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Nationwide Domain Name/Yard Sign Conspiracy
robertjmoore writes "Everywhere I go lately, I see these lawn signs that say "Single?" and then give a URL with my town's name in it. Being a huge business intelligence geek with too much time on my hands, I decided to track down who was behind them and wound up uncovering ten thousand domain names, a massively coordinated and well-funded guerilla marketing machine, and the $45 Million revenue business hiding behind it all. Hot off the presses, these are my findings."
Those are all over SE PA. West Chester in particular.
Oliver Stone? /Not single but still desperate for attention
Amazing Randi?
Da Po Lice?
Agents Scully and Mulder?
yes, yes, yes, I'm sure you uncovered a conspiracy of epic proportions behind the dating sites, but this is /. and only one thing matters....
did you get a date?
why yes, I am new round here.. how did you know?
Do the yard signs read your thoughts and beam them to a satellite? Are they emitting high levels of gamma radiation? Are the dating sites linked to Al Qaeda?
Even singles sites are lonely enough to pay for some action... I thought I was the only one willing to pay out $100 for head...
--
Has anyone seriously got a date from one of these sites ? It seems Mr. Moore overlooked a vey obvious question in his research.
This is extremely fascinating. I'm not quite sure how it becomes news for nerds. But fascinating none the less.
Star Pirates
StayOffOfMyLawn.com
Have gnu, will travel.
I think you missed the point. You were suppose to go to the URL to get a date NOT research the registration.
I was going to bitch about the submitter advertising his company in the summary but after reading the article, I say that he has earned it. I didn't much care about this company but the whole detective process was quite fascinating.
Cheers
First, this guy gets my "Too Much Time On Your Hands" award for the week.
Second, his methodical and unceasing pursuit really makes me hope he has his laptop stolen one day-- I'm sure the tale of how he tracks down the thief and recovers the laptop will certainly rival the P-P-Powerbook story in terms of entertainment value.
McCain?
Now that we know who is behind putting up all these signs, apparently without permission, won't there be some huge fines coming up?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
the low percentage of signs advertising for asians.
Mmmm, asian women. You can eat a lot because you never fill up!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
These signs appear in my neighborhood about once a week in the wee hours of Monday morning. I usually remove about 10 of these signs from my neighborhood by 8:30 am. To date I have disposed of about 250 yard signs. It is illegal to post the yard signs on my property and my fellow home owners property without our permission. Thanks to your research our lawyers will be able to send letters to the proper people now.
Yeah, and I have seen the same picture come up with different names/ages printer under them... pretty safe to guess that they aren't from your town.
Awesome topic. I see those signs everywhere around my town as well. I live in a Minneapolis suburb. They're probably everywhere around the US in semi-major cities/suburbs.
I know I'm slightly off-topic here, but I really have to wonder about timothy's choice of department for this article. It is:
from the tragically-yes-I'm-single dept.
Now, I am not trashing people who are in relationships or who are married or anything else. Please do not take my response that way. But my question is - why is it so "tragic" these days if someone is single? It seems as if everybody spends much of their waking time thinking about whether or not they have a date Friday night and the never do something with their lives. I personally have a number of a friends (girls tend to be the worst offenders) that gain their self-esteem from whether or not they are in a relationship. That seems horrible to me (and a really crummy way to live).
I don't know...mini-rant I suppose. I guess I just don't see what the big deal is about being single. Yeah, it *can* be lonely at times. But even people in relationships can be lonely. (On the flip side, I do know singles who can be alone, but their not lonely.) Being single offers so many advantages - your time is yours, your money is yours, you aren't tied down, and single people (especially ones who are content with that) tend to adventure a lot more.
Why being single = a bad thing, I don't think I'll totally understand.
Any response back from anybody here on Slashdot?
I've been wondering the exact same things, but been too apathetic and lazy to do the work.
This is genuinely relevant to my interests, and made my day better.
If you hate them as much as I do, visit this site for tips and contact your local code enforcement office.
