Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002 21:12:20 -0700
From: Alan Levine <alan.levine@XXXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXX
Organization: Maricopa Community Colleges
To: John Rhodes <john@webword.com
Subject: Legitimate Sites that Have been Porned 
(as well as WebWord Yahoo group)



  John,
 
  I maintain a number of searchable web resource sites
 
  Teaching & Learning on the Web
  http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tl/
 
  Problem-Based Learning
  http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/pbl/
 
  Director Web
  http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/director/
 
  and in the past 8 months, have gotten notice of at least 10 once legit
  sites listed from ours that have been bought and turned to porn. I wish
  I had tracked more of them, but am curious if this is a trend others
  have seen. There is clearly no oversight on the domain issuing agencies,
  not that we should expect it.
 
  This is bothersome because our sites are predominantly for educators or
  people who develop content for education, and it is tiring to have
  people come to us, see a site we had once verified, to find its content
  has changed. I have been doing some checking in the Web Archive Wayback
  machine to verify the original content, and have started keeping a list
  of whois records for these domains.
 
  (1) Flasher.net (http://www.flasher.net/)
  originally described as
 
  Flash Developers Network Although a site for Flash
  developers, because it can now be included into
  Director (via the Flash Xtra), it is an important
  resource for Director users. Currently, the site
  hosts a very active web board (Flashpad) along
  with with tips, tutorials, articles, etc.
 
  is now porn.
 
  (2) Training Media Association (http://www.trainingmedia.org/)
  originally described as
 
  "is an association of companies that produce and
  distribute training media products. At this web
  site, you will find some of the latest information
  about training videos and multimedia products and
  how to use them. In addition, this site contains
  information regarding copyright laws and facts
  about what you can and can't do legally with
  copyrighted materials."
 
  is now porn.
 
  On all of our resource pages, we have forms that allow people to submit
  sites, and all are verified by us at the time of submission, but later
  checks are limited to simple link verifiers. It would be nice if someone
  could create a tool to walka  list of URLs and identify ones with porn
  keywords (the way it is going, a black background for the web page is a
  key indicator ;-)
 
 
  Note that even your webword discussion forum is littered with the same
  porn spam I find in my personal email:
 
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WebWord/message/143
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WebWord/message/142
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WebWord/message/141
 
 
  regards, a webword fan
  --
  \\  alan levine  (alan.levine@domail.maricopa.edu)
  //  "once geologist now technologist"
  \\  maricopa center for learning & instruction (mcli)
  //  maricopa community colleges, arizona
  \\  http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/