Are your links growing lurid?

Social justice news
April 2002

Are your links growing lurid?
Catholic Peace Fellowship makes timely revival
Colombian Bishops issue 10-point plan for peace
CRS responds to Afghanistan earthquake
Did reform or economy lighten the load on states' welfare rolls?
Foreign aid boost makes a commendable step toward reducing global want
USCCB issues statement on Middle East violence
USCCB takes a leap into the future
Will bishops face felony charges because of clergy sex abuses?

Are your links growing lurid?
Managers of social-justice and religious websites might want to think twice before letting "old" domain names expire these days. A lapse of even just a few seconds in registration could mean finding their old or otherwise inactive identities reappearing in new web guises they never intended or imagined. Internet porn merchants have been gobbling up expired domain names—any domain names—and directing visitors to hardcore pornography.

The number of domain names expiring—intentionally or accidentally—is at an all-time high, rising from 750,000 per month in August 2001 to more than 2,250,000 per month in December 2001. A new class of internet entrepreurneur has been capitalizing on the phenomeon. They're called traffic aggregators, and they buy up expired domains in large bulk purchases then redirect corresponding Web traffic to other sites, primarily porn and gambling venues. To add insult to injury, many web aggregators will allow lapsed domain holders to recover their good name—but only at a substantially higher cost than the $20 to $40 it would have cost them to retain their domains in the first place.

For folks unlucky enough to be responsible for website maintenance, this trend means they must remember to renew all their domain names in a timely manner. Missing a re-registration deadline could mean losing a domain name permanently and, worse, having their internet identities used to peddle porn. Even more daunting for web executives, they will have to monitor all their sites' external links—which can number in the thousands—to ensure that none has changed hands and now features undesirable content. In the last few months here at Salt of the Earth, links from articles that were months or years old directed unsuspecting visitors to a European porn site.

Organizations as varied as the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and the Dutch government have seen their expired domain names snapped up by traffic aggregators and redirected to porn sites. Others, including the United Nations and the U.S. Department of Education, have received irate e-mails from online customers complaining about undetected links to porn sites.

The problem has gotten serious enough that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently issued a proposal to create a 30-day waiting period before expiring domain names can be resold. ICANN's policy paper says that in recent months it has seen "a rising tide'' of complaints related to domain names inadvertently changing ownership.

Marketers of link-checking software such as LinkScan are updating their offerings with the ability to check links for adult content. "We just started seeing this trend in the last three months,'' says Michael Weider, chairman of Watchfire, which sells a Web site quality-assessment tool called WebXM that identifies unintentional links to adult content. He says some companies have as many as 200 of these potentially embarrassing URLs buried within their content.

Most network executives "have no clue'' about this problem, Weider told Network World Fusion News. "Any major site that has a significant number of external links has got a couple'' of these URLs."

The identification and purchase of expired domain names has gotten easier in the last year, thanks to the availability of automated services that track and purchase expiring names. These services, from companies such as SnapNames, Dotster and Enom, are increasingly used by traffic aggregators. Other companies, such as Exody.com, LocalWhois.com and Domains bot.com, provide traffic aggregators with lists of soon-to-expire names.

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