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.
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.
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 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.
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?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
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)
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
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 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.
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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.
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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.
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"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST: