Make sure your adult Web site visitors are coming of their own volition - because if you're putting them there and sucking them into those maddening click-of-the-mouse porn loops without their okay, the Federal Trade Commission is going to come after you.
And a major concern, according to reports, is that this kind of hijacking cheats the surfers' intended visiting sites out of potential revenues - and the FTC has broad powers to chase unfair or deceptive practices in commerce, e- or otherwise.
The agency is expected to announce a sweeping crackdown on such surfer hijackings next week, says MSNBC, whose original story on this peculiar variation of the bait-and-switch routine led to the probe that's going to result in the crackdown. They were apparently poised to announce yesterday but Hurricane Floyd changed their plans, MSNBC says.
The original story, aired in May, was prompted by a University of Massachussetts Lowell professor, David Landrigan, who found several hundred hijacked Web pages warehoused on the Alta Vista search portal and tipped off the cable network. He calls the practice "snake in the grass scam."
Landrigan was ultimately contacted by the FTC for information, leading to what's going to be the agency's one hundredth Internet case.
The scam works when a Web page containing common words is duplicated and the counterfeit hosted on the scam artist's computer. Then, a search engine "spider" - Net-roaming software cataloguing keywords - hits the stolen page, it doesn't know the page was stolen…and automatically puts the fake URL into its database with the keywords, MSNBC says.
From there, depending on how the scam artist modifies the stolen page, a one-line Java script can divert a surfer to any number of unintended or unwanted sites - without the surfer even seeing the page for which he was actually aiming.
Precisely how many people are going to be targeted in the crackdown, the crackdown's precise nature, and what enforcement measures will come forth, aren't yet known, but the FTC does plan next week to introduce "victims" affected by the hijackings to speak at its news conference.
And Landrigan has found, MSNBC says, that these hijackers don't necessarily discriminate among targeted sites - they've nicked surfer traffic from news sites, community groups, government sites, even children's game sites.
