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You are here: Home > Law > Copyrights > Typosquatting > Stumbling into the Dark Side Stumbling into the Dark Sidefrom Parry's book, The Parent's Guide to Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace Even when your children are trying to stay out of trouble and want to follow the safe-surfing rules, they might get into trouble by accident. Remember how I warned you that even if you trust your child you can't trust the Internet? This is what I was talking about. But there are many problems that occur as a result of how search engines index sites. Webmasters use keywords - and in some cases the first twenty-five to fifty words at the site - to help the search engines categorize a site. These special keywords and descriptions are written in a hidden code called "meta tags." Meta tags can be very helpful, since without them some sites might be indexed based on introductions like "Welcome to our site. We update it often and are happy to hear from you. Stop back often to see new articles and all our new features." This tells you nothing about the site, who runs it, or what information it contains, although this might be the first twenty-seven words found at the site and would otherwise be used to index the site by the spiders or bots. A good webmaster, to help index his site more accurately, might use "skateboards, sporting goods, sports, kids sports, games, athletics, outdoor sports" in his meta tags to tell the search engines that his site is about kids and skateboarding. Then, whenever you search for any of those words, his site will come up. Without meta tags, you wouldn't know that this site has information about skateboarding. Many websites make money from the sale of advertising at their sites. The sites with the most visitors can charge higher advertising rates. So they do whatever they can to make sure that they maximize the number of people who come to their site. To a website traffic auditor, a kid's visit to a site counts the same as an adult's visit. Traffic is traffic. Bait 'n Switch So how else can a website increase traffic? It can use popular search terms and popular topics (like Disney characters or "American Girl") in its descriptive meta tags. Try searching for the keywords "girls" or "toys" (typical searches when you are looking for girl-friendly sites) and you'll learn more about the pornography industry than you might be interested in knowing. They can also "hijack" a site by using special methods to have their fake site appear at the top of the search engine's list, before the real site. You may think that you're going to the site you searched for, but instead, you end up at an adult site. Even if they're not out to mislead you, some adult sites have "spicy girls" and "Bambi, the buxom blond bombshell" information at the site. If you searched for Spice Girls or Bambi, these sites might pop up when you wouldn't have expected them. That means that every time you search for something using the index of a search engine, you might find sexually explicit sites and other sites that you consider to be inappropriate for your children. An easy solution for these problems is to use a filtered search engine. These give only prescreened kid-appropriate search results. The most popular filtered kid-friendly search engines are Yahooligans! (www.yahooligans.com) and Ask Jeeves for Kids (http://www.ajkids.com/). Many of the other popular adult search engines also have a child-friendly option you can select when executing a search which filters the search results. What Can You Do About It? But just because the sites in directories are reviewed doesn't mean all directory topics are kid-friendly. So make sure you select a kid-friendly directory topic, such as homework helpers or teen sites, or some other child-appropriate topic. Otherwise you might find some sites that, although appropriate for their directory category, are inappropriate for children. Spelling Counts! Remember, the name of the game is site traffic when adult sites are concerned. So they can't rely just on keywords to direct traffic to their sites. How else can they increase traffic at a site? They can use a domain name that is the same as a very popular site, and misspell it-so when people who are trying to contact the real site make a mistake in typing or spelling, they end up at the adult site instead. (At least I think that's why they do this. Perhaps they just can't spell....) Since even our most tech-savvy kids sometimes make spelling or typing errors, it's likely that they would unexpectedly end up at one of these sites or others that have been designed to mislead people on the Net. What Can You Do About It? You should bookmark your children's favorite sites using your Web browser (or mark them as a "favorite" on AOL Then when they want to visit the site, they can just click on the bookmark without having to type its name. That way your children don't inadvertently end up in the wrong place because they mistyped or misspelled the domain name. It will speed their surfing, as well. Masquerading as a Famous Site: That "dot com" Thing We see it every day on television, read it in magazines and on bill-boards, and hear it on the radio. Everywhere we turn we are confronted with the same thing-something-or-other "dot com." Webmasters know this, too. So they use our limited understanding of how domain names work against us. Most of us have learned that if we are looking for an obvious brand or famous name site, we can add a "dot com" to it and most of the time we get there. But not all the time. Quick! How do you find the White House website, or NASA's website? (Don't cheat by looking ahead to the next paragraph.) You'll probably say (unless you cheated) "www.whitehouse.com" and "www.nasa.com." Wrong! Most government sites have a ".gov" ending (called a "zone"). Two of the most famous instances of someone using a famous name to gain traffic from people making mistakes in the ".com," ".gov," or ".org" are www.whitehouse.com (a pornography site that is still up) rather than www.whitehouse.gov (the real site for the White House in Washington, D.C.), and www.nasa.com (a pornography billboard site that was shut down in 1997) rather than www.nasa.gov (the official site for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). All domain names have to use a three-letter suffix ("TLD," which stands for top level domain, or "zone"), which indicates the type of organization or entity involved. The ".com" (pronounced "dot com") indicates a commercial organization site, rather than an Internet network (.net), international organization (.int), higher educational institution (.edu), not-for-profit organization (.org), military (.mil), or government (.gov) site. ".Com" is clearly the most popular zone, followed in popularity by ".edu" and ".org." In recent years other TLDs have been added, such as ".biz," ".info," and ".name" and more are expected. Websites from countries other than the United States may use a two-letter country code, rather than one of the three-letter zones. Sites without a country designation are assumed to be U.S. sites. When I was on the MCI Smart Surfing panel teaching parents how to use the Internet safely, we all watched in horror as the resident typist/navigator typed in "whitehouse.com" when we referenced the real site and the filter wasn't turned on. While all of us on the panel had to watch the screen in horror, knowing what was about to happen, a roomful of families learned firsthand what can go wrong online. It was a very effective lesson. And it's a mistake most of us would make. How can we expect our children to know any better? What Can You Do About It? This is one place where a filtering product would help. These products help filter out certain sites, and this kind of site is almost always caught by filtering software. Young children can also be restricted to a prescreened list of child-friendly sites, or a filtered search engine when they aren't fully sure of the website URL (address). Also, teaching them to know when different zones are used, such as ".com," ".gov," and ".org," makes it less likely that our children will use the wrong one. You may also want to review all pages your younger children want to access before you let them visit those sites. You can then build a list of your prescreened sites in your bookmarks folder, which your children can just click on to access. Using an approved safe-site list, like the American Library Association's recommended sites for children, or any of the others I've listed in "Yes, Virginia... There Is a Good Side to the Internet!," can be a big help, too. |
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