{"id":152,"date":"2005-12-18T01:05:02","date_gmt":"2005-12-17T14:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=152"},"modified":"2005-12-18T01:08:24","modified_gmt":"2005-12-17T14:08:24","slug":"striking-back-against-domain-squatters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2005\/12\/18\/striking-back-against-domain-squatters\/","title":{"rendered":"Striking Back against Domain Squatters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chris over at <a href=\"http:\/\/tis.goringe.net\/\">Things I&#8217;ve Seen<\/a> reports an <a href=\"http:\/\/tis.goringe.net\/2005\/12\/16\/naughty-odd\/\">interesting development<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A typo in my very own blogroll linked to a non-existent domain. Some nasty person created a domain to match the broken link, and put a site there which intermittently advertises porn and other times offers a more standard\/less prurient domain-squatting search page. Needless to say, I strongly recommend the corrected link to <a href=\"http:\/\/girtby.net\">girtby.net<\/a> rather than this dodgy domain.<\/p>\n<p>I pondered how it came to be that the nasty person decided that this was a good domain name to use.<\/p>\n<p>From least likely to most likely, here are my suggestions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They used an random eight character string.<\/li>\n<li>They say girtby.net and guessed what common typos would be.\n<div class=\"aside\">I consider this unlikely, because I tried other variations, including the far more likely replacing .net with .com, without finding any other domains.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>They collected data from DNS lookups (either from one of the top-level domains, one of the intermediate domains, or just from traffic passing through), and found this to be a common error.\n<div class=\"aside\">I consider this unlikely, because I doubt <em>that<\/em> many people have clicked on the (unannotated) blogroll link. OddThinking doesn&#8217;t get <em>that<\/em> much traffic&#8230; yet.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>They crawled the web, and found OddThinking with an anchor tag to a non-existent domain.\n<div class=\"aside\">Cool! OddThinking is big enough to be targeted by nasty people! I&#8217;m doing something right!<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Could that last method truly be the technique that they used? I&#8217;ve got an idea for an experiment to find out.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine if every page of your web-site had a link to a static, gibberish, non-existent domain. Suppose it was in, say, blue-on-blue so no-one would notice it, except a crawling bot.<\/p>\n<p>If the gibberish domain was to suddenly be registered by a squatter page, that&#8217;d be good evidence.<\/p>\n<p>(It doesn&#8217;t prove it though &#8211; perhaps they sniffed the DNS lookups when bots like Google tried to follow the link?)<\/p>\n<p>If it <em>was<\/em> the case that it was detected by crawlers, the next thing to do would be to create a WordPress plugin that did this automatically, changing the broken link as soon as the domain is created. I am sure domain squatters get their domains cheaply, but it can&#8217;t be <em>free<\/em>. If a few web-sites did this (especially in a co-ordinated manner), would it achieve an effective Denial of Service on domain squatters?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Could we stage a cheap Denial of Service against nasty people?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32,23,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-oddthinking","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-thoughts-from-the-shower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}