Cybersquatting among the ruins

Mon, 01 Oct 2001 19:30:00 +0000

On Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, while the twin towers of the World Trade Center crumbled and hijacked jetliners hurtled into the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania, Americans were stricken by shock, anger, grief and grim fascination. Glued to televisions, radios and Internet news sites, many of us were uncertain of what was happening or how we should react. But scores of people around the world reacted decisively to the terrorist attacks, in a peculiar and eerily detached way: They registered Internet domain names commemorating the disaster.

Within moments after the first hijacked plane careered into the World Trade Center's south tower at 8:45 a.m., even as New York firefighters rushed up the stairwells, quick-thinking Net-savvy citizens pointed their browsers to the Web sites of Internet domain name registrars. Jim Burke, of Southington, Conn., was one of the first to react in this way. While learning new Unix commands online, he heard a report that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Without knowing whether the report was true, and almost as a reflex action, he decided to register an appropriate domain name.

Salon.com > Bryan Geon

Cybersquatting among the ruins