Fake Watches, Fake Websites

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Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Diane Sawyer." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.

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November 29, 2010 1:34 PM

If you want Timberland boots online, you may look at Timberland.com.  If you really want them, would you go to RealTimberland.com?

If you do today, you'll find this. Click on it to enlarge:

The Justice Department and Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation today announced they've seized 82 domain names that were being used to sell counterfeit goods -- fake handbags, pirated software, copies of DVDs, Burberry scarves that aren't, and so forth.  A lot of people wouldn't fall for the fakes, but enough would be satisfied with them that they stayed in business, until now.

A few of the URLs:
dvdcollectionsale.com
dvdcollects.com
handbagcom.com
coachoutletfactory.com
mydreamwatches.com
newstylerolex.com
usaburberryscarf.com
burberryoutletshop.com
boxset4less.com
massnike.com

You get the idea.  If you really wanted a fake Rolex, or a copy of a brand-name bag, you might just type one of these names into your browser. As we've reported in the past, some fakes can be pretty convincing.

"By seizing these domain names, we have disrupted the sale of thousands of counterfeit items, while also cutting off funds to those willing to exploit the ingenuity of others for their own personal gain,” said Attorney General Eric Holder in a statement. “Intellectual property crimes are not victimless. The theft of ideas and the sale of counterfeit goods threaten economic opportunities and financial stability, suppress innovation and destroy jobs."

A Justice Department report on intellectual property, released in June, said, “Annually, copyright piracy affecting the U.S. Motion pictures, sound recordings, business software and entertainment software/video game industries cost the U.S. Economy $58 billion in total output, 373,375 jobs, $16.3 billion in earnings, and $2.6 billion in Federal/state/local tax revenue.”

At a news conference, John Morton, the head of ICE, said, “Are the criminals behind these websites hiring American workers, paying federal and state taxes, providing pensions and health care, investing in new products? No. They make money stealing other people's work and innovation without any care for the consequences.”

The government timed its announcement for Cyber Monday, and the effort is part of something called Operation in Our Sites.

Hat tip to Pierre Thomas and Jason Ryan for passing the information on.

November 29, 2010 in Current Affairs, economy, Technology, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Share | User Comments (4)

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Posted by: John Kantor | Nov 30, 2010 5:57:38 AM

Posted by: Bob | Dec 3, 2010 11:47:19 AM

Posted by: Guy | Dec 6, 2010 2:52:41 PM

Posted by: Xtreme No | Dec 13, 2010 4:16:36 AM

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Watch: Gawker Websites Hacked

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Amazon websites outage was due to hardware failure

LONDON | Mon Dec 13, 2010 12:08am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc's websites in Europe suffered an outage for more than half an hour on Sunday night, in what the company said was a hardware failure in its European data center network.

"The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European datacenter network and not the result of a DDOS attempt," a spokeswoman for Amazon told Reuters.

Amazon was among the first U.S. firms to pull the plug on WikiLeaks since it began publishing thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, withdrawing hosting services last week after being questioned by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee.

A loose grouping of activists operating under the name "Anonymous" had urged an online attack to crash the amazon.com site by overwhelming it with requests from users.

Amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.fr and amazon.es were all down for more than 30 minutes until around 2145 GMT when they appeared to work normally again. Amazon.com's U.S. website was unaffected.

Amazon, which operates one of the world's biggest web-hosting businesses as well as a huge e-retail store, had no immediate comment.

The activists briefly brought down the sites of credit-card giants MasterCard and Visa which had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks.

On Saturday, Anonymous said it had changed its strategy and would now focus on spreading snippets of the leaked cables far and wide rather than on cyber attacks.

(Reporting by Michel Rose, Georgina Prodhan and Alexandria Sage; Editing by Jon Hemming)

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Open Websites at login

Macworld - You've probably dragged a link from your browser to the desktop to get easy access to your favorite site or a useful resource for work. But Mac OS X Hints reader nathanator11 wanted to take that convenience one step further by making his Mac open those Websites automatically whenever he logs in. Here's how he did it.

With a site open in your favorite browser, click any link on the page or the icon next to the URL in the address bar, and drag it to the desktop to create a .webloc file. These are the files that you can double-click to quickly open the linked page in your default browser, or add to your Dock for even faster one-click access. You can organize these files into a folder on the desktop or even tuck them away somewhere in your home user folder.

To make these sites open when you log in or when your Mac first starts up, go to System Preferences -> Accounts. Once there, select your user account in the left column, then the Login Items tab on the right--this is the list of applications and files that you can direct your Mac to open at login. Just drag your .webloc file(s) into the Login Items list, and the next time you log in, their destinations will open automatically in your default browser.

Reprinted with permission from Macworld.com. Story copyright 2010 Mac Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.

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