Ordinary Nothing

I have a couple of domains, the main one is the one holding this blog, ordinarynothing.org . In the last few days all of them got an email message, sent to info@ of the domain. This is the one sent for this blog’s domain:

LISTING: ORDINARY NOTHING – Usually I use services like Dictionary.com, since they collect definitions from a large number of dictionaries, increasing the odds of finding the right word. http://www.ordinarynothing.org

Could you please update the ORDINARYNOTHING.ORG directory listing by Thursday so we can continue to list you, if you don’t mind? There is no charge to update your listing. Simply go to:

http://www-goto.com/update.cfm?[removed by me]

Thanks.

To unsubscribe: http://www-goto.com/cancel.cfm? [parameters removed by me]

Media LLC, 1158 26th St. #528, Santa Monica, CA 90403 USA

My first thought was that this is some very odd spam message. But the pattern, it being sent to several domains, to the same address, and that’s that, seemed odd. So I decided to check a bit more.

The sender, and the reply-to addresses, as the links in the message body, where to the www-goto.com domain. I went in to take a look. The first thing that happened, I get prompted to add them to my favourites/bookmarks. And that’s a big warning sign, people. The only sites that try to make you bookmark them without requesting, are usually questionable porn sites and the like. Well behaved sites don’t do that. Especially considering that in their case this was in a script that always loads with the main page, so even someone who actually wants to use their site, may grow too tired of this and leave.

The site itself is a search engine. There’s a big logo saying “World’s Biggest”, a click on which takes you to the exact same page, but on the websbiggest.com domain… And there are various links on it, all to the dirs.org domain, which’s home page gets you to… you guessed right, the same search engine page. And worldbiggest.com domain does the same.

But that’s alright. Serious companies do it all the time, holding several totally different domain names that all point to the exact same place. No, wait, they don’t… Hmm…

A bit more digging, and these fellows claim to have the world’s biggest search engine because they license the entire whois database (That’s the list of all registered domain names, and the contact information of the people registering them), and search all of the sites from there. Now, ignore for a moment the fact that this doesn’t by itself make them biggest, and certainly not best. No, what’s more important is that they used the whois information to spam me. It’s not allowed to use whois information for things other than contacting domain owners for technical problems, or for general verification of data. Certainly not to spam people. And here they were allowed to license the whole thing, and are sending everyone email messages encouraging them to list themselves in their directory. That’s called spamming.

And yes, I think I’ll find out who am I supposed to complain to, and do that. This is not a legitimate usage of the whois info.

And the funniest thing, they claim that one of their advantages is that their crawler bot can extract information from the site in order to figure out what the site is about, and keep the important data. Apparently, that bot software is so sophisticated that it decided the thing that best describes this blog, and the thing that need to be kept as a description of it, is that first paragraph they sent me on the mail, from an old post of mine. Because, hey, this blog is totally and completely all about how I use dictionary.com, of course. Not.

Which makes them sleazy, criminal, and totally incompetent. But apart from that I’m sure they provide a really nice service.

May 2nd, 2005 at 13:06 EET | Categories: Legal, Web | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.