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."
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
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.
And put an extra 'o' in:
www.gooogle.com - same result
Is there a plug-in to have whatever you type spellchecked or suggested, something like Google Suggest.
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?
This is how I found out about slashdong.org
That would make me the grandparent, for a website that I typed by accident, 35 hits or so a day is 'a lot' in my little tiny world opinion :-)
Actually, you are totally right, I did try to research prior to posting, but couldn't remember the link, so I more or less tried to make it sound 'bigger' than it really was. I think I lied.
Apologies.
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
Very interesting idea, but is it possible to use the same technology to create a virtual LAN, just for my friends? I'm not so sure that I trust all these anonymous people to be honest, and not wreak havoc. A virtual LAN to my friends though would be a big plus (and a very bad dream for the record industry), next to the real internet of course.
How about "ISP is the company you pay your Internet bill to"?
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
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.
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).
This isn't a misspelling, but I wonder about the website ©.com. I didn't even know you could register something like that.
/. stripped the symbol out of the link. You'll have to copy-paste the URL, or type it yourself.
Hope it shows up correctly on your screen, if not it's copyright symbol dot com.
AFTER PREVIEW: looks like the text shows up fine, but
Fuck it
However, the next month the domain-snatcher made a mistake by putting up a text version of my real page, with all links stripped except for three referrals at the bottom. At this point I was able to successfully petition my registrar to return control of the domain to me since he was clearly violating my copyright on my site's text and layout.
As it turns out he was doing this to many people. From an email from the registrar:
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
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
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.