• Zarobi@aussie.zone
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        11 days ago

        There’s a hidden war over many common typos of popular domains. Almost every misspelling of YouTube redirects to the main site. Try yootube or yputube or yoitube.com. But less common misspellings or as soon as a domain registration expires, you bet some bot will snap that up and host malware, then demand a royal’s random from Google to win it back

        • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
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          10 days ago

          The yoitube one is clickable on web. It appears to link nowhere to an adblock user, unless they press F12 and see that it’s a bunch of links to random domains all titled either “top sex” or “barzolar” (whatever the latter means), probably some ancient search engine manipulation: marking normal sites people paid against as NSFW; advertising actual NSFW sites people paid for.

          yootube seems to be parked or something (could be fake), yptube redirects through a bunch of stuff then eventually declares me unwanted (probably because referrer turned off) and redirects me to rozetka.com.ua (they probably looked up top 10 sites per region and since I used my IP in Ukraine it directed to a Ukrainian store)

          • Zarobi@aussie.zone
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            10 days ago

            That’s really interesting. I would have thought the URLs would work the same for everybody, but maybe there’s some DNS strangeness going on, or even my device might be correcting the mistakes

              • Zarobi@aussie.zone
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                10 days ago

                Oooh that’s sneaky. It feels illegal for a DNS provider to mess with lookup results in their own favour like that.

                In an ideal world I would change it, but I can’t right now.

                  • Zarobi@aussie.zone
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                    10 days ago

                    The router where I live is configured to use Google DNS. I’d change it to use OpenDNS or something if I could, but since it’s not my router, I cannot