consistently demonstrated its ability to harness unexpected effects and transform them into groundbreaking products. The Post-it note's origin story is a testament to this innovative spirit. Given this track record, it's puzzling that 3M seemingly failed to capitalize on this electrostatic phenomenon. One would expect the company to rigorously investigate and replicate the effect, with the potential for a multi-billion dollar industry hanging in the balance. Instead, the story suggests that 3M dismissed the phenomenon as a mere curiosity.
This is not correct. The field inside a charged conductor is zero. You will experience no force. If there is a hole in the sphere you will experience a repulsive force if you are close to the hole (compared to its size).
(If you made an actual small stellated dodecahedron with infinitely sharp points, the charge would leak away from the points via field emission. Or, in theory, you'd have an infinitely strong electrical field there, and therefore all kinds of singularities. But reasonable approximations of the setup are possible in real life.)
> increasing exponentially with the inverse square
And if anything, in metals I think (???) you can get attraction as free electrons in the neutral body are attracted/repelled towards the charge and the neutral body becomes a dipol (so eg. if the charged body is positively charged then the negatively charged electrons are attracted towards it, and vice versa). But that's weak and acts the wrong way.
https://www.mcmaster.com/19575T43
Or here is a 20 foot wide roll 1/10th of a mile long: https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-20063/Plastic-Sheetin...
Based on the cost of the roll from McMaster, a wider roll with the same cost basis would be $2000.
If something like this could be made safe, I imagine there are applications in security and process safety in places like nuclear power, water treatment, any facility where you want to restrict access in an extreme way. I'd imagine that it would never be safe, any discharge is going to fry whatever completes the circuit.
That's the kind of projects I'd fund if I were a billionaire, not trying to buy the biggest yacht …
Additionally potential differences tend to attract rather than repel unless these individuals were also charged with the same polarity as the field as far as I know.
Wearing a conducting ring might make it easier for charge from the air to move into your body through your skin - but it will not make it easier for that charge to get to the floor (and then to ground) from your body.
Which would likely make you a pretty nice load or resistor!
When insulated, there is no difference. Your potential is “floating”.
After piercing the skin, the test current from the multimeter (9v) was sufficient to electrocute this person. Sadly it (apparently) was a fatal injury. I couldn't find a reference, but the logic makes sense (50V sufficient to kill normally, skin is most of the protection).
When dealing with electricity, having items which reduce the protection your skin offers (metal rings, moisturizer, etc) is a substantial risk.
Most shoes are not great insulators - they insulate but how knows who much. electricians sometimes buy special shows that do insulate. Those shoes come with care instructions and dust on the outside compromises their insulation.
The care instructions and dust you mention sounds likely to be super important when you're casually touching live stuff while standing on a grounded floor.
In an electrostatic situation, the electrons can flow (almost) freely without the shoes / tyres and so a large differential between body / ground will not build up. With shoes, you'll need a large difference to build up (10kV? 20kV? More?) before it discharges.
Anyway, there is clearly a difference between these situations - even if the shoes don't provide magical protection. But the shoes are not magical, as you correctly describe.
If the body is insulated from ground, the body is at the same potential. No current flows. No material conducts anything :)
For the same reasons, high voltage repairs can be done live from a helicopter: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9YmFHAFYwmY
Around 1:10 you can see the lineman connect the mains to the helicopter, to neutralize any potential difference.
After that, the lineman and the helicopter are at the same potential as the cable, so no current flows.
If someone dropped a line from the heli to the ground however.. zap!
"The article says that because of the insulating nature of the floor and and footwear, no discharges occurred."
Charge builds up over time, so there ought to be some discussion of how the field changed between 0 charge and the invisible wall state.
"The article says that because of the insulating nature of the floor and and footwear, no discharges occurred."
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XBWy9gzGGd4&pp=ygUVZWxlY3Ryb21hZ...
You can make one yourself with a nail, some copper wire, and a battery.
And magnetic fields are directly related to electric fields. It's called electromagnetism for a reason.
Like the one described in the article, that a person was leaning against and could not pass through. If this were something that we could reproduce, it would have awesome real-world uses. Like a real hover board! Or the best anti-theft protection for my parked car.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/04/how-did-you-g...
Is that the whole experiment?
That's merely an engineering issue. Keep spraying it with water or something. You do it right, and you might even get the familiar buzzing and shimmering of Star Trek force fields!
> prone to breakdowns
Ah yes, that's very much like Star Trek force fields.
> and might randomly kill people
That might be an issue for Starfleet. A real-world military today will definitely see this as a feature.
Ultimately, you're not wrong, but I would hope some military or other entity with deep budget would try building it anyway, simply because science isn't about "why?", it's about "why not?". I would also imagine, should this design work and became widely-known, some hacker would build and operate it just because.
> This occurred in late summer in South Carolina, August 1980, in extremely high humidity.
But I may have misunderstood this as high humidity being key to it happening, rather than an impediment.
Real world militaries are still pretty picky about who they kill. In particular they don't like killing their own soldiers, who are most likely to be in the discharge path for a shield around their own stuff.
I think this was my favorite part of the article. These workers apparently hit this force field prior and just figured that was a normal part of the job, who cares.
Firefox: Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to amasci.com.
Chromium: https://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html
https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/amasci.com?proto=https
Try manually replacing https with http. Disabling HTTPS-only mode (or HTTPS Everywhere, or whatever is causing the rewrites) might also work.
Anyone clicking on a link like this is open to traffic injection. With several free automated cert services available, there's no excuse for this other than gross incompetence or laziness.