Washington - Harvard student Ben Edelman was searching on the Internet for a bicycle repair shop, but stumbled instead onto "Tina's Live Webcam," a hard-core pornography site.
There was no mistake: Edelman had clicked through to www.bicyclebill.com, but the website registration of the local bike shop had expired, and was quickly grabbed by the Canadian operator of the sexually explicit website.
Edelman, 22, did not take matters lying down: he investigated and found that Domain Strategy of Montreal, which operates the webcam porn site, had snatched up more than 4 000 domain names that had expired.
"This rubbed me the wrong way," Edelman said. "It inspired me to see what Tina's live webcam was up to."
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'Some people would absolutely call it blackmail, but it's not illegal' The phenomenon dubbed "porn-napping" has happened to churches, schools, local governments and others that fail to renew their website registrations.
The new owners generally offer to sell the names back to their original owners - for anywhere from $500 to $2 000 (about R5 000 to R20 000) - in what could be a lucrative strategy, but what some call extortion or blackmail.
In the meantime, the hijacked sites continue to direct users to porn or gambling sites, or to pages that simply say "this domain for sale".
"Some people would absolutely call it blackmail, but it's not illegal," said Art Wolinsky, a New Jersey consultant who operates the Online Internet Institute.
"If you don't re-register a name it becomes available" to anyone who wants to buy it.
Registering a domain name normally costs about $35, but some registrars offer discounts that put the price under $10, Wolinsky said.
Website "hijackers" often sell the names back at around $550 - just under the $600 that would have to be paid for dispute resolution by Internet governing authorities.
Wolinsky said some 40 000 expired domain names were grabbed by porn-nappers or others under a loophole - since closed - that allowed someone to return a site for a refund after five days.
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