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URL redirection service makes innocent URLs look sinister

Mark Frauenfelder at 8:39 am Fri, Feb 19, 2010

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Screen Shot 2010-02-19 At 8.36.01 Am

ShadyURL: "Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening."

The shady URL for ShadyURL is http://5z8.info/--INITIATE-CREDIT-CARD-XFER--_r8a4a_dogfights (Via Neatorama)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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  • LeFunk

    Nah, they make them pretty short. My gallery of steampunk unicorns (original URL way too long) got shortened to a nice
    http://www.goatse.fr

    Much better!

    Moderator note: Click that link at your own risk. You only get one set of eyes and you can’t bleach your brain.

    • Anonymous

      I don’t believe you, I refuse to click.

    • rennie

      I’m ashamed to say that even though I recognized the link, I clicked it.

  • Anonymous

    This works so well that Websense has blocked the link at my office:

    This Websense category is filtered: Potentially Damaging Content. Sites in this category may pose a security threat to network resources or private information, and are blocked by your organization.

  • attheelephant

    Boo, #3, boo.

  • tinyxl

    Reminds me of another url shortener, http://mug.gd/ , which lets you change content of the page itself. For instance http://mug.gd/L5QPL

  • middleclass

    Yeah #3, read the policy on self-linking.

  • Chrs

    Hah, that’s excellent!

  • Anselm

    THIS IS BRILLIANT! Seriously! It’s not often something triggers a good minute of loud, chortling belly laughter, but this did. I’m so gonna use this!

  • Hagrid

    SWEET! Can’t wait to use this!

  • mongo

    Inigo Montoya: You keep using this word “shorten.”
    I do not think it means what you think it means.

    • DaveP

      yeah, shorten isn’t correctly used there.

      HOWEVER as an alternate, they could remove ‘just’ to fix it.

  • JoshuaZ

    I prefer http://www.socuteurl.com . It makes urls look cute. For example, I’ve just added boingboing.net which is now linked by http://www.socuteurl.com/cozzyfoobear . URLS by socuteurl are often actually shorter and are surprisingly easy to remember.