Slashdot Mirror
TypoSquating == CyberSquating
Lostman writes "ZDNet has an article here that details how WIPO ordered a "typosquater" of altavista.com to give up 43 domain names that might confuse and mislead people. The rationale for this is that these sites were not registered in good faith." Typo sites are odd: I'm cool with most of them (parodies or ones that simply have an ad and a redirector to the real deal) but some really piss me off... like the Slashdot typo sites that frame slashdot with extra banner ads. They do confuse and mislead people: the flame mail in my inbox over the years proves it. I've been called an awful lot of nasty things over a few transposed letters.
What you are talking about is infringement on copyright laws, and this has nothing to do with typosquatting. If someone at www.ed.com did the same you'd still be upset.
Cybersquatting is a bunch of bull. Domain names ate like real estate, and if your company is too slow to get the best piece of that real estate, tough shit. Pay the price if it means so much to you. It is amazing how many so-called capitalist ventures go crying to the government when things dont go their way.
I say, you snooze, you LOSE.
Though personallyi don't believe real world trademarks and such should apply to the internet especially in terms of the name services system i can find NOTHING wrong with typosquatting. Why should these company's be allowed to have control over names that they DO NOT own, if they don't registed the typoed domain names themselves (and for the amount some people pay for domain names i can't see why they dont try to atleast) then they have no ownership over them and shouldn't be able to force people to give them up. I really hope that ICANN takes a much less favourable stance towards these companies that it's predecessors have in the past. The domain name system works on a first-come-first-server and should continue to do so without the help of our good laywer friends who are making some big bucks on the whole "cybersquatting" issue.
Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind...
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.
My god did you read that? Taco doesn't care for selling out slashdot! Look at how much you can infer from his quote!
Once you realize that lusers are a renewable resource (There are always more of them on hand than you know what to do with) you can start burning through them like the rest of us abusive elitist crowd who go out of our ways to poke fun at the newbies.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's the fact that you can't immediately tell that you're not on the right site that is evil. Recently I hit www.google.net instead of google.com. Oops. Only... it *looked* like google.com so I didn't notice it right away. Google.net was reserving google.com in a frame. What really bugged me was that it stayed in the frame. Every link that I hit from the google.net search (and the click-path from there on) was potentially recorded by google.net. The added banner ad was just gravy for them (I'm certain that there *are* at least a few people who'd click on the pr0n site banner ad)
hymie
Just put in a little snippet of code in your to break it out of that site?
I don't know perl, but the Javascript equivalent is:
<head>
<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
if (self != top) top.location.href = window.location.href;
//--></script>
</head>
--
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Now this seems as though it could be a real bad slashdot type site. When you go to it you may notice that (even if your logged in) it says that you are not.
Thus... when you type in your password and login as it asks you to. . . well, I just wouldn't "if I were you."
This is a perfect example of place where WIPO could come in handy.
The thing is they arn't "really" suing, nor are they spending outrageous amounts of money. The reason? WIPO -- it arbitrates domain name disputes. Because of WIPO people dont have to have a lot of money to get a domain name dispute resolved...
I don't really have too big of a problem with typo squatting. I'm not the best speller in the world so I seem to run into a lot of stupid domains (ie microwharehouse.com).
Overall it's an honest mistake and isn't a big deal. The one thing that pisses me off to no end is when you goto a "typo-squat" domain and it leads you into an unescapeable vortex of banners and popups. Ugghhhh, usually if I'm expecting to hit a buncha pop-ups and banners I'll just turn java*, cookies, etc off. They don't even give you time to prepare!
Anyway, pointless rant. No useful information in post. Speaking the mind =)
pirst fost?
It started out with about 150 unique visitors a day and has gone up to about 700. What I've done to "combat" evil ways is a redirect, so if one types : boogle.com/search it will redirect to googles (yes people type this) or actually, anything other then real boogle pages redirect. Used to have a "how to google" page but theirs has really improved and is much more useful now so I recently removed it.
In short, I earn about $10 per day through the affiliate program at one cent per use. I've not yet contacted google but am fairly certain they know I exist. But plan to share this news soon to see if they hate me (hmm, maybe they are reading this!) Plans are in the works to add various features, we'll see. I find that MANY do not know how to use search engines and it seems do not desire to learn how on their own either so, I'm planning an "ask boogle" (will use alternative to word 'ask' of course) where boogle users will tell me what they are looking for and in turn, I will tell them how I conducted the search and archive these for future generations to learn from. In tests, people have liked this. I consider myself to be a good searcher (18 hours a day will do this) so might as well use these skills.
So why am I writing these words? Well, here is one way I've made success off a misspelling and am proud of it. Crazy thing is, some people actually hear and think boogle when friends tell them google - this theory has been tested, so it's not completely a misspelling issue but also miscommunication. I like this! :-) Boogle is at a crossroads and am building a backend as we speak!
Also, I own hoogle and toogle - they get about 10 or so hits a day each - not even close to boogle. I have planned to turn those over to google (if they accept) but keep boogle, unless sued. So this is my "success story" and it pays for my bandwidth and food! I love google and can't help but spread the word!
.sig --
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yeah, they're both domains that someone got for free at namezero.com, because they didn't think helping out Rob was worth paying $70 for.
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Websites aren't the only concern here. I have a friend working at Microsoft. Recently, I e-mailed, mistyping the Microsoft domain name. Minutes later, I was inundated with advertisements for "discount" Windows products.
Somebody out there is harvesting e-mail sent to mis-typed domain names and using the addresses for target spamming.
Okay, this is going to end up another "Why is that post moderated up" but I do have a point:
:-)
Remember that not everyone knows how to spell Altavista. If someone told you Alt*ae*vis*ta on the street, you may end up trying any number of erroneous domain names... Perhaps actavista, Aliavista, autavista, or even antavista?
Look at MY URL: http://www.nodachi.net. When I tell someone "Nodachi", they most likely end up spelling it "Nodatchi", "Nodotchi" or "Nodotchee."
(Hell, word spells it "Nod", "Noachian", and "Joachim"...)
Otherwise, good point.
The full text of the WIPO decision can be found at http://arbiter.wi po. int/domains/decisions/html/d2000-0848.html. If you read this decision you can find an interesting piece of news: Altavista requested a blanket order forcing the domain name registrar used by Grandtotalfinances to hand over any similiar misspellings to AltaVista. The presiding WIPO panelist thankfully turned down that request -- while Grandtotalfinances acted in bad faith other "typo" sites MAY not have acted in bad faith.
Imagine that--WIPO not immediately finding that people are acting in bad faith: At least its a start.
you've never heard the expression "oops, i fat fingered it" before??
:P
oh well...maybe you just need to eat more, you skinny fuck!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
One wonders if Taco's typo was intentional, or just another instance of inadvertant self-parody by the Slashdot crew.
Back in 1997 totalnews.com was pulled in courtrooms by CNN, Reuters and six other media companies. The reason was, totalnews used frames to link all the newscontent form CNN etc. Joe Surfer never noticed the news weren't coming from TN.
Later, TN and the media companies made some kind of deal about the situation, and the case was pulled out of courtroom.
-P
--
I hate people who quote
hey cmdrtaco,
how abaout a permanently changing framebuster javascript? shouldn't be that hard...
if in frame -> redirect to "http://slashdot.org"
PAT
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
Cybersquatter: FourGuysFromRolla.com
Annoying, yes, but I take it as a bit of a compliment... one of those things that if you have to worry about it, you know you're doing decent traffic.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Okay, let's change the emphasis marks a bit and see what happens.
Now, I'm not sure, but this doesn't look to me like he "couldn't care less". It seems to me that he was fairly irritated. I'll grant you that he seems more irritated now, but I think some more responsible highlighting of words is in order, here.
I'm with the WIPO on this one. It isn't fair that an individual profits off of the success of other people. I'm sure you've done quite a lot of work on slashdot, and you said yourself that it pissed you off when people frame slashdot with extra ads, but they're all like that. If they all happily redirected to the correct page, then a) it wouldn't be a problem where the WIPO would have to intervene and b) nobody would care enough to do it because they wouldn't gain anything. Though I didn't read the article, I'm sure that it was NOT a typo domain that simply redirected to altavista.com. You can't just be in favor of the "good intentioned" typo sites, those aren't the ones causing the controversy.
These typo domains are helping nobody but the culprit, and most likely, they're hurting other people. These people are cheating off of other people's hard work. How can you support that?
