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

This affects *my* rights?

[Wakko Warner]

So I no longer have the right to steal others' content and redirect their potential, unwitting users to my filthy porn sites. Boo hoo. Cry me a river. How can this be misconstrued as a *bad* thing?

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

That's something for browsers

[jmv]

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.

All Political

[Maul]

There is absolutely no way they'll be able to effectively enforce this. Not only is it a violation of free speech, but it is also impossible to stop every single pr0n dealer in the world from using their Javascript.

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!

Re:This affects *my* rights?

[xHost]

Doesn't matter, the Internet is the most extreme form of democracy and free speech there is. Nobody, neither any organization should be placing laws or controlling content.

And its not like trying to avoid an oncoming truck, most search engines post the URL at the bottom of of the summary and usually if you use your brain you can tell if its a porn site or not (www.porn4free.com/cx0100/2000.html or something .. gee, i wonder if its a porn site ? : P)

And if you do happen upon it accidentally, you can just easily kill netscape.

In windows use ctrl-alt-del, click on Netscape, then [End Task]. Or in Linux, the 'killall -9 netscape' will do.

Wha?

[sporty]

(humour) So let me get this straight, it's a bad thing when porn sites imitate regular sites, but why is it when I ask for porn, I get this...

http://www.google.com/linux?q=porn&num=10 [google.com]

Technological solutions are better

[jflynn]

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.

Stupid Analogies

[Arandir]

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.

..

[Ater]

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 :)

Re:That's something for browsers

[PigleT]

You might be surprised to know about some of the redirection warnings you can set in Tools / Internet Options / Advanced - if you're using IE5 ;8]

Just a thought...

Re:That's something for browsers

[Awel]

On the other hand, I find that these days I do all my browsing horizontally rather than vertically: rather than click on a link straight to load it into the same page (thus losing whatever I was reading at the time) I`ll right-click (in Windows) or middle-click (in Linux) to open it in a new window, and continue to read the referring page as well as the new one. Now that I`ve discovered this facility, I certainly wouldn`t want it disabled!

"I was just looking for a open source debugger!"

[GoofyBoy]

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

Hmmm.

[GoofyBoy]

Since Slashdot is going public they need to increase the hits anyway they can.

:P

Re:That's something for browsers

[PigleT]

The problem we have with that is that, increasingly, I've seen sites who use a bit of javascript to open the link in a new window - eg http://www.antionline.com/ [antionline.com]. The problem is that if you open the javascript in a new window, you get a window with a javascript "location", and no content.
Otherwise, definitely, it should be possible (and probably encouraged) to use both open-in-new and use of the Back button.

So actually, disabling javascript might still be a good thing - it's one of those time-to-decide moments as to whether you javascript your 'open in new window' links or not.

(FWIW I hate these 'return to top of page' or 'back to index.html' links on redundancy grounds alone - if your browser doesn't do ctrl+home or some equivalent, get a new one!)

See the Salon article.....

[Bob-K]

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.

"Your rights online??"

[Daniel]

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

This happened to me

[Weasel Boy]

A popular informational .org website I am affiliated with had this happen to it. This site is not a major site, but gets perhaps 150,000 hits/year on its homepage. We were alerted by a reader that an Australian porn site had reproduced the homepage in its entirety at the bottom of theirs. It should without saying that our site has nothing whatsoever to do with "adult entertainment".

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 .com version of our domain, clearly in an attempt to capture the people who search for our .org site. I guess it's time to raise the trademark club again. It'll be interesting to see if NSI rolls over as readily for a penniless .org trademark holder as it does for a corporation. Stay tuned...

Re:Stupid Analogies

[SnakeStu]

I agree, those are stupid analogies.

"You call your dear mother long distance..."
...and you know her number so you aren't using a potentially misguided search facility.

"...your online TV guide lists..."
...what it knows, as provided by an authoritative source, which does not begin to compare to guessing based on keywords etc.

"...you turn to leave only to find that the door doesn't have a handle on this side..."
...or, more accurately, that you are using an optional device that turns you back around. Disable the device and you're free to leave. (In the case of porno sites, disable scripting support and then the script to open a new browser window won't fire off.)

Article moved to...

[slouie]

http://www. nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/biztech/articles/23 fraud.html [nytimes.com]


-S. Louie

You can stop popups with IE and Netscape too

[redled]

In IE, to stop popups, simply go to Tools>Options>Security. Then, click on the "restricted sites" icon. Click on the "custom level" button, and disable all the ActiveX and Javascript stuff. Click OK, then click on the "Sites.." button. Now, simply add any sites that have or are likely to have popup windows, like geocities, tripod and aol. I think Netscape has an option to do this too, but I'm not sure about the exact method to enable it.

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