--- Rivka Strom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The one Hatewatch was bought by the SPLC and Morris > Dees, the name dropped > and integrated into Tolerance.Org. > > As to the other I am unaware.
Yes, the one (legitimate, IMO) Hatewatch site (i.e. http://www.hatewatch.org) was bought by the SPLC and it was a clever move by the racists to purchase the hatewatch.com and hatewatch.net domains. I'm not glad that they did it, but I admire the thought process behind it. It was the case (& remains so) that domain names were relatively cheap and easy to get and were assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. It's expensive to buy up all the popular domain extensions for a domain (*.org, *.com, *.net, etc.) and the multitude of country extensions (e.g. *.il, *.ca, *.tw), as well as the new extension names (e.g. *.tv). So, if you can't use a *.com domain because it's been taken, you can simply obtain that domain with a different extension. If you do a good enough promotion job (as well as use decptive tactics like "Google bombing"), you can misdirect people trying to get to the legit anti-bigotry Hatewatch site to the racist Hatewatch site. Ironically, Hatewatch.com listed Hatewatch.org as the #10 hate site in its Top Ten. It's difficult to piece together the history of a URL since the Google caches only capture the latest version of a website. However, the Wayback Machine at archive.org is one of the best WWW archives sites I have used for doing such research. If you go to http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.hatewatch.net, you will find plenty of version links from Dec. 5, 1998 to July 24, 2003. The links for Dec 12/98 ; Jan. 25/99 ; Feb. 8/99 ; Feb. 25/99 ; Apr.29/99 and May 1/99 all point to the same page in the archives (which might be because the site didn't get updated regularly). The link for Apr. 8, 2000 shows that the SPLC managed to succesfully acquire the hatewatch.com and hatewatch.net domains, as well, and used them to forward Internet users to the main Hatewatch.org site. B'shalom, Steven M. Bergson, Internet columnist =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: Hasafran at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 at osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
