What on earth is this web page? You expected to see a rich selection of news, ideas and innovation at www.newsceintsit.com 鈥� not an odd listing of links to other pages. Neither did you expect to find, when you closed that window, another window promising gambling joy or enhanced sexual pleasure. Grr!
Of course, you meant to visit www.newscientist.com 鈥� but you were trapped by a typosquatter. Typosquatting is the practice of registering web addresses that differ from popular destinations by single-letter errors or transpositions 鈥� typos in editors鈥� jargon. The typosquatter can then redirect unsuspecting visitors to various kinds of adverts, including those irritating 鈥減op-under鈥� ads.
Why bother? The answer, pure and simple, is money. Many websites pay a small fee to sites that send surfers their way. Click on one of those ads and you鈥檙e putting money into the typosquatter鈥檚 pocket.
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But it can be worse. Some web browsers, particularly older ones, have security holes that allow your computer to become infected with malicious code from a website. One way of accidentally visiting such a dodgy site is via a typosquat.
Some sites persuade you to install a program that tracks where you go on the web. In the worst case, some malicious links could infect your computer with code that steals your passwords or sends out spam.
Stories abound of typosquatters redirecting hapless web users to pornographic sites, but this practice appears to have diminished following the successful prosecution in 2002 of a squatter who linked to porn. The fear of similar cases seems to have put other squatters off this tactic.
Not all typo-sites are malicious, however. Some of the earliest were parodies. The website was created in 2001 as a spoof of the US president and vice-president鈥檚 PR machine. The real site, of course, is .
The website , which hosts a parody of the World Trade Organization鈥檚 site , currently suggests that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is to be extended to free trade in slaves.
Some typosquatters link to competitors. Visit and you will find a link to the search engine as well as some adverts. (The amusing and occasionally useful information about the port town of Goole in East Yorkshire that used to be here now has a separate link on the site.)
Some companies even anticipate typosquatters and buy up the mistyped sites themselves. For example, Google missed out on goole.com, but has bought with three 鈥渙鈥漵, with five and the same word with 12 鈥渙鈥漵. But in a veritable domain-name bunfight, typosquatters somehow got the four, nine and 20-鈥渙鈥� versions. Where does it all end?