Legally, they are no different from litter. If you don't have a permit to leave something in a public place, it's nothing but trash. That said, the neanderthal assholes who post them might not be aware of that* and almost certainly won't be happy if they catch you taking them down, legally right or not, so be careful when picking up trash.
* and I'm sure the assholes who SELL the signs never mention it, either.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Is my understanding correct that all you want for Christmas is a PSP? (A PSP? A PSP?)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Nice prank.
What?
I had actually seen a few of these in my local area, thanks for clearing up who they belong to anyway.
The McCain-Palin signs are mostly gone, the Obama signs are mostly gone as well as of today. All of a sudden I'm seeing Fair Tax signs pop up.
The amusing signs on my drive to work outside a (presumably) very right wing house expounding me to not vote for Obama as he kills babies (eg supports abortion) were still there this morning, though.
And erm, is it a slow news day?
In the roads of NC we are starting to see more and more of these signs. Seems like you just can't get away from the Net
http://mc.jamonek.com - Minecraft Signature Generator
Next, can you figure out what scam artist posted all of those "Real Estate Investor Seeks Apprentice 20k Per Month" signs last year? All the signs used to be identical, but they now show things like "Buy Foreclosed Houses" instead.
But it is just another form of spam marketing. And as the article notes, the 'big national' dating sites are of little use if there are only one or two members within 200 miles of where you live.
That said, maybe /. should start a dating site. :P
Let's think this through:
1. Anyone who wants to get more Obama can go to news.google.com and read through several dozen international news sources, as well as the Huffington Post and Fox "News", and get more than enough of the regular headlines.
2. Slashdot, as a news aggregator, is finding slim pickins on the tech side, as Obamamania sucks the oxygen out of every other news story. Cool for us political wonks, not so cool for CowboyNeal & co.
3. This really is a nationwide conspiracy. Every tiny suburb and exurb of Dallas is frequently spammed by these guys. I thought they were a local outfit, so it's very interesting to see the extent of their reach.
4. The way the guy investigated is cool, and I'm sorely tempted to upgrade my own DomainTools.com account to "paid" status, now that I know that it really works.
5. Last, but CERTAINLY not least, it's about a DATING SITE. Dating, as you may have heard, is part of the mating ritual of Homo Sapiens Solaris, aka "those of us who have emerged from our parents' basements". It involves meeting FEMALES, which is kind of an awesome concept when you think about it. Opportunities for +5 Funny moderations abound (deserved or not).
I think the "Together Dating" guerrilla marketing behemoth, with its sign spam, is reaching the same shallow end of the gene pool that buys enough v1@g@ra to keep our inboxes full of e-spam. Pretty sad. Especially when there's a free dating site that almost certainly generates better results. But I guess some folks think, if you don't pay for it, it's not worth anything. Hopefully, those folks won't be asking me for a date.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Has been around since long before the web- this is just their latest marketing technique. I'm actually a somewhat satisfied customer- turned out to be a great way for a geek to get a family, just faxed them my commute map and they introduced me to a gal who became my wife two years later. It helped greatly that her apartment was halfway home on my commute.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Great primary research and very entertaining. Reminds me of the p-p-p-p-power book scandal. Gotta wonder if he had a slow day(s) with his business to do this.
import system.cool.Sig;
Being a huge business intelligence geek
Are you sure it had nothing to do with you being a single geek?
DallasSingles.org, LasColinasSingles.org. Isn't it illegal to plop these signs on public land? I hate this crap.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I thought secret agents about various towns would go to these websites and put in their "special" information. Then they could get secure messages back and forth. If someone else used them, they just got some boiler plate thing. I thought the whole thing was a vast government project. Like those CIA numbers stations.
I'm disappointed to find out it's nothing more than spam for a "dating" site. Really kills my faith in conspiracy theories.
And the sign said long haired freaky people need not apply
So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why
He said you look like a fine upstanding young man, I think you'll do
So I took off my hat I said imagine that, huh, me working for you
woah!
