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Cyber Squatting is the practice of registering a desirable domain name in the hope that you will be able to sell it to someone else for a much inflated price. miscellaneous Porn-napping is a relatively new form of cyber squatting were someone waits for a desirable name registration to expire. They then pick it up, turn the front page into a portal for pornography, and offer the domain for sale in the hopes that the original owner or someone else will rescue the once respectable site from the grips of pornography. NetTech.org was a web site out of the University of Maryland and City University or New York. Two OII members were on the design team. After funding ran out and the future of the site was uncertain, we decided to go to the site and download what we had created. Unfortunately, when I went there in early October, it was too late. The site had been taken over by squatters who had turned it into a porn portal. I reported it back to the WWWEdu mailing list, where a discussion ensued. It wasn't long before other sites were taken over and the unsavory practice was being discussed on a variety of mailing lists. Redirection takes place when you go to one URL and are automatically transferred to another URL by a script on the page you wanted to access. This doesn't always send you to a porn or gambling site. A redirection may take place because of a name change or merger. On the other hand, it could be a scam to lure you to places you had never intended to go. Below are links to messages I posted to students in Safeguarding the Wired Schoolhouse, a CoSN/EDC course I am facilitating. Similar messages were also posted to LM_Net. Only my messages are posted here. The complete discussions can be found at the LM_Net and WWWEdu archives. Cyber Squatting and Porn-napping Messages Nov 13 By not giving in to extortion and reporting incidents we can alert the educational community about the sites. Filtering companies can block the sites. In doing so, the site becomes all but worthless, because no one would want to pay big bucks for a domain name that is not visible to its intended audience. Though this action will not stop Cyber Squatters, it may help stop the practice of turning the captured sites into portals for pornography and/or gambling. |
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© 2006 Online Internet Institute. |