All bugs lead to Rome

Wait, you never heard of ROT13? Heck, Son, I remember when ROT13 was the DoD's standard for strong encryption.

The &quot;breakthrough&quot; boiled down to something we all do in desperation: Google it.<p><i>At a loss for other ideas, I started going through all the Google results for “erzbir”. Imagine my surprise when, a few pages in, I came across the following page: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;easyciphers.com&#x2F;remove" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;easyciphers.com&#x2F;remove</a> As it turns out, “erzbir” is “remove” encrypted with a simple Caesar cipher. </i><p>Every once in a while you get a happy ending instead of the dead end like the XKCD comic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;979&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;979&#x2F;</a>

What a useless thing for a virus scanner to do. Why bother following a link, if you&#x27;re not going to <i>follow the link</i>?

Rot13 to avoid unintentional side effects of URL activation? What could possibly go wrong apart from a) the mangled URL still having side-effects and b) only the non-mangled URL serving malware, thus totally defeating the purpose of this &quot;safety check&quot;?

<i>&quot;We use a great service called Mailgun to send our emails. As part of this, they rewrite our URLs to enable click-tracking.&quot;</i><p>It&#x27;s fun to read about spammers suffering.