You know, I think I'm wrong--their motives may be financial rather than ideological.
Here's the thing. Warriorsforinnocence.org is registered through a kind of domain anonymizer, so you can't tell who owns it. But what's really odd is that WfI.org was registered in October '06, the very same month that their anonymizer's patent was issued. Awfully fishy. What's fishier is that their address and phone/fax lines are the same as the old Coastal Management Group that was implicated in an identity theft phishing scam in August '05.
Everyone complains that the WfI site is spyware intensive. My guess is they make up a site that pushes a big old emotional button to get tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people visiting them, and harvest names, addresses, social security and credit card numbers from those few hundred people who have preexisting datamining spyware and older versions of Internet Explorer, and with that information they do--
--what exactly? I don't know; it was never really clear what Coastal Marketing was doing with their harvested information. Still, identity theft seems a likely enough motive, and with everyone's attention now focused on Six Apart and the ethics of using incest and molestation in fiction, they have a pretty good chance of slipping under the radar and doing something like this again. It's brilliant in its own way--pretending to be an unbelievable idiot and having people be so busy looking for the larger con that they don't notice their pockets being picked. Then again, I don't know enough to say that this is the whole story.
LJ is apologizing, so it looks like all this outcry is doing some good. I'll see how things develop in the next couple of days before I commit to anything in particular. I'd almost rather do a little digging on this Coastal Marketing group to see what else they've been doing.
no subject
Here's the thing. Warriorsforinnocence.org is registered through a kind of domain anonymizer, so you can't tell who owns it. But what's really odd is that WfI.org was registered in October '06, the very same month that their anonymizer's patent was issued. Awfully fishy. What's fishier is that their address and phone/fax lines are the same as the old Coastal Management Group that was implicated in an identity theft phishing scam in August '05.
Everyone complains that the WfI site is spyware intensive. My guess is they make up a site that pushes a big old emotional button to get tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people visiting them, and harvest names, addresses, social security and credit card numbers from those few hundred people who have preexisting datamining spyware and older versions of Internet Explorer, and with that information they do--
--what exactly? I don't know; it was never really clear what Coastal Marketing was doing with their harvested information. Still, identity theft seems a likely enough motive, and with everyone's attention now focused on Six Apart and the ethics of using incest and molestation in fiction, they have a pretty good chance of slipping under the radar and doing something like this again. It's brilliant in its own way--pretending to be an unbelievable idiot and having people be so busy looking for the larger con that they don't notice their pockets being picked. Then again, I don't know enough to say that this is the whole story.
LJ is apologizing, so it looks like all this outcry is doing some good. I'll see how things develop in the next couple of days before I commit to anything in particular. I'd almost rather do a little digging on this Coastal Marketing group to see what else they've been doing.