Signs, signs, everywhere a sign
Blocking out the scenery breaking my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign
And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight
So I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house, Hey! what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in
If God was here, he'd tell you to your face, man you're some kinda sinner
Now, hey you Mister! can't you read, you got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat
You can't even watch, no you can't eat, you ain't suppose to be here
Sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside Uh!
And the sign said everybody welcome, come in, kneel down and pray
But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all,
I didn't have a penny to pay, so I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign
I said thank you Satan for thinking about me, I'm alive and doing fine
Excellent novel...I swear it reminded me of Snow Crash because of the immense detail.
There is some crazy detail in this story and I must give credit to the author. You deserve a shiny metal for an article that long and well written....and excellently researched
You might be the next Neal Stephenson of the spam novel world XD
There are several of these in my town, which is technically not even an incorporated town. I figured it was something local to the NY/NJ area. I had no idea it went further than that.
No wonder we're running out of IP4 addresses.
Single? SlashdotSingles.org
Are they the corrugated plastic ones with metal stands? Those make great target holders when you go to the range.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
What?! I hadn't realized the human race had officially speciated by operating system!
I enjoyed the read particularly because I've done similar witch hunts myself in the past and I think it would be beneficial for others to follow their nose similarly. I'm less interested in the entertainment from tracking a legitimate business however and more so in exposure of crime rings related to fraud, ID/CC theft, domain hijacking, etc. Those ones can be pretty vast in scale and very difficult to track down. Some of them put up impressive fronts too such as legitimate "ICANN Accredited" domain registrar services, etc. - but make no mistake, they're rotten to the core. If more people actively pursued and exposed these types of organizations perhaps we'd all be a little better off...
Wow, I did not know that existed. This is probably the first time I've learned something from a /. article in months.
Thanks!
Regarding number 4, don't waste money. netcraft.com and the manual pages for nmap and whois are all you need to do what he did.
there exists people who also talk about "crotchfruit" with derision when talking about children, and act confused as to why anyone would choose to have kids
well, people like that, and you who speak of pair bond formation in a mystified manner, are genuine oddballs
fact is, a society that doesn't form stable mating pairs and doesn't raise children is a dying society. all other observations on the subject matter fall secondary to this undeniable fact. being in a relationship with the opposite sex often sucks, and having children certainly sucks, but there is simply no other way to contribute to your society in the most fundamental, biological of ways
you don't have to form a pair bond with a member of the opposite sex, and you don't have to have children. both those choices are perfectly ok for you to take, and i have no problem with that choice
but don't pretend that singlehood or childlessness is somehow the default choice for human existence, and don't act mystified as to what drives people to do these things. pairing up and having children is called keeping humanity and civilization alive, and its pretty hardwired into our psychology and biology, for obvious reasons: keep homo sapiens alive
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... this reminds me of all the "I lost 60 pounds in 30 days. Ask me how" signs I used to see all over the place.
With 8-figure revenues, and $3k-$15k per customer, I'm not so sure.
As for the "shallow end" of the gene pool... this is a dating service. A rather expensive one, at that ($3k-$15k per customer). The customers have cash (making the assumption that therefore they have *some* good genes), and they have difficulty finding a match on their own (making the assumption that they don't have the best genes for reproductive success).
Seems to me that this service serves to increase the variability of good genes in the gene pool, since there are probably good traits that the most-likely-to-reproduce-successfully may be less likely to exhibit (or have the genes for).
Lot of assumptions here, and I don't beleive that genetics determine so much of our personalities, etc... just a thought on the genetic implications of matchmaking services like this. Not that it really has anything to do with your point.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
They are on public property. Am I free to take them? Can I cover them with my own promotional stickers?
He has liver damage?
Trolling is a art,
Given the RTFM, inquiring minds want to know.
