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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."
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.
I work for a company that exploits mistyped URLs.
From our business, we found that a dial up user does an average of 4 bad requests a month and a broadband user an average of 10.
Iraq: war to save the U
slsahdot.org
They might have been better of using IPv6. Seeing they're tunneling it over IPv4 anyway, this would rid them of all addressing problems.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
It's true, I teach primarily for Microsoft Office. The module that we run that people have more trouble with than anything else is the internet, simply because of the amount of acronyms/jargon that is used. One question asks them to find out some information about three different ISPs. Invariably on their first attempt they come up with Google, Yahoo and AOL. It takes some of the older students weeks to learn the difference between ISP and search engine.
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.
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
The best example of this is when AT&T started a service at 1-800-OPERATOR, MCI registered 1-800-OPERATER and got a fair chunk of their buisness.
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.
Google owns that domain because of their search-by-number (T9 equivilent) service for mobile phones. It's easier to enter 466453 on a mobile phone than it is to enter "google".