A friend writes:
"I just came across a curious fake web site, the point of which escapes me.
>From where I got the link from, I expected it to be a bona fide
robotics-related site, but the front page just contained a picture of an
ASIMO robot and nothing else. I looked at the source and found some
insubstantial text about robots, a block of porn links, and some obfuscated
JavaScript.
"I expected the JavaScript to unravel to some exploit, but all it did was
load and execute a JavaScript file, which in turn loaded and executed
another JavaScript file. The only effect of this one was to cause all of the
text in the body of the original page to be wrapped in <div id="front">
</div> , and provide CSS defining the "front" style as position:absolute;
left:-5000; top:0; width:100% and a few other things of little
significance. In other words, it shifted the entire content way off the
left-hand side of the window, in a way that did not cause the browser to put
in a horizontal scroll bar that would allow it to be accessed.
"I searched around and found several other sites that had this sort of thing
in them. What is accomplished by placing porn links into a page and then
making it impossible for anyone to see them? I looked up the site on the
Wayback machine, and it appears there was a real web site there until late
2006, when I guess they let the registration lapse, because it was then held
by a registration company, and took on its present form in 2007."
I'd like to know what they're doing too. Some sort of link farming or
googlebombing trick? Is this a related trick to that of pop-up launching? I
have to say, I would like to know if a site is trying to hide things from me
in sneaky ways like this. How would NetSurf handle it?
--
Simon Smith The idea of an uncrackable digital rights management
(DRM) scheme is fundamentally flawed. Encryption is
about A sending information to B while ensuring that
C cannot read it. In DRM, B and C are the same person.
