27 March 2008

OOXML and Porn: What's the Connection?

Talking of Document Freedom Day, here's an amusing - and symptomatic - story:


anonymous supporters of OOXML use Domains by Proxy registar in order to register a site with a very similar address of Document Freedom Day's. The OOXML support site is Document Freedom Day **dot com** and redirects to a well known astroturf site which pretends to be a community of OOXML supporters.

This technique is a redirection scam which, according to the explanation given by the Online Internet Institute, takes place

* when you go to one URL and are automatically transferred to another URL. It further explains that it
* doesn't always send you to a porn or gambling site and that
* it could be a scam to lure you to places you had never intended to go.

Which is clearly the case here: to confuse users who expect to check out the Document Freedom Day event page, and lure them into their own OOXML astroturf site.

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