34 comments

  • postalcoder 6 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.

    • devsda 4 hours ago
      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.

      1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714

      • xlii 3 hours ago
        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 :)

        • devsda 16 minutes ago
          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.

        • treebeard901 2 hours ago
          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...

      • testfrequency 3 hours ago
        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.

      • jnrk 4 hours ago
        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.
        • postalcoder 3 hours ago
          Site should add a reverse lookup. Provide the poison and antidote.
          • gala8y 24 minutes ago
            Bitly does that, just add '+' to Bitly URL (probably other shorteners, too).
    • PUSH_AX 2 hours ago
      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.
    • Barathkanna 3 hours ago
      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.
  • gnabgib 7 hours ago
    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
  • arjvik 6 hours ago
    My favorite link of all time:

    https://jpmorgan.c1ic.link/logger_zcGFC2_bank_xss.docm

    Definitely not meta

    • cuechan 35 minutes ago
      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.

    • fuddle 5 hours ago
      Imagine using this as your personal website lol
  • qnleigh 2 hours ago
    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.
  • bityard 6 hours ago
    IIRC, shadyurl was the original version of this. Doesn't seem to be around anymore, though.
    • nomel 5 hours ago
      shadyurl a whole bunch of different incredibly shady domains that were used at random. it was beautiful.
  • dizhn 10 minutes ago
    Firefox is freaking out on some of these. It's hilarious.
  • victorevogor 27 minutes ago
    Just wondering. so you bought c1ic.link and web-safe.link. That's very cool
  • champagnepapi 6 hours ago
  • phoe-krk 1 hour ago
    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?

  • caminanteblanco 5 hours ago
    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]+

  • jmward01 4 hours ago
    • bl4ckneon 3 hours ago
      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!
  • domoregood 6 hours ago
  • bsza 1 hour ago
    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.
  • dieggsy 4 hours ago
    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.
    • saghm 3 hours ago
      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")
      • janwillemb 3 hours ago
        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.

  • juliangmp 2 hours ago
    This is legit! If you disable your adblock you even get a suspicious ad
  • dreadsword 7 hours ago
    Saw this on relaunched Digg and figured HN would appreciate it.
    • qweiopqweiop 1 hour ago
      Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time
    • koakuma-chan 7 hours ago
      I don't appreciate how AI generated this website looks.
      • nimih 5 hours ago
        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.
      • olyjohn 5 hours ago
        Just looks like every other generic framework oriented site.
      • 4k93n2 6 hours ago
        which bit are you getting an AI smell from?
        • koakuma-chan 6 hours ago
          gradient background, card, button
          • anomaly_ 1 hour ago
            Have you looked at a website in the last 10 years?
          • Alupis 5 hours ago
            Perhaps, but nearly every tutorial in all the modern frameworks demonstrate this exact style.
    • bundie 5 hours ago
      Digg is back?

      Edit: looks like you need an invite code.

      Bummer

  • jhalderm 4 hours ago
    Fantastic! I miss the original ShadyURL.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31386108

  • lzap 4 hours ago
    I like how old-school HN comment section does not care about creepy links at all. Or link for that matter.
  • zakki 4 hours ago
    • jimnotgym 52 minutes ago
      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.

  • FuturisticLover 4 hours ago
    I am sharing content using these creepy links to send to office people.
  • abhinai 4 hours ago
    Please take my upvote. :)
  • lzzzam 2 hours ago
    I can just say thanks
  • fancychancy 6 hours ago
    Haha, it's fun. Just thinking, is there some place where creepy links would be better ?
    • AnotherGoodName 6 hours ago
      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.

      • trollbridge 5 hours ago
        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.

  • rendall 1 hour ago
    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!

  • CGMthrowaway 6 hours ago
    Use case? Besides humor and phishing tests
  • awesome_dude 7 hours ago
    • vanc_cefepime 6 hours ago
      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.

      • bmacho 1 hour ago
        punished by whom?
  • fuddle 5 hours ago
    lol, I'm not clicking a .vbs link
  • manthangupta109 1 hour ago
    lol
  • CrimsonCape 7 hours ago
    It is hilarious and i'm not clicking any link lol.
  • hnst1 7 hours ago
    [dead]
  • olya_pllkh 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • thesebas 3 hours ago
    [dead]
  • pabs3 6 hours ago
    Please don't make any more URL shorteners, they are just a bad idea.

    https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam

    • aussieguy1234 6 hours ago
      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.