Slimeball Typo Squatters Take Social As Well As Financial TollSlimeball Typo Squatters Take Social As Well As Financial Toll

An anecdote: I finally agreed to buy my pre-teen daughter an iPod (after making her jump through hoops to convince me she wouldn't immediately lose it). As part of our due diligence, I set her on a Web quest to research our purchasing options.One of the places I told her to check was Craigslist, always a favorite virtual first stop for information on a bunch of topics. I heard her typing, then a sharp gasp of horror. Which I promptly echoed as I looked over her shoulder. There, in living color, was an XXX site displaying some of the most explicit pornographic images I've ever encountered (OK, I'm sheltered. But still.). She'd made a typo--I won't dignify the site by linking to it here. We were victims of a particularly vicious example of typo squatting.

We apparently aren't alone in experiencing this. Typo squatting--or purchasing a URL for the sole purpose of capturing ad revenue should someone mistype a popular domain name--is a very real and growing problem. Indeed, the World Intellectual Property Organization said in March that cybersquatting disputes in 2006 increased by 25% compared with 2005.

Craigslist.org alone showed a whopping 680 potential typo squatting domains at the time this article was written.

This not only results in massive losses in advertising and e-commerce revenue for legitimate sites, it also has a social toll. There were those images that I worry might be burned too vividly into my daughter's brain. There's the potential embarrassment should such a site pop up while at work or in a professional setting. There's even a legal angle--would stumbling on the kind of site that my daughter did count as illicit surfing for pornography and be grounds for being fired if it happened in the workplace? It seems to me that's a real danger.

What do you think? Have you ever had a particularly egregious typo squatting experience? Has it ever happened in a situation that you felt was particularly uncomfortable or potentially destructive? Tell us about it by responding to the information blog.