Phishing domain names are terribly annoying. Aside from the obvious problems with people playing with the vulnerability of fonts (e.g. “O” and “0”) or taking advantage of common misspellings, there is also the issue of Unicode translations, etc.. A simple domain name can sometimes require a great deal of thought to make sure it is less susceptible to hijacking or abuse. However, the risks are not always from the outside. With that in mind, see if you can find the hidden meanings in these real domain names:

Who Represents is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their web site is:
https://www.whorepresents.com

Experts Exchange is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at:
https://www.expertsexchange.com

Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at:
https://www.penisland.net

Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at:
https://www.therapistfinder.com

There’s the Italian Power Generator company:
https://www.powergenitalia.com

And don’t forget the Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales:
https://www.molestationnursery.com

If you’re looking for IP computer software, there’s always:
https://www.ipanywhere.com

The First Cumming Methodist Church web site is:
https://www.cummingfirst.com

And the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky web site:
https://www.speedofart.com

Yes, they really are real. Snopes even confirms the marketing site for an Italian company, although the site is now “under construction”:

The powergenitalia.com domain apparently hosts the web site of a real Italian company (Powergen Italia) which sells specialized battery products.

Guerrilla marketing, accident, or intentional joke? You be the judge.

And this just had to be filed under poetry, because my guess is that if the domain owners had read/written more poetry they would have been far more immune to this kind of risk…

According to the pridesource site, Wharton is hosting the decorated poet Sarah Jones:

She also received an NYCLU Calloway Award in recognition of Jones as the first artist in history to sue the Federal Communications Commission for censorship. The lawsuit resulted in reversal of the censorship ruling that had targeted her hip-hop poem recording, “Your Revolution.”

A regular uncensored guest on public radio, she has also made numerous TV appearances on HBO, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, and in her own special, “The Sarah Jones Show,” on Bravo.

Event details are here.

The group that helped Jones fight against the FCC has provided a description of the lawsuit:

The work entitled “Your Revolution” is a protest against the degrading treatment of women in popular culture.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in New York challenges the FCC’s indecency determination for focusing on sexual terms in the work without any acknowledgment that their context is a critique of the frequently offensive treatment of women in popular hip hop music. The FCC filed a motion to dismiss arguing that the artist can not challenge the agency’s determination in federal court.

[…]

While pleased that the FCC recognized the error of its ways, we remain concerned about FCC “indecency” procedures and the harm that can be done to artists like Sarah Jones, and will continue to work on the issue.

I wrote about this security incident briefly last month. A new video on YouTube now sheds some absolutely shocking and downright gut-wrenching first-person evidence related to Halliburton’s apparent failure to treat water for soldiers or notify them that the water put into tanks was no different than that in the Eurphrates river itself.

It is one thing to read a story like Confessions of an Economic Hitman about the way Halliburton exploited and destroyed foreign markets:

As Chief Economist and Director of Economics and Regional Planning at MAIN, his primary job was to convince Less Developed Countries (LDCs) around the world to accept multibillion dollar loans for infrastructure projects and to see to it that most of this money ended up at MAIN, Bechtel, Halliburton, Brown and Root, and other U.S. engineering/construction companies. The loans left the recipient countries wallowing in debt and highly vulnerable to outside political and commercial interests.

But these latest reports are starting to show that Halliburton was even cheating with regard to the health of US soldiers who had no choice but to trust their systems. What kind of company would do such a thing? From the MSNBC quote of the original Granger [Theatre Water Quality Manager in the war zone for Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary] report:

“Theatre wide there is no formalized training for anyone at any level in concerns to water operations.â€? […] Confusion between KBR and military officials over their respective roles. For instance, each assumed the other would chlorinate the water at Ar Ramadi for any uses that would require the treatment. […] Inadequate or nonexistent records that could have caught problems in advance. Little or no documentation was kept on water inventories, safety stand-downs, audits of water quality, deliveries, inspections and logs showing alterations or modifications to water systems.

It seems to me the company was put in charge of purifying the water. So the fact that no one was actually running the purification system, coupled with the fact that no one was actually testing to see if the purification system was running…

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) “Shine, Republic”:

The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining, of water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness.

And reticence: each is noble in its quality. The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.