Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Typo Millionaires

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the slsshdot-and-slashdit dept.

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."

4 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. slashdot by digitalchinky · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:An anonymous, underground internet? by owlstead · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Google are kings at this by kd5ujz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Try www.466453.com
    This is Google spelled out on a touch tone phone.

    --
    -William
    God is everything science has yet to explain.
  4. Re:LAN by owlstead · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.