Wednesday, November 14, 2001

Re: Kids' learning game site becomes porn site (Smith, RISKS-21.74) It's refreshing to see that Ernst and Young actually cared enough about the problem to do something about it. Back in May, the same pornographers bought up close to 2000 expired domains (that I could tell), including domains owned by respectable organizations with hundreds of inbound links, such as the TCL Consortium, XIII International AIDS Conference, Evian, Universal ADSL Working Group, and Craig's List. I tracked down the original owners of about 60 of these sites with the most inbound links and warned them of the problem (this wasn't entirely altruistic as I was operating a service at www.moveannouncer.com that could help them bypass the worst effects the problem). Five months later, only three of those 60 sites have done anything about their former domains, either buying them back from the extortioners or getting links changed to their new sites. Some of the former owners I talked to seem to have trouble seeing that their web sites did not stand in isolation, that people outside their organization had links to their web site and others had bookmarks and those links attached to their names were now serving up porn. I got responses to the effect of "We have a new domain name now, so we don't care what happens to the old one." One certainly takes a RISK in letting one's domain name expire, but when the gamble fails and what must be about the worst case scenario occurs, the indifference I've seen surprised me. I find it hard to believe that so many people have so little respect for their viewers and customers. [Dan Fandrich via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 76] 0:00 # G!