now THAT is funny..
PACE, Florida — from www.ethiopianreview.com – You need to look up something about a school and it involves Pace High School. Quickly, you get online and type away, but accidentally type .com instead of .net. Quick. Close your eyes.
You will be directed to a pornography site owned by a company called PimpRoll, a group which describes itself as “professionals in maximizing profits.”
One Pace parent, Fatima Hawkins, who owns the domain PaceHighSchoolBand.com, had such an experience.
“I was going to check my website and left off the word band,” said Hawkins of her incident on Sunday. “I was horrified when I saw this come up on my computer screen.
“I support the work to stop cyber crimes and the efforts of the juvenile justice system, and I was completely appalled at what I saw.”
Pace High School is aware of the site, but according to Principal Frank Lay there is little he can do about it.
“We found out about this site a couple of weeks ago and there is nothing we can do,” said Lay. “It is their right to do this and we exhausted all possibilities to see if there was anything we could do.”
One of those to investigate the matter was Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Deputy Lt. Tommy Gunn. According to Lay, Gunn checked out the site through the Cyber Crimes unit and says it is a legitimate site.
Attempts by the Press Gazette to get more information on this from Lt. Gunn were unsuccessful.
“The two things you can do,” says Susan Wade, Director of Public Relations for Network Solutions (one of several firms that license online names), “is file a petition with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) or take the cyber squatter to court. It depends on who it is and where they are located.”
PaceHighSchool.com was filed as a domain name on Oct. 9, 2002 by Cheapies.com based out of Toronto, Ontario.
Cheapies.com is a Canadian version of the popular GoDaddy.com
The website pacehighschool.com domain is set to expire on Oct. 9, 2009 (if not renewed) and was last updated on June 16, 2009 just before midnight.
Wade pointed out that these things do happen. Wade says it isn’t uncommon for firms looking to make money to secure names that might soon be needed.
“There are ways people can file a possible breach or abuse of a domain register,” says Wade. “We just don’t have a way to determine what they will do when they register a domain and we don’t police the content on domains.”
Pace High School or any other high school involving the use of Pace could take the matter further to the ICANN if their name is trademarked according to Wade.
“If the high school name is trademarked then they can file a uniformed dispute resolution process (UDRP) with ICANN for going against their trademark,” said Wade. “That is about the only way a high school can protect itself in a case like this.”
When asked if the site in question could be getting some traffic due to mistypes, Lay said anything is possible.
“I am sure it has happened,” said Lay. “The only thing we can do is take it off of web access here and on the county servers as well.”
Calls to Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, ICANN, and Cheapies.com had yet to be returned as of press time.