The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
creepylink.com423 points by dreadsword 9 hours ago
423 points by dreadsword 9 hours ago
There may actually be some utility here. LLM agents refuse to traverse the links. Tested with gemini-3-pro, gpt-5.2, and opus 4.5.
edit: gpt-oss 20B & 120B both eagerly visit it.
I wish this came a day earlier.
There is a current "show your personal site" post on top of HN [1] with 1500+ comments. I wonder how many of those sites are or will be hammered by AI bots in the next few days to steal/scrape content.
If this can be used as a temporary guard against AI bots, that would have been a good opportunity to test it out.
I posted my site on the thread.
My site is hosted on Cloudflare and I trust its protection way more than flavor of the month method. This probably won't be patched anytime soon but I'd rather have some people click my link and not just avoid it along with AI because it looks fishy :)
Yeah I meant using it as an experiment to test with two different links(or domains) and not as a solution to evade bot traffic.
Still, I think it would be interesting to know if anybody noticed a visible spike in bot traffic(especially AI) after sharing their site info in that thread.
I've been considering how feasible it would be to build a modern form of the denial of service low orbit ion cannon by having various LLMs hammer sites until they break. I'm sure anything important already has Cloudflare style DDOS mitigation so maybe it's not as effective. Still, I think it's only a matter of time before someone figures it out.
There have been several amplification attacks using various protocols for DDOS too...
I think that something specifically intended for this, like Anubis, is a much better option.
Glad I’m not the only one who felt icky seeing that post.
I agree my tinfoil hat signal told me this was the perfect way to ask people for bespoke, hand crafted content - which of course AI will love to slurp up to keep feeding the bear.
Of course, the downside is that people might not even see your site at all because they’re afraid to click on that suspicious link.
How is AI viewing content any different from Google? I don’t even use Google anymore because it’s so filled with SEO trash as to be useless for many things.
LLM led scraping might not as it requires an LLM to make a choice to kick it off, but crawling for the purpose of training data is unlikely to be affected.
Sounds like a useful signal for people building custom agents or models. Being able to control whether automated systems follow a link via metadata is an interesting lever, especially given how inconsistent current model heuristics are.
Related: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy (434 points, 2023, 100 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34609461
My favorite link of all time:
https://jpmorgan.c1ic.link/logger_zcGFC2_bank_xss.docm
Definitely not meta
With Firefox on Android it simply says
Deceptive site issue
This web page at [...] has been reported as a deceptive site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.
What's going on? I can't find any setting to disable this.
NextDNS is blocking it too (https://google.c1ic.link/lottery_qrdLCz_account_verification). The reason is that Google Safe Browsing considers that site as unsafe.
What's up with the creepy ads on this website? It seems like they are actually sketchy ads and not just fake ads for comedic effect. One shows some scammy nonsense about your device being infected and the other links to a real VPN app.
Please don’t use 3rd party relays for your URLs. It’s bad enough to have your own server, domain, etc. as single points of failure and bottlenecks without adding a 3rd party into the mix, who either themselves or someone that takes over their domain later track users, randomly redirect your users to a malicious site, or just fail.
I know people have fond memories of long ago when they thought surely some big company’s URL shortener would never be taken down and learned from that when it later was.
IIRC, shadyurl was the original version of this. Doesn't seem to be around anymore, though.
shadyurl a whole bunch of different incredibly shady domains that were used at random. it was beautiful.
https://jpmorgan.web-safe.link/flash_7KzCZd_money_request
I love this version and I hope you do too.
I'm not sure what the use case for this is, but I've been using it as a inefficient messaging service with my girlfriend, ie:
https://c1ic.link/campaign_WxjLdF_login_page_2.bat
You seem to be able to encode arbitrary text, so long as it follows [A-Za-z0-9]+\.[A-Za-z0-9]+
I wouldn't call it a shortener, since most of the links it creates are longer than the originals.
What would be a good name here? A URL redirector?
URL lengthener. :D
Huh, https://looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo... comes to mind.
Thanks!
This had to be done:
https://wellsfargo.c1ic.link/TODO_obfuscate_url_8wyS7G_hot_s...
Thought this might be it... I clicked it anyways haha. I will need to update the Rick roll url on my nfc implant with this new link!
Just wondering. so you bought c1ic.link and web-safe.link. That's very cool
Yeah but have fun explaining yourself to the police when the author abandons the project and an actual scammer ends up buying up all those domains.
This is fun. Is it not checking for previously submitted URLs though? I can seemingly re-submit the exact same URL and get a new link every time. I would expect this to fill the database unnecessarily but I have no idea how the backend works.
Am I missing something, or would these essentially be implemented via DNS records? It's not clear to me that keeping the links in a database would be necessary at all (unless the DNS records are what you mean by "database")
DNS is only for resolving the host part. The path is not passing through a dns query.
In example.com/blah, the /blah part is interpreted by the host itself.
And apart from that I would indeed consider DNS records a database.
Firefox is freaking out on some of these. It's hilarious.
Saw this on relaunched Digg and figured HN would appreciate it.
I don't appreciate how AI generated this website looks.
It seems appropriate that, for a website whose purpose is to make links which raise your suspicions, the visual design itself also raises your suspicions.
which bit are you getting an AI smell from?
gradient background, card, button
Perhaps, but nearly every tutorial in all the modern frameworks demonstrate this exact style.
This is legit! If you disable your adblock you even get a suspicious ad
Fantastic! I miss the original ShadyURL.
I like how old-school HN comment section does not care about creepy links at all. Or link for that matter.
Is this suspicious: https://microsoft.c1ic.link/0B7jqd_invoice.vbs ?
I think Microsoft have their own version of this
Msn.com Office.com Sharepoint.com Hotmail.com Etc, plus all the subdomains they insert before them. It makes it very easy to create phishing emails that look plausible.
I am sharing content using these creepy links to send to office people.
Please take my upvote. :)
Haha, it's fun. Just thinking, is there some place where creepy links would be better ?
I've been at a company that internally sends out fake links that log the user and links to an educational page on internet safety.
I honestly don't mind too much since it's a once a year thing (hacktober) and honestly companies should be trying to catch out employees who click any and all links.
We used to have fun hammering millions of requests to such URLs from a VPS when they would send such emails to role mailboxes.
Eventually we got asked to please make it stop. I asked them to please stop sending fake phishing emails to robots.
I can just say thanks
This is the best article on Wikipedia!
https://c1ic.link/bzSBpN_login_page_2
Edit: Chrome on Android warned me not to visit the site!
For humour I shortened "https://www.facebook.com/"
And got https://twitter.web-safe.link/root_4h3ku0_account_verificati...
I added google.com and it spit out https://twitterDOTc1icDOTlink/install_Jy7NpK_private_videoDOTzip
Interesting that it spit out a .zip url. Was not expecting that so I changed all the “.” to “DOT” so I don’t get punished for posting a spammy link despite this literally being a website to make links as spammy and creepy as possible.
lol, I'm not clicking a .vbs link
lol
It is hilarious and i'm not clicking any link lol.
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Please don't make any more URL shorteners, they are just a bad idea.
I always end up making my own, they're so simple to write.
Saves using one of the "free" ones which looks like its free but you're actually on a free trial, then you can't access your links after that trial expires.