I stumbled upon an old article today entitled
How to Obscure Any URL: How Spammers And Scammers Hide and
Confuse.
Quoting from its summary, the article describes three ways to obscure URLs:
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Meaningless or deceptive text can be added after "http://" and before an "@" symbol.
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The domain name can be expressed as an IP address, in dotted-decimal, dword, octal or hexadecimal format.
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Characters in the URL can be expressed as hexadecimal (base 16) numbers
Two more ways come to mind that are most useful if you are building your own website:
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Use indices or hashes for object references. For example, www.mywebsite.com/myapp?objectref=1.
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Use a hash function (say MD5 or SHA-1) to hash the URL and use the result as a key to the real URL. For example,
www.mywebsite.com/this/is/a/private/path might become www.mywebsite.com/f061a171dfc30635462850684f98b886.
This is similar to what URL shortening services such as TinyUrl do.
References
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How to Obscure Any URL: How Spammers And Scammers Hide and Confuse,
www.pc-help.org, 2002