"The panel finds the respondent is in bad faith because...the respondent is deliberately using complainant's famous trademarks with the aim of misleading the public and siphoning off the 'Chanel' trademark's accumulated good will for profit," (actually quoated from an earlier ruling regardin Chanel)
I find it interesting that the test they apply is a good faith test. In these circumstances I think good faith tests are inherently righteous tests since the actions in question can be pretty easily distinguished as good or bad faith. Now some might argue that such a subjective test is a problem, but the law does deal with subjective tests all the time (although in the Anglo tradition many of these tests were left to juries to evaluate, and I bet there weren't no jury at WIPO). Typo squatting really doesn't have much of a leg to stand on it pretty much an unconscionable way of getting the attention of users. (but what about the days when altavista.com wasn't even owned by altavista, kinda puts a hole in the whole aregument really, anyway I digress)
An interesting "grey" area would be a site such as astslavista.com where clearly the name is a play on the phrase from the "renegade" in Terminator and the name altavista, but I would think they would have a fairly strong defence
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Actually, they couldn't've been tracking you. Just being inside their frameset gives the site no additional powers to track you. You're not going through their servers, and they have no additional JavaScript powers to track you just because you're in their frameset.
One at a time: It's really, really difficult for a web proxy to keep you inside of the proxy, whether that proxy be for the purpose of tracking you, providing anonymity for you, or whatever. Believe me, I know, building such a proxy is what I do for a living. Of course, were such a proxy to keep you inside of the proxy, it could track you at an arbitrary level of detail.
It's pretty much impossible, barring some horrible bug in Netscape or IE that you'll likely hear about on the 6 o'clock news, for one page in a frameset (or in another window that you have open at the same time; it's all the same to the browser) to tell what you're doing on another frame, unless the two frames are from the same domain. And in order to keep you in the same domain, it would have to proxy your requests. See above.
So, take heart. While I can't check to see exactly what google.net is doing (since the site seems to be down at the moment), I can fairly well assure you that whatever they're doing, they're not logging your activities. Because they can't.
I'm concerned, however, that present and future domain name disputes may be wrongly construed as "typo-squatting," regardless of the intention of the alleged offender. Although the term "typo-squatting" is appropriate in this case -- as the defendant capitalized on common mispellings -- I can see the potential for such a term to devolve into another jingo easily manipulated to trivialize the interests of small website operators regardless of legitimate intent/ fair use; another catchphrase to be leveraged by corporations intent on ammassing valuable domain real-estate.
My concern is magnified by the potential for disparate bargaining power among the parties in such a dispute -- i.e. fan site vs. multinational media conglomerate.
Anyone interested in perusing a compendium of past domain name disputes might want to check out the Consumer Project on Technology's (CPT) page on Selected Domain Name Disputes. This site describes in detail (and links to) relevant decisions made by the arbitrator.
I'm currently on leave from CPT, and will return in several weeks.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Insects and Grafitti Photos
Something that is sort of like something else but not enough to be legally like something else such as copyright or trademark infringement. Nice to see some altruistic NGO taking on the burden of legal arbiter. Especially in domains that it has no parvue. Here's my plan. Start a church called the Chruch of Jefus Chrisp. Let's see if millions of bewildered souls are confused and accidently contribute to it. Heck, if the response rate is anything like direct mail then I can retire tomorrow and buy my own country.
/. No humor allowed. Only self righteous bullshit. The kind of one dimensional moral absolutism you pick up freshman or sophmore year. If you have found any typos in this note so far please sue me. I wouldn't want stupid people to accidently confuse me with someone else.
This is a joke people - so don't get carried away. Oh wait - I forgot this is
I can't wait to see what's next - maybe someone will create a domain that is intentionally misspelled or vague just so they can sue everyone else. And then those people can cry to the WIPO about how they were wronged by someone who was intentionally vague in the hope of being sued.
We have instructions on shampoo bottles - w'dya expect?
Try going to www.slashdot.org. If you always go to slashdot.org, you won't be logged in. That's because logged in means you have a cookie for slashdot.org, not www.slashdot.org.
I wonder what kind of traffic these sites actually get
http://www.googol.com/ has over 300,000 hits this year. I don't think it would be doing that well without Google, but this guy has a legitimate claim. After all, his site *does* have material about the googol, as well as the googolhedron, which I never thought of before.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I have no problem with typo squatting as a whole, but there are a dozen Slashdot typo sites, one of which fra m es Slashdot with a 2nd banner a d. Now I don' t care ... but this f o ols about 1 person every 2-3 days, and t hey fl a me me for se l ling out and doing so m ething so horrible as framing Slashd o t for extra ad space. So I guess typo sites that f r ame the site are pretty slimey, but as l o ng as the typo site provides a li n k to the correct site, I'm totally cool with 'em.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Remember that 2600 registered www.guinessrecords.com to protest the real Book of Records portrayal of Kevin Mitnick. Shouldn't something like this be allowed just as "MicrosoftSucks.org" is/should be? Follow the links for more info.
I can't think of any websites like that....*cough*whitehouse.com*cough*
The anti-salmon
Yes, I know that this is a bad question, since it just encourages them, but I'm wondering...
