Picture this: you go online to see if a specific domain name is available; you use what is supposed to be a reputable site on the web; when you come back later someone has grabbed the domain name you were searching for (by the way it was shown as available when you searched); and, is holding it for re-sale.
Seems far fetched? Well eWeek has a story on their site this week:
Opinion: Whois Hijacking My Domain Research?
Leave it to the domain-squatting industry to come up with a way
to jump claims.Slide Show: Hijack: Who's Advertising on My Researched Site?
Why should you care? This is another attempt to use the web to and computers in a surreptitious way. Just when you thought web intermediaries were trustworthy… sigh…
Mark, does this sound familiar??
We were creating a site for a conference, searched the domain name, it was free, and the next day tried to purchase it but it was gone….Hmmm
I noticed this problem was rampant when I was working frequently with foreign law materials. For example, some industrious person would attempt to post legislation from Burundi, and a month later it was an online casino. Ever since then, I've been recommending to everyone that if they find a valuable website that could be vulnerable to being lost, submit it to the internet archives:
http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters#crawl_site
The historical constitutions of Afghanistan are still on there, thankfully – long after the site was taken down.
Since when are web intermediaries trustworthy? :P