Some Websites Are Not What You Think
  By Randy Benjamin

A while back I had a very embarrassing thing happen to me. I’d written an article called “There’s More To The Internet Than Email” and it was published by several newspapers and magazines. The article was geared towards senior citizens who primarily use the Internet to keep in touch with friends and relatives by email. While this is a wonderful use for the Net, it’s just one of hundreds of things they could be doing.

In the article, I mentioned government websites where seniors could learn of changes affecting their tax and retirement benefits. I provided links to game sites where they could play online games against a computer or with players from around the world. I wrote about websites where they could download free utility programs that would help to keep their computers in top shape. And of course, I mentioned websites where they could find free anti-virus and spyware software.
All of this was fine and dandy and I’m sure the articles contained useful information that seniors everywhere could use. What caused my embarrassment was an email I received from a reader complaining about one of the websites I’d mentioned. I always double check the links I’m writing about before I send in my finished manuscript. It’s just too easy to misspell a web address or discover too late that a link is no longer valid. While the article is still on my word processor all I have to do is click on a link to check it out.

The site the reader was complaining about was one I’d visited numerous times and one I’d always enjoyed listening to. I say “listening” because this website contains dozens of old-time radio shows organized by the date they were first broadcast. You just needed to click on the link and the show would play over your computer’s speakers. Now I’m way too young (60) to have heard these shows when they were originally broadcast, but when I discovered them on the Net some 50 years later, I became a fan for life. The website in question is dedicated to an early radio sitcom called, The Shadow. Orson Welles played the first Shadow in 1936.

The complaining email stated, “I went to the website mentioned in your article and found it to be…quite racy, especially towards the end.” As I read that email I couldn’t for the life of me understand what they were talking about. I’d visited this website dozens of times and there was certainly nothing “racy” about it. But it was only a click away so I thought I’d better check it out before answering them.

Was I ever shocked! They were actually being quite kind in calling it- racy. Pornographic was more like it. At first, I was embarrassed and a little confused. But after reading a little farther I became angry. What had happened to one of my favorite websites? It was still the home of “The Shadow” radio shows when I wrote this article. But somehow in the month or so between my writing it and its getting published, it had changed. After several hours of scouring the Internet for answers, I think I’ve finally figured out what happened.

You can use just about anything on the Internet as a domain name as long as it’s not already registered. My website is www.randybenjamin.com. I pay $9 a year to register this domain name. As long as I pay the yearly registry fee no one else can use it. Apparently, the previous owner of the website in question failed to renew the domain name. Actually, domain names are not owned, they are leased. And if you fail to renew this lease within the allotted time the name goes on the market again and anyone with $9 can register it. Once this happens, it belongs to the new owner until they too, fail to renew it. The scary thing is…they can change the content of the website to anything they wish.

In many cases, the intent of the new owner is to sell the name back to the original owner at a huge profit. In the domain name industry, this is referred to as Porn-napping. This is a common problem. The United Nations, U.S. Department of Education, and even the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra have all had to deal with it.

Some domain names, mainly those of large corporations are automatically protected. IBM, Coca Cola, RCA, etc., were never available to private parties. Any name that is a registered trademark falls under this category. Entertainers and corporations often have problems with people using domain names that are similar in spelling to their own. Unscrupulous people purchase these names knowing that they will get a lot of “hits” from people who misspelled the domain they were actually wanting to go to.

There have also been problems with porn sites using domain names that you wouldn’t expect to be a porn site. One of the most infamous happened in 1997 when a porn site operator leased “www.Whitehouse.com” and used it as his domain name. Of course, every time someone searched for, The Whitehouse, along with the expected government websites his Whitehouse porn site popped up. The actual government website is www.whitehouse.org not .com. This is a very common trick used by pornographers.

It’s possible to add filters to block out these sites but it seems like the offending websites find ways to get around these filters almost as fast as you can block them. As for now, it looks as if we are just going to have to live with the bad as well as the good. So if you log onto a website and it’s not what you thought it was going to be…there’s a pretty good chance that one of the above scenarios has happened.

You can reach me at my website www.randybenjamin.com. You may not find it all that interesting but I promise you, it won’t be “X” rated.
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