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Asia Buzz: Geek Street
How I became an unwitting porn mogul
By ERIC ELLIS
Web posted at 9 p.m. Hong Kong time, 9 a.m. EDT, Tuesday, Aug. 31, 1999
A funny thing happened on the way to the Internet the other day. I became on online version of Larry Flynt, the American porn king.
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ASIA BUZZ
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ALSO IN TIME
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First, some background. I stayed recently at Hong Kong's Century Hotel, where for the privilege of simply hooking onto my CompuServe traveling account, I was charged the equivalent of about 50 cents for a local call that would be free if dialed outside the hotel. (The seven-year-old telephone system requires expensive maintenance, I was told, unconvincingly, by someone at reception.)
After 10 re-dials, I determined that the local CompuServe line was down (does Steve Case know that Asia's out here?), so I reluctantly dialed into a U.S. server at the hotel's outrageous megabucks-a-minute rate (don't ask), the cost exacerbated by the snail's pace of CompuServe's trans-Pacific journey. To simply check and respond to a few e-mails ended up costing double my monthly online charges. As I imagined this happening across Asia, I thought: there had to be a better way.
And so I signed up my own domain name, www.ericellis.com, to facilitate secure, Hotmail-like e-mail access anywhere in the world. O.K., so I had to pay $160 for two years to Virginia-based Web registrar Network Solutions. But another "eric_ellis" had already been to Hotmail, Netscape and Yahoo, and the alternative ID that Hotmail offered, eric_ellis1156@hotmail.com, lacked a certain personal touch (though it was free). I rationalized that I'd make most of the money back saving on hotel bills, and the whole affair earned me 10 minutes of dinner-party conversation, such is the stuff that titillates the trendsetting tables of today's new economy. Besides, the way things are going in the over-hyped "new paradigm," there's always a chance of instant tycoondom from my own personal start-up IPO.
So I became ericellis.com. Until my rude shock a week later, that is, when I received an invoice in the mail from NetSol congratulating me on being the proud owner of a new net site. The problem was, it wasn't ericellis.com but bestXXXporn.com, and would I mind sending them a check for $235?
ericellis@bestXXXporn.com?! Living in starchy Singapore, my immediate reaction was to crumple the invoice and glance nervously up at the nearby trees, just in case security men were zooming in on me and my alleged online habits. In this town, you can't even log on to the relatively tame playboy.com. Or so I've heard.
And should I tell my wife, who has already scolded me for spending too much time online and not enough with her? Now the marriage-rocking specter of cyber-sex!
Instead I got on the phone and discovered that someone had used my personal details to register me as the owner of bestXXXporn.com, which, admittedly, offers better prospects of instant riches than ericellis.com. It was one of those awkward conversations: "Er, you don't know me, but I didn't really do this." The tech-support operative responded with a semi-understanding, semi-mocking: "Yeah, sure fella."
So what's the moral, here? I had become a victim of Internet fraud, a phenomenon that has snared an estimated 5% of netizens worldwide. According to Network Solutions, it could have traced to something as innocent as telephone bill paid online, after which an insider purloined details and passed them to the unscrupulous. It's a disturbing trend that threatens the development of e-commerce, one reason why companies like Visa are spending millions to guarantee secure online transactions--to help secure their own future.
In the cashless and, by extension, signature-less economy, one solution conceived in Singapore is a credit card number that is recognized only in cyberspace and that comes with a personal ID number. That sounds sensible. In the meantime, I advised my card company not to honor any online transactions for two months, except long-standing ones like CompuServe. Network Solutions seems to have accepted my explanation and I did not get charged.
But around the same time, my credit card was charged for accessing a different, existing porn site. I await next month's statement to see what other nefarious sites I'm supposed to be visiting.
Meanwhile, the domain bestXXXporn.com is apparently again available for registration. And my 10 minutes of dinner-party conversation has expanded to 15.
But I wonder if I should have held onto the name. With 20,000 new registrations a day, "cyber-squatting" on web names has become a surefire way to make some cash, when someone else is desperate to buy a groovy site name from you (try indonesia.com, for example). Maybe I should have held out for Larry Flynt's call.
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