Resistance Is Futile.

Category : annoying + internet

Recently, I became side-tracked while searching through some old files and archives. The reason for this is that I stumbled upon a golden nugget which within most backups, is finding that almighty cache of really old bookmarks. It’s candy for those of us with a sweet tooth for information hinted with nostalgia, but it often comes with a dangerous consequence. No, it’s nothing terrible, but if what you were looking for originally wasn’t the cache of bookmarks, then consider your original search long forgotten and the hours you spend browsing through them will be long lost. What did suprise me is the ammount of bookmarks I managed to amass over the course of a year or two under an aging 56k modem at the time.

So, now I’ve totally forgotten what I was originally looking for, because over the past few hours I’ve been clicking away to see if any of these bookmarked sites are still around and worth adding to the ranks of my current bookmarks. Also I’m a bit curious to see what some of the sites have become, and what the authors might be doing today. Sadly, a huge number of these sites have fallen into “the wrong hands”. In reality though, I’m not totally suprised, knowing perfectly well it was bound to happen eventually. And this brings up just a few of the things I hate about the internet and how some “companies” operate, a.k.a. “the wrong hands”.

These things are: Domain vultures, fake search sites, and worse than both alone: a combination of the two only to form a two-piece Voltron megabot! Except it’s only one of the pieces from each set, so when combined looks like both a lion, and a car. Just sit back and imagine for a moment how stupid that would look… just a torso and an arm or something, yeah, that could look pretty stupid. OK, so if you don’t know or remember what Voltron is, I’m sorry, but you missed out on some early 80’s toy and cartoony awesomeness. Anyway, for those of you totally unfamiliar with the practice of the domain vultures, I’ll sum it up like this: The very moment your domain name expires, some idiot “company” already has their finger on the trigger ready to snipe it out of your hands and register it as their own before you know that domain is even gone. This injury is often compounded by the insult of then having that domain indexed under the guise of some legitimate and “newer” or “better” search engine or other product. Which in most cases is not so great at all, not to mention, nobody has probably even heard of it.

It’s kind of like the borg invading the internet, once a domain is assimilated, any attempt at getting that now expired domain out of this vastly retarded collective is seemingly futile. That domain is now a zombie slave to some superiorly retarded affiliate spewing site within their vast circle jerking collective. All of which want to procreate by spawning pop-up after pop-up and have you install their malware ridden toolbars. If that isn’t the geekiest yet scarriest of nerdy nightmares, I don’t know what is. But what I do know, is that I find these “companies” and their sites largely deceptive, problematic and potentially spammy.

Just like spammers, practices like this make me wish I had the keys to a network registrar which held the owner and DNS info for people who do this kind of crap. I would simply unregister then blackhole the domains so they couldn’t propogate any further then they already have. But that’s dreaming, the best thing I could hope for is weeding these sites from major search engines so when you or I do go searching for something relevant, we don’t have to innocently click into one of these domains which display anything but relevancy.

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