Porn's web of deceit

When logging on to www.tourdefrance.com, you might expect to see a few cycling facts and figures about the world-famous race, maybe a couple of interviews, possibly the odd video clip.

Instead, you are greeted by a naked woman sprawled over a pine bed in a suggestive position. Porn, not cycling, now forms the content of the site which has in industry parlance been 'porn-napped'.

To do this, pornography operators scour the Internet for popular websites with registrations on the verge of expiry. Millions of URLs expire every month - in December last year, 2,250,000 URLs failed to renew. When they do, many of them are snapped up and turned into porn sites.

Registration for domain names such as www.tourdefrance.com are bought for a fixed period, typically a year, after which the owners need to renew. Ninety per cent of holders used to re-register but, since the dot.com crash, this has dropped to 50 per cent.

The failure to renew has been matched by a dramatic increase in the number of porn sites on the Web. According to RuleSpace, an American webfiltering company, the number of web pages with 'adult content' has grown four times as fast as non-porn pages in the past 18 months.

These newly acquired domain names are proving a rich source of revenue for pornographers. They artificially bump up traffic to their sites while also providing the opportunity to squeeze original owners by charging them exorbitant fees to buy back the name - a price many are willing to pay to save face. Several reputable organisations have already been embarrassed, including AOL and Ernst & Young.

Mike Wipperfield, marketing executive of Watchfire - a Canadian company which has developed software to tackle this

problem - believes many others will suffer.

He said: 'It's happening more and more because pornography operators are using automated technology to monitor lists of site names, snapping them up as soon as they're available.'

Many websites originally intended for children have already been napped. When Ernst & Young decided to abandon a site called moneyopolis - set up to educate youngsters on finance issues - an Armenian company, Euro Teens, bought the registration and converted the site to porn.

Napping is also enabling pornographers to get around filtering systems. Andrew Craig, news editor at Web User magazine, said: 'Porn filtering software isn't clever enough to know that a formerly innocent domain name now points to something unpleasant.'

Websites containing an array of links are also likely to suffer. Unless these links are all checked on a daily basis, the host site is unlikely to know if any of them have been converted to porn. According to Mike Wipperfield, this has already caused red faces at a number of companies. He said: 'We've had customers with 200 links on their sites which originally linked to legitimate places but now point to pornography. Anyone with a website containing more than 5,000 pages is probably exposed.'