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Porn site testing college's patience Juniata monicker in both addresses Thursday, January 31, 2002 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
To clear up any confusion, socially conscious Juniata College has no orgies on the schedule and the deal about the naked celebrities -- that's not in the cards, either.
But those surfing for Juniata on the World Wide Web can be forgiven a little confusion right now.
Try www.juniata.edu. That's the repository for scholarship information, football schedules and academic whatnot.
Take a wrong turn, wind up at www.juniata.com and, well, the orgies and naked celebrities are just the warmup.
It's a newly launched, Florida-based Web site, not even a distant cousin of Juniata College. And it's soaked in hardcore pornography -- very hardcore pornography, base fare that would have sent mortified residents of Sodom and Gomorrah off to pledge allegiance to the Legion of Decency.
"We tend to have values at Juniata," said Ray Chambers, vice president and chief information officer at the 126-year-old college, a 1,300-student school in Huntingdon County rooted in the Church of the Brethren.
"This wouldn't fit in well on this campus."
Internet records show that Juniata.com was claimed in mid-December by a Seminole, Fla., outfit called Worldwide Media Inc.
Two weeks ago, Juniata College officials found out that the closest link juniata.com had to education was something called "School Girls."
Worldwide Media didn't return calls yesterday. But Juniata has heard from them.
The company wanted $5,000 for the rights to the Web address, Chambers said.
"Usually, you can get addresses ending in .com, .org and .net for under $10 a year," said Terry Calhoun, a technology expert at the University of Michigan who maintains a list of collegiate Web sites and Web masters.
Chambers said Juniata doesn't seem to have legal recourse and might wind up anteing up for Worldwide Media if juniata.com becomes a public relations miasma.
"It appears to be extortion," Chambers said.
More properly, it appears to be a relatively new twist on what the cyber world calls porn-napping.
The race to reserve Internet domain names was like a land rush, with speculators and legitimate users hoarding what they could.
Now, though, thousands of those registrations expire at a time and aren't renewed. And speculators scan the horizon for domain names to pick up.
According to the Online Internet Institute, an adviser to educators, porn-nappers turn abandoned domains into porn sites, then offer the sites for sale, hoping that the original owner will pay up "to rescue the once respectable site from the grips of pornography."
The same happens with similar domain names -- such as juniata.edu and juniata.com.
A speculator can't horn into the .edu domain; it's a closed fraternity of accredited four-year colleges and junior colleges. But .com is open to anyone.
"Pornography -- that's what everyone worries about with similar names," said Douglas Stanfield, information technology coordinator at Penn State University.
At www.whitehouse.gov, the key feature last night was President Bush's State of the Union address. At www.whitehouse.com, however, the main attraction was "Hot Interns."
At Penn State, which estimates that it reserved about a dozen domain names to avoid confusion with the school, Web scanners found one cyber opportunist on the outer fringes of university turf.
"It used a variation on the name Nittany. There was pornography on the site," school spokesman Stephen MacCarthy said. "They were hoping we'd buy it."
Penn State refused.
Some confusion, though, is innocent.
Type in www.pitt.edu and get the University of Pittsburgh, but www.pitt.com is a 52-year-old Kentucky school for learning-disabled children, named for founder Msgr. Felix Pitt.
At www.cmu.edu, Carnegie Mellon University answers, but www.cmu.com is the Canton (Miss.) Municipal Utilities.
Back at Juniata College, things don't look as innocent.
And the college is pondering whether it will have to write Worldwide Media a $5,000 check, something Chambers won't do without a lump in his throat.
"What I think of when I think of $5,000 is four work stations for faculty ... or software for our computers," Chambers said.
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