Tuesday, November 6, 2001

Re: Kids' learning game site becomes porn site (RISKS-21.73) You won't be surprised to hear that Ernst & Young (no relation) are not the only people to have been affected by this scheme. I got some moderately irate E-mail recently from users of a small site I run because one of the sites I had linked to had apparently converted to a porn site in the way the *Post* describes. However, in this case: * the registration was by a different company: someone out of Tbilisi, Georgia instead of Yerevan, Armenia. * The new site contained a single page containing an _advertisement_ for "Euro Teen Sluts", plus half a dozen post-close pop-ups for similar sites, but also offered to sell you the domain name in question! Obviously, buying up random dead domains is a cheap way of getting advertising space, as long as you don't care who sees the adverts in question. Risk 1: links are sometimes seen as endorsements. That's a problem for me, but it is presumably also a problem for people like Google, whose rating system depends on seeing that particular sites are linked _to_ by other sites. I wonder how they cope with this? I can see that they do, because the site I linked to still has a lot of links to it, but no longer appears in a Google search with any of the obvious keywords... Risk 2: automatic link checkers will tell you there is something there, but they won't tell you what it is. You actually have to visit your links once in a while to check they haven't turned into something else. [Ian Young via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 74] 0:00 # G!

Dutch police 'bombard' stolen cell phones with SMS Dutch Police 'Bombard' Stolen Cell Phones With SMS By Andrew Rosenbaum, Special to Newsbytes, AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS, 05 Nov 2001 The Amsterdam police have been using short messaging system (SMS) missives to block the use of stolen cell phones, and while the campaign has been successful, mobile providers are concerned about the cost and bandwidth strain of the campaign. About four months ago, the Amsterdam police began cooperating with the national telecommunications provider, KPN Telekom. When stolen phones are reported, the police asked KPN to use the phone to locate the telephone number. Then, every three to five minutes, the police sent SMS messages to the telephone saying, "Warning, this is a stolen telephone, using it is against the law -- stealing it is a felony." ... http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171836.html [Monty Solomon via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 74] 0:00 # G!