Slashdot Mirror
Porn-Jacking Crackdown
The FTC today announced a crackdown on pornjacking, errr, pagejacking. Apparently these smooth operators have been copying other sites wholesale in order to get hits on certain keyword combinations - search engine fodder. And then of course when you click through from the search engine, you are whisked away with Javascript into porn land, never to return... It seems that the actual offenders were Australian so international cooperation was required. Hmmm, here's a couple of readers submitting a New York Times story too, it's a little more in-depth.
We can probably assume there were assorted copyright violations involved; but when does this rise to the level of consumer fraud? Using dictionaries to get search engine hits is a stupid practice, one that the search engines are right to minimize, but if it starts being regarded as some sort of legally-actionable fraud, a lot of people are going to be in trouble - and there's a lot of potential side-effects (see the various lawsuits that have been filed about people using certain keywords in their META tags, such as Playboy suing a former Playmate who used "Playmate" in her tags: Playboy lost). Where's the line? -- michael
Honestly, did anyone read the FTC's summary? These bastards disabled the back/forward buttons on the browser with Javascript so people would be barraged with pr0n. Imagine if you unsuspectingly did this at work and were fired for it. Would you be crying "foul" then?
There are a lot of reasons to be mad at the government. We don't need to manufacture any.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I thnik the best solution to that is having options in the browsers to counter that. For example if, by default the browser wounldn't allow 'redirect', 'pop a new window', 'disable-back' it would be a lot simpler. Actually, just a warning on redirects would be nice. I find that browsers (or at least netscape, I don't use ie) have way too many features for their own good. Those features are most of the times used against you any way. 90% of the pop-up windows I have are to show me some ads I don't care about.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
This seems just another political tactic by Washington to pretend like they actually care about the safety of people's privacy. (Of course, in reality the Feds seem to not want us to have any privacy online.)
If you want to avoid the search engine "attacks" then just use Google!
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Don't we already have federal and state laws against unauthorized hacking and cracking and malicious unauthorized use of other people's computers? When did I ever authorize any bozo to disable my 'back' and 'exit' buttons? Where's the law when I need it? Book 'em.
I work for a website and we've had very bad people use frames to:
a) preserve their URL in the address box.
b) use our content from our servers!
c) pop up some banner ads from their servers in independent windows so to generate revenue for them while essentially stealing all our work.
Needless to say, our lawyers were on them like a pack of hungry wolves. It was kinda fun to watch results.
http://www.google.com/linux?q=porn&num=10
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
One thing that might help is a redirection permission meta tag. If it's not present in the original domain, redirection is not allowed, and alta vista keeps the older link.
The idea of an open source browser here is interesting because it makes our acceptance of the commercialization of the internet voluntary to some degree. If something really irritating like pop-ups from hell (or blink tags) is invented Mozilla is patched to ignore it by default. More people use Mozilla, bad advertising goes away from lack of people who can see it.
Why should the courts/governments/police get involved? Cause it's fraud. Just because no one is out money doesn't mean they're not harmed. Imagine...
You call your dear mother long distance with one of those new-fangled prepaid thingies. However, instead of your mother answering, it's Debbie in Duluth making a living as a phone-whore. Good thing you didn't have it on speaker phone!
Or, your online TV guide lists "Dumbo" showing at 7:00. It's a great movie for kids, so you let your six year old watch it. At 6:59 you go to the back yard to do yard work. At 7:40 you return to find out that your previously innocent child has been watching hardcore porn for the best part of an hour because someone jacked the online TV listings.
Or, you walk into a building that house "First National Bank" above the door. It's a large marble building like banks should be. But once inside it turns out to be a Mustang Ranch franchise. Desperate to uphold your reputation in the community you turn to leave only to find that the door doesn't have a handle on this side.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Personally I just hope all these victimized sites don't try any pagejacking of their own to get back at the porns sites. Few things would piss me off more than having a legitmate site pop up when im trying to get my daily porn fix :)
I'm printing out these articles so I can defend myself when I get caught at work.
"Its not mine, baby. Thats not my thing!"
-Austin Powers
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Since Slashdot is going public they need to increase the hits anyway they can.
:P
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Why not just force all porn sites to use .xxx domains? Countries like the US, britain, etc could do that without any censorship. Adults could block out the kiddywinks and there would be no problem with adults getting what they want.
This could easily be added to the Salon article about Columbine, as another example of how media helps spread and immmortalize myths. These people apparently did nothing but copy some popular pages, submitted them to Altavista for indexing, then swapped in their normal pages after they had secured their place in the index. Tacky, probably a copyright infringement, but pretty low-tech.
But "pagejacking" makes it sound all that much more dramatic. Throw in a weepy story about how teenagers could accidentally exposed to naughty advertising, and it's national news. And if the offending sites "incapacitated their computers so they couldn't escape," (known to the rest of us as those annoying page-exit popups) it sounds all that much more frightening.
Sounds to me like just another case of the FCC looking for ways to expand their jusridiction.
The point is that it displayed exactly what you were looking for. After going to the site, you would just see something that says "Click here to find what you were searching for" and then be redirected to a pr0n site or shady looking online auction.
Pardon me if I don't see how deceptive advertising, fraud and entrapment are rights. (Posing as offering different content, then forcing people to look at what *YOU* want them to look at? Even if these people were selling tofu it would be a problem!)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I believe the way we got the page pulled was by writing to abuse and webmaster @ the offending domain and demanding that they stop illegally using our trademark!
Now we face a different kind of web page piracy: An e-commerce site has registered the
Don't knock one of my favorite fantasies :-)
the gov is going to try to control what your broswer does. Oh wait they already do.,....
http://www. nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/biztech/articles/23 fraud.html
-S. Louie
"I may be Love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
--
--
"Insert witty quote here."