Willy Wonka and the Eyeball Factory
By Michael Swaine
Let's try a thought experiment. Let's say you're running a search site, like Excite or Yahoo, and you run a little check to see who's getting the most hits. What site would you guess will come out on top in your survey?
Well, it could be Moldavia.
Last fall, thousands of Net surfers downloaded a program that supposedly gave them access to erotic photographs. Maybe it did, but it also cut them off from their local ISPs and reconnected them to a telephone number in Moldavia (a country wedged between Romania and the Ukraine). Phone bills ran into the thousands of dollars. The hijackers were ordered to pay them.
It was a season for Internet hijacking: Another accused hijacker, self-described Webslinger Eugene Kashpureff, was apprehended in Canada and held, according to a curiously specific news report, with "150-odd undocumented workers who'd been rounded up at a candy factory." I dunno; to the wetback Willy Wonkas, the wayward Webslinger may have seemed the odd one.
Or maybe not. Kashpureff, the founder of AlterNIC who rerouted Web traffic headed for the InterNIC site to AlterNIC last summer, is a hero to some.
But it won't be Moldavia, and it probably won't be Alternicia that heads your hit list. Could it perhaps be the Orrin Hatch Web page?
Hatch has done his share recently to make Bill Gates' life miserable, and while that isn't enough to make me want to buy his album (see my October, 1997 column), it could raise the hits at
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