A Tough World Out There

In my own rumbly, griping sort of way, I'm trying to understand this world we live in today. It's kind of gotten away from me.

Case in fact: The internet exploded during the three years I was intentionally away from it. Or so it seems to me. That would be between 2003-06. At least I now feel firmly seated in the 21st century, and can even think of the 90s as "the previous century." Which is a start, I guess.

But some things about the internet don't change. It's a place where you can get ripped off in the blink of an eye and it's happened to me more than once. I lost my internet innocence a long time ago, largely thanks to domain grabbers. I won't go into the details here, but at present my second website's domain name, avadianneday.com, is owned by someone who is not me and who has put up a website with my books and an old interview and a Contact Me link that does not link to me at all. I just found out about this a few weeks ago, and now, thanks to research done by someone more savvy about these things than I am, I have a name and physical address in NYC and an email address that's in Russia -- but there's little I can do except wait until it expires, which is in August of this year. Meanwhile my first domain name, dianneday.com, was available again (it was grabbed up too, by Russian porn vendors, years ago) and I just a little while ago purchased it through GoDaddy for $25 for two years, automatically renewable.

I posted about this on Crimespace, and one of the members who read it gave reasons why the Russians and Chinese and Nigerians and so on like to grab the domain names of known authors. It's because they know the authors have fan bases who are likely to visit and they hope that among the many hits they may be able to attract one tiny bit of business to whatever it is they redirect the traffic toward.

My curmudgeonly mind linked up that information with the content of a Prime Time tv program (I think that's NBC) about identity theft, in which the reporter tracked purchases of identity thieves all the way to an African country so tiny I never heard of it (nor has much of anybody else, which is why the thieves like to use it), located right next to Nigeria where so many of these internet scammers reside. The reporter interviewed two of these people into identity theft and other sorts of computer crimes. When the reporter said to the man pretending to be a lawyer, "You lied to me", the man replied, "Of course. Everybody lies." Later on he said "You're American. You have so much, we have so little, of course we want to deceive you."

That's a large part of what's going on in this world that I'm trying so hard to understand.

We are out of balance, globally. Too much of the wealth is concentrated in the US. We consume a disproportionate amount of the world's goods, especially the oil. One way or another, this situation will not be allowed to continue -- and as it slowly falls apart or is blasted into correction, individuals like me will have problems like Russians taking over our domain names. I'm lucky that's all it is. At least, so far.