Typosquatting

plashdoy writes: "Oh what a tangled Web we weave: ZDNN article on Typosquatting. Don't you hate it when stuff like this is more profitable than your honest efforts?" I have no problem with typo squatting as a whole, but there are a dozen Slashdot typo sites, one of which frames Slashdot with a 2nd banner ad. Now I don't care ... but this fools about 1 person every 2-3 days, and they flame me for selling out and doing something so horrible as framing Slashdot for extra ad space. So I guess typo sites that frame the site are pretty slimey, but as long as the typo site provides a link to the correct site, I'm totally cool with 'em.

Comments

slashdit

[Money__]

Interestingly, slashdit.org is still available.

Re:you know...

[arcade]

actually, you'd be pretty stupid not to bookmark you favourite sites anyways..

Why on earth should I bother bookmarking slashdot, when it takes far much effort to use the bookmarks-button, than to just type 'slashdot.org' ?

You only show that you probably have a patethic 400keys-per-minute typingspeed. ;)


--

Re:Making bucks off someone else's rep

[ddstreet]

I think that it is more like an address.

Do you know exactly what the address of your local McDonalds is? I don't. But I know the sign on the front says 'McDonalds' and generally what its appearance is.

A McDonald's street address would correspond to a website's IP address. NOT its DNS name.

Re:Making bucks off someone else's rep

[ddstreet]

Lat & Long and Street address are both ways of locating (or describing) a location. An IP address is also a way of describing a location. So an IP address can correspond to either a street address or lat & long. It depends on whether you're the type of person who looks up McDonald's lat & long and then uses GPS to get a Happy Meal. Perhaps you are.

Re:Typos'

[British]

And that's what pisses me off when I'm at work. Imagine you make one mistake in going to a regular friendly site, and instead get a porn site. It hits hard at work when there's a liberal Internet usage policy. What if it was an accident?

Re:you know...

[Pope]

actually, you'd be pretty stupid not to bookmark you favourite sites anyways...I never have to type any of the URLs to the sites I go to on a regular basis.

Pope

Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!

Kills frame-squatting dead.

[e_n_d_o]

setTimeout ("changePage()", 10);
function changePage()
{
if(self.parent.frames.length != 0)
self.parent.location="/index.html";
}

Re:Kills frame-squatting dead.

[Haight6716]

A cleaner version of this:

<script language="JavaScript"><!--
// Break out of frames! I'm the tops!
if (window.location != window.parent.location) {
window.parent.location = window.location;
}
//--></script>

If you want a nav-bar, that's why your browser has that little toolbar at the top of the screen. Or you can implement a floating bar that sits in it's own trimmed-down browser window. Then you won't run afoul of frame-busting scripts.

-=Julian=-

Re:Kills frame-squatting dead.

[mikpos]

Considering that it uses JavaScript, it would probably kill frame-squatting "slightly injured" instead of "dead".

Re:Kills frame-squatting dead.

[mikpos]

Actually, I can browse most of the popular sites with my low-tech browser just fine. In the case that I need graphics (e.g. I want to look around an image gallery but pavuk will take too long), I get by just fine with Mozilla with Javascript turned off. In the odd case that Javascript is *needed* in order to browse the site, I can type in URLs by hand, or, more commonly, go somewhere else. I've yet to see an actual use for Javascript.

Re:Kills frame-squatting dead.

[TrevorB]

CNN.com does this, and it's bloddy annoying... :)

I actually have a page on my own web site (not for external browsing, www.arbutus.cx/navbar/) that has a narrow (75px) left sidebar frame where I can navigate between my favorites. Easier for me that having to drag around my favorites whereever I go.

CNN likes to kill my happy little side frame, which is a reason why I usually go to it last. But I guess CNN would have more "frame linking" problems (especially linking directly to articles). I wouldn't be happy is Slashdot did this (the first link on my side navbar), but I guess I could live with it.

Re:Kills frame-squatting dead.

[pen]

I agree. I hate it when the webmaster thinks that he knows the way I should view the page. Providing a "break out of frames" link is nice, but doing it for me is ignorant.

Another thing I really hate is the opposite of this -- reframing. The site on which it bothers me the most is SecurityFocus. Who in the world thought that reframing a BugTraq post that I link to along with 7 other frames, putting into a tiny little frame and making it unreadable, is convenient? I ended up using other BugTraq archives.

--

DavesClassics and PayPal

[Rahoule]

I used to frequently visit an emulation site called Dave's Classics (www.davesclassics.com). I had to be very careful typing in the address because if I typed:

• www.daveclassics.com --> Porn site.
• www.davesclassic.com --> Porn site.

DavesClassics is now known as VintageGaming.com.

I remembered someone on Slashdot mentioning that PayPal had a problem with a site typosquatting on paypaI.com and grabbing people's credit card numbers. (The lowercase 'l' and uppercase 'I' are almost indistinguishable in some fonts...)

Mews sites

[troyboy]

I have set up a few typo-sites that are based on a common misspelling of "news." The sites are non-commercial and I get no ad money. Unfortunately, I get very few hits (less than 20/day each)...

See foxmews.com, cbsmews.com, and nbcmews.com.

New TLDs...

[the_tsi]

Won't it be great when we can register .cmo domains? The number of times I've tried surfing to yahoo.cmo can't even be counted in binary on two hands and two feet.

-Chris

This reminds me...

[b1t r0t]

This reminds me of the time when AT&T came up with "1-800-OPERATOR". Well, seems lots of people couldn't spell, and tried dialing "1-800-OPERATER". Which just happened to be a random 800 number inside of MCI. Which MCI quickly routed to their own 1-800-COLLECT number!

And that's why the phone police on the TV ads now tell you to dial 1-800-CALL-ATT.

Re:What typo site?

[Phrogman]

Meanwhile you have just generated additional revenue for them, as a horde of interested Slashdotters (like me) type in this URL to see what shows up.

Personally, while its kinda sleazy and I sure as hell would not be likely to engage in typosquatting, I do think its inventive. This attitude will survive until such time as someone start typosquatting one of my websites of course :)

So how would you fix it?

[Twid]

OK, assuming the problem of "typosquatting" is a real one that needs to be dealt with, how would you create an enforcable rule?

For example, if I owned frito.com and you owned fritto.com, a perfectly legitimate word (maybe a chef's site, for example), is that a violation?

How would you quantify this in a way NSI and others could enforce? It seems like any solution would require subjective review by a committee, and that means that it would be political, capricious, and subject to manipulation like the WTO.

Personally, I think the internet advertising market will change in coming years, and just serving up a banner won't make you the 5 cents a click that people claim to receive now. This will make running a "typosquatting" site less lucrative. I also see no difference between "typosquatting" and perfume knockoffs, rolex watch knockoffs, kit cars, and other sorts of ways of leeching off a major brand name. It's a healthy part of how capitalism works.

The only big problem I see is intentional deceit, such as the recent problem with bank of america where someone was trying to deceive people into sending in personal info. We have existing fraud laws to cover that.

So, unless someone is trying to trick you into thinking that they are really bankofamerica.com or slashdot.org, I don't have a problem with "typosquatting".

TO say the least

[CAIMLAS]

Typeosquatting is bad, but what's even worse is when porn/advertising takes a site that is in reference to something that's popular - say, descent.com. I've not tried going there in quite a long time, but back when I played Descent almost exclusively (man, what a while ago!) The site was a porn site. Looking for a patch/map/mod and finding porn is not fun.

-------
CAIMLAS

Re:Who cares?

[Abigail]

Banner ads are a stupid way to generate revenue because anyone who's likely to spend money will _look_ for what they want, rather than being convinced they want something by what amounts to an online billboard.

Oh, really? Banner ads are not that different than ads on television and in magazines: mass exposure of a name or brand, grouped around content that hopefully has a higher density of your target audience than average. Name recognition and image building is extremely important to become a successful product. There might be a few exceptions, but you didn't really think that Coca-Cola or Microsoft would be as big as they are without the ads, do you? Billions of dollars a year are put into advertisement, and trust me, most companies would not do that if it didn't boost sales.

Witness the frequent "AOL keyword" phrase in radio ads.

The "AOL keyword" namespace isn't in any way bigger than the DNS namespace. If it becomes popular as an alternative for domains, you get the same problems as you find now with domains. Except that it's all in the hands on one company. You won't get many domainsquatters, no, you have one: AOL, and it's got *everything* squattable. (It would be the same for any other company trying to make such "name spaces"). Oh, and you don't really think that Ford Motors will say, "we already have ford.com, we don't mind if someone else uses 'AOL keyword: Ford'", do you?

Domain names should not be typed in by hand very often. Use bookmarks and search engines.

Well, to put something in a bookmarks file, you first have to find the address somehow. Search engines are nice, but not an alternative. Could you imagine a radio ad for Xyzzy soap saying "Visit out web site, go to your favourite search engine, search for 'xyzzy soap', and find us in the huge list of returned matches". No self respecting marketing person is going to fall for that - nor will the public accept it. Besides, search enignes fall for the "typo trap" as well; and you don't even need different domain names for that. Also, Yahoo was mentioned as one of the companies with typo sites.... you really thing that using a search engine to go to yahoo is going to solve that typo problem?

I forsee a day when there are multiple orthogonal online namespaces akin to Yahoo, and URLs will be passed around as "http://namespace/name/restofurl/"

Well, that's how it all started. But nowadays, everything needs to have its own domain name - and it isn't just companies. Just look at the postings with this story, how many people here are saying "I have .(com|net|org)". Just like big companies, geeks want their own domain too. It's all vanity and the phobie to type punctuation characters.

My favorite bakery has a site at SantaCruz,CA/Buttery (by city)" which would translate to http://santacruz.ca.us/buttery/

Cute, but since Henry Ford mass produced cars (and before that, railroads), we no longer live in a society where people spend 364 days a year in their own village. The world, and especially the electronic world is global. Geographic domains don't work in general, and any attempt to do more than two-letter toplevel domains has been a failure. And even two-letter domains don't really work well. Or do you really think all the .to and .cx domains are located in the Pacific? And then there's the obvious problem of people and companies relocating... Would you want to have your email address change when you move?

-- Abigail

Re:What typo site?

[B.D.Mills]

The concern I have with these typo sites that frame Slashdot is that there is an ad in the frame. One must then ask the question - who is getting the revenue for the banner ad? You can bet it's not Slashdot.

In my opinion, this is plagiarism. They are plagiarising Slashdot to raise money for themselves or a content provider. If someone was doing this to a commercial website I owned, I would be seeing lawyers and issuing "Cease and Desist" notices very quickly.

I think the best way of thwarting it tho is through Javascript. Something like:

if (top.location != self.location) top.location = self.location;

--

my all time fav

[small_dick]

reuter

...instead of the news service, you get "free web based email" -- just enter your uname and password.

who would have guessed the web could make our lives so simple?

ICANN?

[Masem]

Unless there's a beef with ICANN that you refuse to use their arbitration services, this sounds like an ideal case of cybersquatting (I've seen ICANN rulings where typo sites have lost on trademarks). Unfortunately, there's a somewhat signifigent fee involved ($500) to start arbitration, but particularly for the site that frames you, there's the cybersquatting (and making money issue), and that framing other sites intentionally has been considered somewhat iffy by the courts in the past. IANAL, of course.

What's the problem?

[pacc]

Typosquatting seems OK to me,
the alternative would be that any given trademark etc. would include permutated characters and similar words.
Any name hard enough to make it possible to spell wrong by _anyone_ , i.e more than 4 characters, is just a bad name for the net.

Re:Making bucks off someone else's rep

[troyboy]

I guess our disagreement comes down to whether a URL is more like an address or a name on a sign. I think that it is more like an address. You type in where you want your browser to take you; you don't look at a list of URLs and say "look, there is McDonald's; I want to go there" but end up at MacDonald's. I guess if the name turns up in a search engine, your analogy would be closer. So, maybe it's more of an empirical question about how people browse.

OrangoTango

[weston]

If you want a nav-bar, that's why your browser has that little toolbar
at the top of the screen. Or you can implement a floating bar...

I beleive there's a company called
OrangoTango that's working ona product to
do some of these things and more. Browser/Location independant
bookmarks, preferences, etc... available anywhere, from any
browser... there must be more to it if you simply
implement these by making floating js bars.

Making bucks off someone else's rep

[warpeightbot]

I don't agree, Taco. Someone else is making bucks off your good rep, for $15 worth of capital. At best, somebody owes you a cut of the proceeds for your blood, sweat, and tears spent making a site yonder doofus could exploit.

I have a feeling that if I went out on the street, put up a green sign with silver arches, and called it MacDonalds and started selling chicken sandwiches, that the company that has sold Billions and Billions would have proper recourse to land on me with a ton of lawyers. But here in cyberspace, it's *just* a typo?

I don't think so. And even if it is, when folks like the 800 pound gorilla from Redmond get into the act, it won't stay that way long, DOJ lawsuits aside. And for once, I think that's as it should be. www.whitehouse.com indeed, don't try that not-a-link unless you're 18.....

--
That Isaac Hayes, he's one baaaad mutha...(Hush yo mouth!)
I'm just talkin' 'bout Chef! (We can dig it!)

Re:Making bucks off someone else's rep

[troyboy]

Your McDonald's analogy is imperfect. On the web, people don't go to the typo-site because they believe that it is McDonald's. They go there because they mistyped the address.

A closer analogy would be if Burger King set up a store at 123 N. Main St., while McDonald's was at 123 S. Main. St.. People know where they are, they just got the address wrong. The misdialed phone number analogy is also good...

Re:Making bucks off someone else's rep

[ddstreet]

A closer analogy would be if Burger King set up a store at 123 N. Main St., while McDonald's was at 123 S. Main. St.. People know where they are, they just got the address wrong. The misdialed phone number analogy is also good...

No, your analogy is imperfect...
a real analogy would be someone opening a store that looked exactly (or almost exactly) like McDonalds, and called it MacDonalds (notice the extra 'a'). THAT's a typo analogy.

Re:Making bucks off someone else's rep

[pen]

Wouldn't the IP address correspond to the location's longitude and latitude?

--

Re:not totaly realted but

[Tairan]

Slashdot.com works, but all links are hard encoded to point to Slashdot.org. And yes, CmdTaco has complained about misuse of TLDs.... "no, those ads do not generate us any profit..."

Typos'

[Mike the Mac Geek]

And be careful of Hotmail, and Beef-Cake.com ( A South Park Site). One wrong keystroke and it's porn city. Unless, of course, that is what you are looking for....

Re:Typos'

[Fishstick]

This actually happened at my office. Someone typoed a domain and was sent into javascript pop-up porno land. They were really worried about losing their job because someone had been recently fired for visiting porno sites from work. They went to their boss and let 'em know right away what happened. Turns out that the monitoring software on the firewall did flag this and an e-mail went to the boss and HR. Of course nothing serious happened because the policy is to notify management and let them investigate, and in this case it was clearly unintentional.

The ass that got fired was warned multiple times about his browsing and chose to continue. He had a pretty sizeable collection on his harddrive, looked like the majority came from e-mail attachments he was exchanging with his buddies. I couldn't understand that one. Guess he was pretty compulsive about it.

Right after this clown was fired, a memo went out reminding everyone of the policy and that everything was logged and sniffed. Guess a bunch of people were warned and cleaned up their act since. I'm no prude, like to see some skin myself once in a while but it completely escapes me why someone would need to do this while at work.

Re:Typos'

[jesser]

it's always those fucking pages with 550 popup windows and banner ads -- there is no porn. That's what really bugs me.

Mozilla bug 29346 has been futured, so I'm afraid we might have to live with this problem for a while longer (the multiple popup ads, not the lack of porn).

--

Re:Typos'

[British]

Yeah I was hit by goatse 1 or 2 times(it was from some guy's page linking supposedly to a DecSS mirror). Fortunately I'm quick with the keyboard, and alt-f4 in a second, turned my back to make sure my sup wasnt around.

slsahdot.org

[modus]

I like my typo site, complete with cricket-based monitoring of how many people have misspelled it on any given day:

slsahdot.org

No money in it, of course, I just got tired of getting a DNS lookup error everytime I misspelled it that particular way.

Re:slsahdot.org

[arcade]

while serving slsahdot.org /index.html (referer=http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/09/ 23/1733257&mode=thread, agent=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; ACS-255; DigExt))

You're using WINDOWS. yuck...

--

I hate that

[clinko]

I mean, i own donkeyhumper.com and would ya know it, someone bought donkeeyhumper.com. And would you belive it, the guy has the nerves to make donkeeyhumper.com a porn site! I cry myself to sleep just thinking about the people who accidentally go on that other site instead of quality donkey-humping action at donkeyhumper.com.

What is this world coming to?

Rights in misspellings

[Animats]

The only real problem is that somebody might be able to generate a legal theory under which "big names" get exclusive rights to everything that could possibly be a misspelling of the "big name".

As a business, "typosquatting" probably ranks with standing around with a "will work for food" sign, so it's not going to go beyond the joke level.

Re:What typo site?

[z4ce]

Very interesting. Those people aren't making a dime off of those ads. Somebody used namezero.com to register those sites. So namezero is making money off of it. Though, I'm sure namezero are not the people who registered it. FYI, namezero is a little vanity domain place, will give you free "web" dns services (That is, no access over the real dns entries, but access to the main frame on your own domain), and email for your domain.

Ian

Just for shits and giggles

[Accipiter]

I had to try some purposely misspelled domains. Here's what I've found:

www.widnows.com
www.micorsoft.com
www.gooogle.com
www.exciite.com/
www.microsofy.com
www.hotmaik.com

Here's a funny one:

www.netwroksolutions.com

And

www.networksloutions.com - which redirects to http://www.networksolutiond.com/, and provides a link to http://www.networksolutions.com/

You can probably come up with a LOT more than this list, just by entering misspelled domain names. Hell, it worked for me, and this is probably just a tiny sample of what's out there.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Re:What typo site?

[lar]

www.salshdot.org frames slashdot...... see?

==

you know...

[Wakko Warner]

you would have to be incredibly, unbelievably stupid to not only make the mistake of typoing slashdot.org, but then to write an email about the site without even checking to see if the URL in the "Location:" bar is correct. Would any of the morons who have done this please reply to this post? I wanna see what breed of dork it takes to fuck up this magnificently.

- A.P.

--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.

Re:you know...

[Pope]

OK, in iCab i have to type sl then return to get slash! :)

Pope

Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!

If there was a model of the most vague story...

[AFCArchvile]

then this has to be it.

What's he referring to, sites like Slashgrits?

Making 1st amendment go bye-bye

[gad_zuki!]

Domain names aren't necessarily trademarks, so that analog doesn't apply. What does bother me is that only high-profile deep-pocket sites like slashdot.org could get away with the arbitration necassary to get rid of "typo" sites. While a smaller site or a personal site has to deal with the normal act of mistyping and ending up somewhere else.

Let's not get into the mess that would happen if I run doglovers.com and some other dog lover couldn't get that domain so they made their own legitimate dog site called dogloverz.com. Or maybe he's busy working on his site and has only some opening HTML and a few test ads. I'd rather not have brat netizens calling "typo" site and demaning pulled domains. Outlawing typo sites would be a great way for losers like GW Bush and Jack T. Chick to get rid of parody sites named after them. Go ahead and try to define "typo" site.

Typo sites should be kept alive and well and if you feel they're using your content without permission (framings) that doesn't mean all typo domains should be abolished it means you have a problem with one specific webmaster who is actively trying to fool people.

As far as linking to the "real" site, thats just as much bullshit as the rest. That could fool the user into thinking that slashbot.org has an association with slashdot.org. You're better off without them, eventually they should realize that hey this isn't the place I wanted to go.

What you should be doing is less whining and more hustling, inform the ad providers and the company that they're advertising that you saw their ad in an unfair fashion and will think twice before shopping there and prefer the honest admanship (this isn't a word or is it?) of their competitors.

Then again I don't see most ads, click my homepage to get a small but effective ad blocking hosts file.

Re:What typo site?

[Trickster Coyote]

Also slahsdot.org takes you to the same framing site.