/. ?
Where is the typo site that Frames
I've typed in several typos in my day, and I've never ended up with this site. I have heard of it at least ten times (in articles). So, I'm curious.
Where is it???
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
GENEVA -- U.N. arbitrators ruled on Monday that a cybersquatter with addresses in Panama and Latvia must give up 43 domain names it had registered containing variations of the name of the Internet search service AltaVista Co.
...and if they dont want to give up their domain names, the U.N. is going to send in the blue helmets to stare them out?
The sad fact of life is that no matter what stance you take, some people are going to be worse off as a result. Media innovators, archivists, and consumers are going to lose out if IP laws are practiced too rigidly, but media producers and artists will lose out of IP laws are too loose. Obviously, Sting shouldn't be able to take back sting.com (and he didn't), but is slahsdot.com another story? There's two sides to every coin.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly advocating the fascist use of IP laws that the MPAA and RIAA practice. But I think it's worth understanding the resistance that some artists and producers have to the free software / new media ideals. Slashdot is Rob's baby; it's easy to understand while he might feel upset if someone tries to piggyback off its success and tarnish its name. And, really, how he any different from Lars?
Green Monkey
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Explain this one?
http://www.slapdash.org
I am not saying you are squatting, I like the name, but why?
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
You seem ot have misread.
Maybe NameZero is the owner!
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
actavista? Aliavista? autavista? antavista? Take a look at a keyboard, folks. The C and L are on opposite sides of the keyboard. So are the I and T, though they're closer. L and U are on the same hand, but aren't next to each other (even on diagonals). Same with L and N. Not every letter-substitution deserves to be called a 'typo' in my book.
Are there really people out there who type this badly? I can see the argument for names with characters right next to each other. I can see it for missing characters (alavista, for example) because some people have crappy keyboards that click sometimes when a key isn't pressed. I can see it for swapped letters (atlavista), and for added letters (altravista) next to ones you really are supposed to type, but a bunch of people at WIPO have a really negative opinion of the typing prowess of the average net user if they think enough people are legitimately mistyping a C (in qwerty, the middle finger of the left hand) when they mean to type an L (the ring finger of the right hand) that it's worth their time to arbitrate the dispute.
If someone's typing ability is really that bad, wouldn't they at least be in the habbit of checking what they've typed before hitting enter, given the number of times they must screw things up typing?
I'm not saying that typo squatting is fine (though in most cases I'd say it is), but can't we at least pick plausable cases to argue about?
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
the problem is, every time i come here to slutdot.org, i read an article, i post my reply, i quit my browser, i get like 50 annoying pop-ups telling me about these live horny women that want to have sex with me.
taco should really try to get more conservative advertisers.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I was at a MacFrugals recently, and found this little address book thingy. It was in the same style case as a portable CD player, and popped open with addresses to write in. The real funny thing about it was the name of the "manufacturer": Panashiba.
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem& item=485096924
Please email Taco about this.. He is really confusing the intent of NameZero. They're NOT trying to make money of his domain or be slimey by cybersquatting. It wasn't even their choice to register the domain. Someone else, probably someone who frequently typed slahsdot.org, had to register it, and that person doesn't get any money whatsoever from it. There's nothing slimy about it. Frankly I'm mad at Taco for jumping to conclusions without even trying to understand what's going on.
Hell, if he was all that mad about it, he could include Javascript code to break out of the frame easily.
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I remember back before WIPO and the term 'cybersquatting' was developed, there were legitamit registered sites that had the typoed domains for large sites, and on those domains simply had a 15 second redirect and a link to the real site, with the only 'advertizing' was that this service was brough to you by such and such. No banner ads or anything else like framing the other site. These types of sites were cool before we were engrained with knowing the domains explicitly, and they got only minimal advertizing dollars for that $35/yr for registering the name.
<P>
Here, obviously, the group registered the domains in bad faith, hoping to make some money with the domains, and other WIPO cases of late have been a similar nature with those that did specifically grab typo sites trying to make big cash off of them.
<P>
But let's say I know of a popular site X, and whenever I go there by typing in the domain name, 5% of the time I mistype and go to a "domain not found" error page. I decide to register that domain, and simply do the same redirect and link as was done originally, and I let site X know about it, and being the 'white hat' that I am, I suck the costs for simply maintaining that site, with the only stipulation that I have a link to my own web site so that people know who helped out here. Could that, under some of the more extreme WIPO rules, be considered squatting? I hope not, but I'd like to see something a bit more concrete on the squatting rules.
<P>
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST: