Slashdot Mirror
The Typo Millionaires
theodp writes "Slate's Paul Boutin reports on the sordid history of the oldest scam on the Internet. For almost as long as the Web has existed, there's been a thriving economy of sites, services, and software vying to grab you as soon as your mistype a URL. Studies estimate that 10-20% of all hand-entered URLs are mistyped, adding up to at least 20 million wrong numbers per day, helping to enrich the likes of porn purveyors, ISP's, Paxfire, Microsoft and VeriSign."
Interested in joining an anonymous, underground internet?
http://meta.fshell.org/
Get your own free personal location tracker
Now I am poorer than I originally thought? Damn.
I see no problem. :)
Slashdit
What you need, when you need it
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
As are 75% of all hand-entered /. submissions.
The real problem is when an institution like Verisign does this kind of stuff. Many ISPs put some thing in their zones that shouldn't be there, the problem is when a root server does it.
ICANN Should put his pants on and take action.
ALMAFUERTE
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
That's a lot of traffic for http://slasdot.org/
we geeks have little risk of that happening to us, since decent typists (like we should be) are looking at the screen while typing, instead of looking at the keyboard...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
http://lsashdot.org/
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
It's a shame that the people who are probably more likely to mis-type a URL and not notice/tell the difference are probably beginner users of the internet. These people are also perhaps more likely to fall for scams such as downloading trojans etc. I work as an IT trainer teaching older people how to use computers, and many of them are unable to tell the difference between typing something into a search engine, and typing something into an address box. They are definately the people that don't know that mis-typing a URL actually makes much of a difference, and I have seen many of them attempt to install malware, just because the install box has popped up, and they have no idea what to do with it.
I remember the time several years back when I read about people registering misspelled web addresses. So I thought I'd take a look, and tried the first spelling mistake I thought of, www.hotmale.com.
I've been very careful since about what I type.
I recall once typing in slashdot.org, (incorrectly) and ended up at a site displaying nice frequency/time graphs of how often that occured. (A lot)
I wish I could remember what it was - I think salshdot.org - (now just a black page with an automatic redirect)
One of those milk through the nose moments.
"Various studies have estimated that 10 percent to 20 percent of all hand-entered URLs are mistyped"
Surely that number is slightly exagerated there? My personal score would be well under 1%, and I practically live on the internet. That's a lot of URLs that I type.
Especially with the drop-down menus telling URLs that start with the letters you are typing, I don't see how people could mistype that many URLs.
And put an extra 'o' in:
www.gooogle.com - same result
It's hard typing correctly all the time with only one hand free. ;)
This goes way beyond typos. There is a whole cottage industry of people registering domain names that unwary site owners allow to expire. I've heard several stories of church groups who accidentally let their domain expire and within a matter of days it had teen porn on it.
I'm a big tall mofo.
no ads on slsshdot, but it is for sale for all you porn vendors who target geeks who cannot type properly.
Monstar L
Shoe shoppers who mistype www.zappos.com as wwwzappos.com get pictures of women who are wearing shoes but not much else.
Unfortunately, though Slate's servers are well hardened against DOS attacks such as what slashdot inflicts, since every slashdotter who will read that quote will instantly type in wwwzappos.com into his URL bar, the servers of that site will fall under the weight of the 80% of slashdotters who get that URL correct.
When one is trying to accomplish a task, ending up at the wrong site is a distraction, not necessarily a hot, sweaty tangent.
Just because someone ends up on a porn site doesn't necessarily mean that they'll instantly stop what they're doing and start beating off.
I imagine we would have read about this behavior in business journals by now if it were the case.
Is there a plug-in to have whatever you type spellchecked or suggested, something like Google Suggest.
Because it's just so easy to mistype goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle
Blender And Linux Fan
If you misstype a street in your map software, you may end up at the other side of the city which will cost you money. Misswrite your checks and lose money as well. The problem are not the URLs but websites behind such URLs that copy the original site. Especially unwanted with online banking and e-stores. It's always the same. If it's about your money. -> pay attetion.
www.whitehouse.gov: Current President's home www.whitehouse.com: Former President Clinton's home ;)
"Nature bats last..."
Mine is localhost.com
Those guys must be making a killing from people hitting ctrl-enter by mistake.
Chip H.
One simple solution to this problem is to use Google spellchecker to good use. I always type URLs in my google box and let google lead me to the page, even if I know the URL. Probably just because I believe Google more than I do my own typing skills..
- PS
Reminds me of the guy who created the "I don't care" and "I don't know" long distance company. When people made calls and were asked who the caller wanted to use, this guy got all the business.
slsahdot.org
If you had enough money, you could buy as many typo-domains as possible. Even though your visitors may be confused as to why the domain they entered linked to your website, it would keep them from getting the the pop-up hell.
Is most of this really a scam though? It seems to me there are two levels to this type of behavior - the true scam, whereby a user is led to believe the site they are looking at really is the site they intended to go to, and therefore handing over personal details / card numbers etc.
However, most of what is described appears to be people capitalising on poor typing skills - a "lesser" scam if you will. I suspect the majority of these miss-spelt domain names don't claim to be the site you're looking for.
A scam is, after all, to defraud somebody. Mis-spelt domain names is akin to reading a map incorrectly, and ending up somewhere you didn't expect.
Of course, the fact that many of these sites will then go on to install malicious software etc, and that they generally intend to catch traffic from other sites probably works against this argument.
"Microsoft rejiggered Internet Explorer so that if you type in a URL that doesn't exist, the browser will redirect you to a Microsoft page. " This alone is reason enough to switch to firefox.
Google have prevention for this type of thing on their site by registering multiple domains.
http://www.gooogle.com/
http://www.googlee.com/
http://www.googlle.com/
Word!
Have you metaroderated recently?
This also happens when people forget which TLD a website has. Like suprnova.com .
If you follow http://www.slahsdot.org/ it's almost the same site but there's "wrestling women" as the most popular link. Does that mean slash dotters have this affinity for buff chicks? We need a psychologist in here...
Google goes after people who register domain names with the word "Google" in it or any variant of it. It also registers hundreds of domains that can be considered common typos, such as "gooogle.com" or "gogle.com."
It's not only typos, but entire names that people take advantage of, for example people can register names such as google-search.com (inactive) and use the name to attract (trick?) gullible visitors. The typo problem only exists as a subordinate to the larger trademark issue at hand.
Mod parent up. I do not have mod points.
Re: Grandparent, I don't see how you can quote "a lot" for how often. The site records a record number of 35 people spelling it wrong.
Have you metaroderated recently?
Hunt and peck.
Use proper form but look at the keys
Don't look at the keys
Speech recognitin softwar wurks fur we
I don't have hands you insensitive clod!!
I dictate everthing to CowboyNeal
Right now, I've got a broken arm, so everything is one handed. Normally, though, I look at the keys.
Great... now let's watch it go down in flames.
:)
I have a feeling they should switch to a bigger scale on those graphs.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
There goes their statistics! ;)
That dumb people that look to the kyeboadr when type.....
http://www.michel.eti.br
...many of them are unable to tell the difference between typing something into a search engine, and typing something into an address box.
Both boxes look pretty much the same.
What you're highlighting is the imlicit expectation among software designers that users will come to understand the how the Internet works. That is, that users will understand what a URL is, how DNS works, what a search engine is, and ehat happens when you enter a search phrase versus entering a URL.
Those are unwarranted expectations. An analogy would be cars designed on the assumption that drivers understand how internal combustion engines work. Few of us would be able to drive safely if that was a prerequisite.
The most effective way to protect users from crooks and abusers on the net is to design software that does the protecting and is not based on unreasonable assumptions about user knowledge.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
http://slashsnot.org/index.html
does this. He owns easily over a few thousand miss-spells, and offers services to buy up expired domains. There's really 2 tricks to this service.
The first is to have a program to find domains that expire, and find them the day of expiry so you can pick them up before others trying to do the same. Of course, some domains will do better (ie. miss-spell of slashdot) than others (ie. miss-spell of some joe-blow site).
The second is to target the material on it to the types of visitors it would get. Of course, with the new domain ad pages from google, it makes this really easy. This is a huge business, honestly, you have no idea how many people, when they get to the wrong page, go through and click on an advertisement.
So how well does this do? He makes 6 figures canadian a year on it, and that's not including business derived from his own programs to find expired domains. Furthermore, he's my age (22) and still in university. How can you argue with something that brings that type of money for doing so little work?
Here you are.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
AT&T had a national collect-calling campaign telling people to "Dial 1-800-Operator."
A competitor, MCI IIRC, quickly snatched up the number 1-800-Operater and got lots of the business from the campaign.
So it's not just URL's that get the typo business.
Slashdot don't need to register another domains because all the users here don't look to keyboard when typing.
http://www.michel.eti.br
This is how I found out about slashdong.org
When you buy a domain, you have to justify why you're choosing it and it can't be "that's what we sell". Should kill off cybersquatters and these typo-profiteers. But what do I expect? People like Verisign won't implement it because it's too profitible to do what their doing (and children possibly being exposed to pornography be damned)
... counting on human error in order to profit by.
... where the lower rate gets paid off first -- increasing compounded interest on teh higher rate... etc..
Hmmm, as an example.... war on iraq for oil....
credit card promotional interest rates and the untentional failure (honestly forgetting) to make a payment, or not knowing that transfers at 0% or low rates while having higher rate debit
I have no doubt that as a matter of insured payoff, to invest in human failure is a successful investment practice.
I'm sure better than the stock market scamming of the public,
This isn't a fat finger mistake but a funny story. This lady that I worked with was Internet illiterate. She wanted to set up an e-mail address so she could send junk home that was personal in nature. She had trouble with her ISP e-mail and no one at work wanted to volunteer to intercede and help out. I told here to just go to hotmail.com and set up an account for free. She went to hotmale.com and started screaming !! She thought she would be fired on the spot...I had to get the President, John, to help calm her down...hell she was almost 66 years old. Never saw anything like that I guess. /snicker
There's another typo-squatting game that only the big guys can play. In 2001, Microsoft rejiggered Internet Explorer so that if you type in a URL that doesn't exist, the browser will redirect you to a Microsoft page.
*Cough*Verisign SiteFinder*cough*
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Salshdot.org used to put slashdot in a frame with a banner ad up top. Taco got a lot of hate mail from that one.
That's the last time they feed that buffalo some curry
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
can get you sent to prison. A dude made porn sites that were common typos of Disney and Disney names, ie targetting children. He got thrown in jail....
Monstar L
I made this embarassing mistake myself today:
:-(
actual fansite
and one letter off when your brain has not had enough coffee yet:
not safe for work
Fortunately I was not at work!
What happens when kids do this by accident
Since anyone can do this, from now on when I see an unregistered typo I am going to buy it and point it back to the real site for them. I can spare the $7 to protect minors. What would happen if we all did that to help a local school, charity or other cause - it can add up!
I wonder if you could make any money doing something like this over the telephone. It would work like this. Register an 800 number very similar to some other high traffic number, like one belonging to Visa, Or some other frequently called company, and play an advertisement everytime someone calls. It's much easier to mistype a phone number as many phones don't allow you to see what numbers you actually typed, or dialed in.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Oh and we work at the DNS level with DNS NXDOMAIN anwsers.
That means that these figures I gave in the parent post DO NOT include mistyped URLs going to a registered domain (ie www.gooogle.com which is a domain that does exist) and all the errors caught by msn.com under Internet Explorer and google.com under Firefox.
Also, we only care about HTTP traffic.
That explains maybe the difference between our numbers and the 10% to 20% the studies found...
Iraq: war to save the U
Well they _could_ distinguish between people misspelling slashdot and a link, by simply checking for the referrer info in the HTTP request. But then, they probably didn't expect anybody to post a link on slashdot ;)
...
But the weekly pattern is interesting. Looks almost too regular to be true
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
at a boom-era party in silicon valley, i met a woman who'd goosed her income by developing software that took a list of the most-visited web sites, calculated the most likely typos that surfers would make trying to reach them, and automatically registered those domains if they were available
Karma be damned....
I have no sympathy for them. It's their fault their domain expired normally and someone else bought it up. That's why it's always best to renew at least a few days before the domain expires, or at least have payment information on-file so that a domain can be renewed automatically.
Now, I do remember reading about a particular domain that was hijacked by another registrar/company in Australia. It was on Slashdot, but for the life of me I can't remember the URL.
A lot of times I end up at slutdot.org, but it's not becuase I don't know how to type.
Don't ever go to www.dicks.com when you're looking for hockey supplies... they don't have sporting goods...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have seen WYSIWYG editors consistently muck up URLs, such as http://http//google.com. Can anyone tell me why this redirects to microsoft.com?
I also had the same idea about the same site. I thought it would be funny to see what was there. Now I am emotionally scarred and, since I'm a Californian, I'm thinking about suing.
Honk if you're horny.
It's fun to go there and hit refresh over and over, and watch the numbers climb.
I know, I know - simple minds are easily amused.
...The Typo Milionaires? ;-)
I posted a story on AQFL about it:
"Former U.S. President candidates' Web sites can be just another place to shop for sex toys, download movies and get a law degree online in a few months...
When politicians and Internet domain names meet, strange things happen, particularly after the campaigns are over. Click on Elizabeth Dole's old site, and you go straight to an auction of Pokemon video games on eBay. A Libertarian currently owns the original 1996 Clinton and Dole campaign Web sites, and uses them to support 2004 Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik, while also hawking Clinton and Dole's latest books.
When asked for an explanation, a top domain-name registrar pointed out that Web site addresses are always rented and never owned, and that former owners can't dictate who picks up their discarded sites."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Of course, it's only anonymous as long as no one is looking.
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/4334 7
"I used the LiveHTTPHeaders extension (see http://extensionroom.mozdev.org) and figured out that trying to go to http://http://google.com actually does a "I feel lucky" search on "http" at Google. For some reason, Google's top hit on http is Microsoft.com. Go figure"
Obviously they don't differentiate between a manually entered URL and a link.
Gosh, I wonder why there's a spike in todays graph?
Wake up.
It seems reasonable enough to me to know which does what.
I disagree. Maybe one doesn't need to intricately understand the principles of internal combustion to drive a car, but the mechanics of how your accelerator works, how your different types of brakes work (and how to use them safely), how a car will react to dangerous conditions, and if you drive an automatic, the mechanics behind changing gear - these are things that nobody should get behind the wheel before understanding.
In the same way, while the intricacies of DNS and routers and so on need not be explained to new users, there IS, undeniably, knowledge which for their own safety they should be armed with before setting foot on the internet. That spy/ad/malware exists at all is a major one. That there ARE websites out there which will claim to install neat stuff on your computer, but actually just mess it up, or feed you annoying popups. That there ARE people who will email you claiming to want to give you money when actually they want to take money away from you. That the internet not a playground, it is dangerous: that you need to stay alert for and know how to avoid this stuff.
Not all of this is stuff we can rely on software to do for us. Education is what is needed.
qntm.org
Use adblock to block them!: //landing.domainsponsor.com/*r mation.com/*
EG
http://test.yesadvertising.com/*
http
http://search.info
http://www.searchguide.com/*
and so forth. Some of the stuff listed as examples on this site i couldn't load, because they were from these sites..
... it might not be a good idea to spew venom and arrogance from almost every sentence.
... only the types bearing strong resemblance to Jimmy Fallon's IT guy character from Saturday Night Live ...
However, if you're happy with things currently, go back to your pap-fed, TV-induced brain-numbing stupor, and smile at the nice pretty pictures, the short snappy soundbites, and cower in fear at the Fox news alerts, and feel free not to engage.
(The instructions are deliberately vague. A sort of aptitude test, if you will.)
After reading crap like that, I can't imagine any normal person joining this
The oldest scam on the Internet is forged email, though it was more of a prank than a scam (there was a santa@north.pole.com long before there was a pole.com). The second oldest is the Make Money Fast spam, though it wasn't called spam back then.
Typosquatting is a youngling. AFAIK, mine was the first (whitehouse.net) and that only happened in 2/96.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Very insightful indeed
Over 1000 hits now - soon the counter will be slashdotted!
slsahdot.org
According to the above link, a lot of people are misspelling slashdot.org today as compared to other days!
I don't think anyone drives who doesn't know what an engine is, and ascribes the car's motion to some inexplicable magic.
English is easier said than done.
Other than showing porn sites and selling malicious products, these 20% of the total surfers can be made the victim of credit card frauds too. Just imagine you type in something which you believe is the address of paypal and the give away your credit card number. I am sure scammers always look for possible incorrect URL's of this sort to get on with their 'business'.
(This ain't Usenet!)
Heh.. I think you've thrown off todays numbers a little bit.
Rod Taylor
Nice story but bogus!
...but I've lost count of the number of times I've made a typo and accidentally visited hotbabes.com instead of google.com. The letters are just so damn close to each other!
But it didn't work!
(This ain't Usenet!)
Once I stopped laughing I told him he should check the spelling of his url. Then he started to get worried someone would think he had been intentionally viewing smut during work hours on the campus network. All in all a pretty good day at someone else's expense of course.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
He and his kind are scum, and should be genocided ASAP for the good of mankind IMHO!
(This ain't Usenet)
Made the mistake of typing Freshmeat.com instead of Freshmeat.net a few times at work. A few years ago it was pretty raunchy.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
HaHa. Yes it's flamebait but damn funny flamebait. I wish I could type in shitdot but I'm at work and god knows what would come up. Mod This parent up as funny flamebait. shitdot I gotta remember that one.
1-800 h0liday (with a zero) was snatched up by a travel agency, who then booked commisionable stays at holiday inns--
holiday inn sued and lost
the agency never advertised as "1-800-h0liday" they just happened to have this certain # with a zero in it.-so it was not infringing on a trademark... kinda harder to do with URLS..
more of the same here
http://www.ivanhoffman.com/1800.html
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I used to own yahhoo.com for a while. The domain was getting massive amount of unique traffic. I believe it was something like 2000 uniques per day. Then I got curious and set a catch-all email address. That got really interesting real fast...
But I gave it up because it didn't feel right. Could have linked it to one of those search engine sites to make some decent change though... Oh well...
eTrade SUCKS
The problem is that its people doing nefarious things on the net. Learning how DNS works isn't going to render you immune to crooks and predators.
Yes, there is risky terrain along the net, just as there is risky terrain along the highway. And, yes, the more you know how to navigate safely through either, the lower your risk will be.
But safely and effectively using a browser is analagous to safely and effectively driving a car. The latter is completely possible with no knowledge of the machanics of the car's operations. Likewise, using a brower safely and effectively ought to be possible without understanding how the net works. But, cars have a 100=plus year head start on browsers. (Most people will never understand how either their car or the net works because it isn't important to them.)
Of course, no one expects their car to keep them out of risky neighborhoods, and no one should expect their browser to keep them away from risky sites and links. The education you recommend, then, should be about how people behave on the net, not how the net works.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I work for a company that provides infrastructure support for these domainers ("What you want, when you want it" is the company's template page). The money is obviously made through advertising links.
A poor choice for a domain name may pull in a few pennies per day in revenue. A good domain can pull in $3,000 per day. That's right, over a million per year. So the shotgun approach, where you register tens of thousands of misspelt domains, usually pays off in the long run.
If a popular browser were to notice redirections to a certain number of sites, and were to block accesses to said sites, it could bring the domainer economy to its knees. So if the Mozilla foundation ever needs an emergency influx of cash...
Nor do I. But I know lots of people who don't know how an engine works.
Most folks I know understand that the letters they type go out onto the net over a bunch of cables and wires and that new stuff is sent back to them. They think of it, I'm sure, as very much like a telephone network. Start talking about name resolution and packets, though, and eyes glaze over.
Remember, people (at least non-geeks) want to learn only what they need to learn to do what they want on the net. The less to be learned, the better.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Of course now you're *completely* screwing up their data.
I don't get it.
you are 100% incorreect. that has nothing to do with an internal combution engine, but rather driving the car (for which you should pass a test before you can drive)... it just so happens there is no internet test..is is that what is being taught at the local highschool?
Just set up a VPN server on your computer, then get your friends to set up a VPN connection on their machines to your IP. Only allow access to trusted clients.
This is a core problem of our industry, and the initial responses highlight it. They just try to talk about how people *should* learn things, and try to bend the analogy.
For the true analogy, look at the actual history of cars. Drivers were hired along with the car not only because the owners were rich, but because a car requried great skill to just operate with some modicum of safety. The engine was started with a crank, which could break your arm if you weren't careful. Almost every engine parameter had to be continually adjusted by hand. The choke had to be set and adjusted. The spark advance adjustment was typically on the steering wheel and needed continual twiddling to keep the engine running right. There was no power assist on anything.
Today, how many drivers (other than mechanics and enthusiasts) even know about the choke and the spark advance, much less how they work? And how popular are cars now compared to 100 years ago?
Technologists who ignore this are fools, and there are too many of them. And, just because you always gt more out of something by knowing more about it, does not mean that we should require such knowledge just for basic use. Believe it or not, some people have other things to do with their lives, and care about other stuff.
To paraphrase Kennedy: Ask not what your customer can do for you, ask what you can do for your customer.
To spell it out: do not ask your customer to learn your machine so she can use your (confusing and clunky) interface, ask how you can make it easier, smoother and safer for your customer to use your product.
end rant.
I typed this one in once by accident. It threw me off guard for a moment, thinking Slashdot was for sale!
The site assumes that slsahdot is the only way to misspell slashdot.
I wrote my congressman about this. If they get enough complains something might be done. :)
And besides if it doesn't you still get an envolope that was sent with the Franking Privledge.
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
I tried to register http://www.fluff.net because I'm sick of http://fluffnet.serveftp.com because it takes to fricken long to type and users wouldn't remember it if they had to. :| But it turns out someone already took it. :| They are charging like $4000 dollars for it too so im not gonna be able to get it unless the company gets shut down or I win the lottery. :|
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
This is more like expecting that a deiver knows what the bakes do. Really, there is no need for the user to know how DNS and seach engines works, just to know that a URL is different from a search string.
Of corse, there are users that don't understand that, so a little training is needed, like the training needed to someone to drive, cook or use a TV remote control. There is no way to do software that can be used by everyone with no training at all.
Rethinking email
Well, someone has just to warn then that they have been slashdoted...
Rethinking email
Great! Now we're going to slashdot slsahdot.
Make sure you dial Ess-Oh-Ess NOT Ess-Zero-Ess. One is (or rather was) Apple's help line, the other was a phone sex line. Back in the bad old days I worked at Best Buy and routinely had to deal with customers complaining that we had told them to call a phone sex number.
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
typos????
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
enrich the likes of porn purveyors, ISP's, Paxfire, Microsoft and VeriSign.
Was I the only one who looked at that and thought, "Since when did Microsoft become a porn purveyor?"
Isn't our regular internet anonymous enough?
The only piece of information that someone has is your IP address, and it's there for routing purposes and, even though you could find out from where is thata dude connecting that's all you can know. Anyway, IP packets are still part of your undergroud internet, so there's no extra anonymity there.
Besides that, you can have a truly anonymous internet if you don't permit any cookie, and don't have any user account. the anonymity will also be lost in your internet if you add a certain type of registration.
So, what are you promoting here? Because I have seen this post on other slashdot sites. Is this just a downgraded internet?
Yes, but that are all point to point connections. I have got that set up already with my friends. Problem is that you won't get any routing, and you must trust each friend. It's a pain on your firewall and sockets setup as well.
What I need - and I think more people are interested in this - is something that established a virtual LAN. Now, VLAN is already another technology, so we might need another acronym. I would consider Open Virtual Private Lan, or OpenVPL for short (see below).
The biggest issues are probably the routing - e.g. broadcast packages - and management. You would also want to set it up as a LAN adapter as well (which requires insight in device driver development). You would probably want to start off with something like OpenVPN and add routing and management on top of it.
As you can see, I did a little thinking beforehand. Currently my private developments are all in Java unfortunately, so programming the TCP/IP stack in Linux is a bit too remote for me. This IS an interesting idea though, most of you will probably agree.
"the likes of porn purveyors, ISP's, Paxfire, Microsoft and VeriSign." So, we were talking about typos? ISPs
CKSCIII
Last week I mistyped an domain who send me to an wierd site, then I look at brazilian registrar registro.br and found this guy:
. 119/0001-55 . 952/0001-42
L E.COM.BR
http://registro.br/cgi-bin/nicbr/whois?qr=006.209
http://registro.br/cgi-bin/nicbr/whois?qr=002.799
Mostly are to catch mistyped domains, some of her domains are typed like google is spelled in portuguese.
GLOGUE.COM.BR
GLOOGUE.COM.BR
GOGOG
GOOCLE.COM.BR
GUGOL.COM.BR
You mean the whitehouse isn't really a man-on-man porn site catering to the military trade?
It's part of the reason my blog about Hawaii politics is hosted at my domain poinography!
Clever
Apparently, 4020 of us have mistyped /. today, though I went there on purpose today after accidentally going there a couple days ago.
Thats exactly what metanet is
How about an Open Virtual Anonymous LAN. You could you call it OVAL. Eh?!
Nice Marmot
"All right, this place must be hot. They don't need a big ad, or even correct spelling."
Ok... so it's not quite a URL...
Reading my usual comics, I accidentally went to http://www.dilber.com one day, (warning: ad for an "Amateurs" site...).
Careful what you type at work!
"Oops! You probably meant to type this domain instead, here's a link. BTW, here are some ads."
Who could get mad about that?
>> "Oops! You probably meant to type this domain instead, here's a link. BTW, here are some ads." Who could get mad about that?
That sounds like 'Clippit'
"You look like you're surfing for Donkey Porn. Would you like some help?"
http://request-header.info
http://tor.eff.org/index.html
Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and more. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.
And Freenet.. which I was never able to make any practical use from.
The trick is having a trusted relationship with anonymous strangers. If all you know is what you see in his posts, how do you know he is trustworthy?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
There have always been internets. An internet is simply several LANs connected via IP routers. Somewhere along the line one big huge internet formed that we refer to as the Internet (notice the capitalization). Today other internets are usually referred to as "intranets".
They are called "intranets", not "internets". It's only you who called them "internets".
Internet was always used to refer to a global system of computers interconnected via TCP/IP. That's why it was always capitalized. As people started using it in a common language, it was converted from "Internet" to "internet".
If you have an Internet-like network which is not part of the global Internet, then you've got yourself an "intranet".
There were NEVER mulitple "Internets".
I had a friend who used to work for MCI at that time and she told me that MCI made a lot of money off that "1-800-Operater" number and didn't spend a penny to advertise it. AT&T eventually changed the number to something like 1-800-CallATT figuring that would be harder to misspell.