The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Site Design and First Impressions

  • Some find the design “AI‑generated” or generic: gradient background, centered card, big button, “framework tutorial” aesthetics.
  • Others argue this is just how most modern sites look and that the suspicious style fits the product’s theme.

Generated Links and Browser Reactions

  • Users share examples: many links end in .zip, .bat, .vbs, .dll, .msi, .docm, etc., with phishing‑style paths like account_verification, login_page, private_video.
  • Browsers and filters often flag the domains as deceptive/dangerous (Firefox, Chrome, NextDNS, Google Safe Browsing), which many consider both funny and appropriate.
  • Some won’t click the links at all, even knowing the joke.

Use Cases: Humor, Phishing Training, Messaging

  • Primary use is clearly humor and trolling friends/colleagues.
  • People mention internal corporate phishing‑simulation campaigns as a natural application.
  • One commenter uses it as a tiny “messaging” channel by encoding short arbitrary text into the path.

Security, Shorteners, and Third‑Party Relays

  • Strong pushback against URL shorteners in general: link rot, added tracking, extra failure points, domain takeovers turning old links malicious.
  • Examples of government and enterprise emails (e.g., healthcare, Microsoft “safelinks”) training users to trust opaque redirects, which is seen as bad security hygiene.
  • Concern that if this project ever dies, scammers might buy the domains and inherit a trove of “trusted” creepy links.

Interaction with AI/LLM Agents and Scrapers

  • Some LLM agents reportedly refuse to follow these links; a few models do follow them.
  • People speculate about using such links as a temporary “AI poison” to deter scraping, but note trade‑offs: humans may avoid them too.
  • Broader discussion on how hard it is to block AI crawlers without also hiding content from real users; Cloudflare, proof‑of‑work systems (e.g., Anubis), and bot behavior are debated.

Implementation Details and Behavior

  • Links are often not actually shorter; users suggest “URL lengthener,” “link obfuscator,” or “dodgifier” as better names.
  • Same input URL can yield many different outputs, implying non‑deduplicated, probably database‑backed redirects (DNS alone is insufficient for the path).

Novelty, Precedents, and Variants

  • Multiple references to past projects like ShadyURL and phishyurl; some miss the older, even more extreme variants.
  • A subthread questions why the same joke keeps being rebuilt; others reply it’s a good learning project and not everyone has seen earlier versions.