Remember that the internet is not just a collection of wires and radio waves. Behind it are people. That's good news and bad news because there are quite a few unethical and immoral folks out there and they could become quite a problem for you. Consider these two examples:
Do you know when your domain name is up for renewal? This is a true story of an event that happened to a colleague at another company who wishes to remain anonymous. I have permission to share this story.
This company retains an internet service provider for numerous services - one of which is to renew their domain names. They have several versions of domain names and they were obtained over several years. One of the lesser used domain names was up for renewal. You guessed it. The ISP messed up and failed to renew it. Who got it? A porn site! When did the company find out? When one of the company's professionals used it (thankfully not one of their customers!). Can this company get the domain back? Right now, that's unknown.
To top it off, when my colleague googled the lost domain name, what was found were links to all sorts of general interest blogs and bulletin boards where the porn perp had made comments that linked to the porn site. Therefore, it's a good idea for anyone who has a blog, discussion forum or guestbook on their site to occasionally google the domain(s) because porn perps may be using your site to promote their services.
So the first warning to you is be aware that even when paying a firm to renew the domain for you, don't count on it. People assume that if they have a web hosting company that they don't have to worry about their domains. It's your job to keep up with your and your firm's domain names.
Joe Jobbing. The second warning concerns "joe jobbing" which I wasn't familiar with until I read about this real life situation.
According to wikipedia, "joe jobbing" is:
A "joe job" is an incident of spamming designed to tarnish the reputation of an innocent third party. Despite having existed since at least 1996, joe jobs are uncommon compared to other types of spam because they provide no commercial benefit to the joe jobber.
Scott Allen of The Virtual Handshake is suffering from such an incident. According to his site:
It seems that an evil spammer (who shall remain nameless pending further investigation) has developed a personal vendetta against me and is maliciously trying to smear my reputation by posting bogus blog comment spam in my name (and my wife’s...)
It began when he wrote to a comment spammer asking them to stop. He also told them that he was going to expose their site publicly as engaging in spam marketing if they continued. The spammer didn't take kindly to that and Scott is paying the price.
The second warning is don't take on spammers if you can help it. I will not advocate being kind to spammers but for most of us, it doesn't do any good to take them on. Just delete their info and ignore them. Right now, I consider this one of the risks of being on the internet in such a personal way. Scott certainly doesn't deserve what has been happening to him but for the rest of us - forewarned is forearmed.
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