I wouldn't expect someone to immediately know about the existence of Hacker News, nor immediately assume "oh they're the good kind of hackers, for sure" when I am sitting in a security clearance interview.
Not knowing these things doesn't make someone incompetent or terrible people---it just means they don't run in the same circles that I do (to note, plenty of good people at Microsoft have never heard of HN, but are still nice enough to work with).
>I wouldn't expect someone to immediately know about the existence of Hacker News, nor immediately assume "oh they're the good kind of hackers, for sure" when I am sitting in a security clearance interview.
It's the tracking and asking you about what you visited part, not the "not knowing about HN" part
It was loosely inspired by a BBC broadcast I heard during the very early days of the web. The announcer said something like “If you would like to learn more about this radio program, enter the following into your browser: aitch aitch tee pea colon forwards-slash forwards-slash bee bee see period see oh em forwards-slash — oh, never mind.”
My hosting provider eventually took it down, because URL redirectors can be used for phishing.
> My hosting provider eventually took it down, because URL redirectors can be used for phishing.
What provider was this? I'm going to make sure to never use them. That's not a valid reason at all to take someone's site down, even if it's being actively abused you notify them first and notify them many times before even considering booting them as a customer.
OT: I did, it asked me to select traffic signs. No picture had any. Not marking anything is not an option. So I marked 2 traffic lights and a gas station sign. Accepted. :(
Can't actually generate a URL on the site (presumably because everyone's trying at the moment) but it reminded me of https://verylegit.link/ which does something similar.
If I remember correctly, the author of this site hangs around here and last time the site came up he had mentioned there used to be a free API but it had to be taken down because of constant abuse by scammers.
Its also possible I'm thinking of another similar site, if that's the case I apologise.
All the modern SEO-heavy links lend themselves to modification. You can give someone the URL https://www.amazon.com/fnord/dp/0440539811 and he may say "oh, I've read that, fine book" and won't have noticed anything peculiar about the URL.
(Using the male pronoun seems appropriate for that book.)
#ThatsTheJoke 'fnord' is supposed to be invisible, and you, the reader, are outstanding in that you are resisting this mind-control and able to see it anyway. It's a reference to the novels linked in in the Amazon link.
you can't avoid the statistics gathering because you need to contact their server to get the full URL. the best you can do is look for workarounds (goo.gl has a details page if you append .info to the end of a link, not sure whether that gets recorded as a visit). either that, or you have some sort of centralized service that caches short URLs so they only need to be visited once.
Confirmed tool's promise: the "shortened" url to my company website has been immediately blocked by our big brother firewall citing internal policy :-)
Nontechnical users whom we are trying to train to parse and understand URLs. And to avoid those which are outside the norm, even when received from known contacts.
"Haha it's just a joke, click it" undermines that. Just like it would dilute an AI's training.
Yes, my point, really anyone who looks at urls if this became prevalent couldn't trust their intuition - maybe trusting intuition isn't a good thing anyway. For some reason though I got minus 4 points for what seemed like a reasonably clear and uncontroversial observation.
I think the whole point of the joke is that URL shorteners have already made it impossible to look at URLs and intuit anything about where they lead and how reliable they are. e.g. the "t.co" through which all twitter links are blinded.
It gives you urls like https://upstandingcitizenry.com/peace-and-love-and-ponies except instead of redirecting you to a safe URL, it drive-by downloads some malware, fills your screen with porn popups, and uses your CPU for monero mining.
Maybe that would spread your message better?
You obviously don't get the joke. The joke is that it looks shady but is actually perfectly fine. If every URL tells you "don't click on things that look shady", then the joke is gone.
If the user isn't looking at the URLs then no way a joke like this is going to change heir habits. If anything, they might notice when it's pointed out and they might consider looking at the URLs in the future, though unlikely, as a single experience isn't enough to be habit forming.
I think it's rather interesting because you can use it as a canary like service of some sort and plant some shady URLs that lead to unique resources you have logs for.
is now
http://www.5z8.info/horse-slaughter_o2z4pp_heroin-od.avi
:D :D