...in Pooler, GA, a suburb of Savannah. (I was surprised to be sure; Pooler is more a loose federation of strip malls than it is a town, and I wasn't expecting to see anything like this that implies a communal identity.)
Am I and this guy the only ones who've seen this?
Too bad the parent can't be modded up to +6 Funny
I see the ads up every so often. They pay $1 per sign
I confirmed this when I brought one of the signs home and, er, um, NOTHING TO SEE HERE- MOVE ALONG.
I wholeheartedly agree. I found specially interesting the amount of information that a particular individual with dedication and $10 bucks can uncover.
I thought they were a local outfit, so it's very interesting to see the extent of their reach.
/. article that discusses investigations into your naivety.
You seriously thought it was local, and honestly didn't expect that they were simply working out where you were and putting that name in? If it's such a slow news period, then I patiently await the next
.. I didn't believe him when he told me he paid ~$2500 for this.. He tried to get his money back after he realized that he wasn't getting any dates, with no luck. A fool and his money are soon parted my friends.
Single? SlashdotSingles.org
Slashdot.org works just fine.
paintball
OK Cupid is also free and has a lot of personality tests to find people who think like you. I met my wife through that site.
Work Safe Porn
Those signs cost about $0.50 each to print.
Pull them up. You will increase their costs. Every little bit counts!
You seriously thought it was local, and honestly didn't expect that they were simply working out where you were and putting that name in?
One of the other posters pointed out that it's not just city names, it's neighborhood names too. Like "LasColinasSingles", "LakeHighlandsSingles", and "OakCliffSingles". Those wouldn't show up in many city name databases -- you need eyes on the ground to know those names, and more importantly, where to stick the signs.
My only disappointment in the article is that he didn't figure out where the army of locally-knowledgeable sign-planters is coming from.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I'm 54 and my sweet young girlfriend is 51, and we have no plans to marry, so we are considered "single" in the legal sense, which makes no sense at all since we've been committed to each other for the last 7 years.
The org mentioned below wants to make things "equal" with those who have legal rights simply because they marry.
The Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP) is a national nonprofit organization advocating for equality and fairness for unmarried people, including people who are single, who choose not to marry, cannot marry, or live together before marriage.
I wonder if these are the same people sending me "Christian singles" spam. I always think, sure, I'll fuck and dump your naive little Christian girls...
While this is a lengthy article it is definitely worth the read.
And yes I can confirm these signs are around I95 exits for years.
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
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If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Get it down on how it is really down.
Get into Leykis 101 class idiots who pay for dates.
His rule:
1: Never pay more than 40 dollars per date, if you can make it 0 is the best.
2: Never date single mothers.
3: Never get a girlfriend.
More on blowmeuptom.com
stupid losers who pay for women.
I saw an ad like this ONLINE only ONCE for Twin Falls, Idaho.. and instantly came to the conclusion that domains were listed for tons and tons of cities... And you get paid to not figure it out till the second sign?! :x
Defective Logic
http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/crazyfox/crazyfox.php
Excellent research! These (and other) signs are illegal in 99% of our cities and towns. See http://www.causs.org/ CAUSS.org. CAUSS is a nationwide organization of citizens and code enforcement officers who remove illegal signs in their neighborhoods. CAUSS maintains national and state-based forums that are fairly active. There is quite a bit of research on illegal singles signs there - search for "single" and "dating". Bottom line: help Code Enforcement remove illegal signs in your city!
Christ, buy a six pack and get a hooker!
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
Hopefully, those folks won't be asking me for a date.
I wouldn't worry about it, dude.
Every thing about this company is trivial and their main source of their income is directly related to the illegal sign placements. If they had to pay for posting of said signs, then they would function at a normal level. As the article mentions, everything else is trivial except for the illegal advertising.
If you're willing to do illegal things and that has low probability of being prosecuted, then you can make lots and lots of money.
Replace your company staff with illegal workers and thousands of dollars saved. Just multiply it by eliminating your competitors and you're into huge numbers.