Friday, February 13, 2009

All your typoes are belong to us

Have you typoed an url lately? Where did you land? The last times I have tried that, I have ended up in a site of mega religion cristian somethings, where the big news on the first site is something along the line that the bible is true. They now have testimonies proving that.

I have to admit that while this is great advertising, I am shocked by the way one organisation, this time a very fanatic religious one, has been able to hijack the Internet. There must be a mechanism somewhere that redirects all typoes that would otherwise lead to a "file not found" to this site. How has it happened? Have they bought the spot? Can it be bought? If so, what did it cost? Or have they hacked it, planted a bug that infiltrates your machine, and then sends you off to their site, rather than just google search site or something. Are there thousands of religious fanatics that keep creating websites with typoed versions of every website out there, which then redirects to this page? Have they taken over explorer? Did Bill Gates receive Jesus in his heart, and started preaching through the error messages?

It's quite scary. Fanatics are no more reassuring just because they are Christian.

And yes, I deliberately did not use exact phrasing or links in this post. They get more than enough hits out of me as it is.

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