Last week, nasa.com and nasa.net pointed to a site operated by host.net, a site which carried an ad for an adult site, a picture of the Tyson - Hollyfield fight and a link to the host.net Web site.

Of course this wasn't the real NASA site (which can be found at www.nasa.gov) but the work of someone obviously looking to capitalize on the mistakes people make when entering URLs. Aardvark first reported this interesting fact in the July 7 edition of Aardvark Weekly and other news sites picked up on it shortly afterwards.

As a result of the huge interest in the NASA Mars Pathfinder mission, the operators of the bogus nasa.com/net site say traffic to their site increased twenty-fold. "We received on average 100,000 [hits?] per day before the Mars rover landed. We hit 1,000,000 on July 4th, and after the media picked up on this, we hit 2,000,000/day" said a spokesperson for host.net.

On Friday of last week, host.net was notified by InterNIC that their nasa domain names were to be put "on hold", effectively removing them from the DNS - the global Internet roadmap that translates domain names into the numbers used to identify individual computers on the Net.

As is so often the case however, there's more than one way to skin a cat and host.net are working to restore access through these domain names. Aardvark was told "We have taken special measures to ensure that NASA.COM domain service works from various larger nameservers. More are being added daily".

Host.net have also filed for an injunction against InterNIC who are refusing to comment further on the matter.

In regard to the issue of trademarks and claims that host.net are attempting to capitalize on the popularity of the official NASA site they point out that the word nasa as they use it is not an acronym. "The word 'nasa' means various things in different languages. For example in Japenese[sic], there are 12 definitions of 'nasa'. One meaning 'compassion'.

Host.net say that their NASA domain names were first registered with a view to re-selling them and they are also the holder of another "near-miss" domain: espnet.com. The latter is about to be used by a physic [?] network registered in the Kingdom of Tonga. "I don't think there's a problem with that domain. If any of our domains are held by InterNIC for trademark disputes, there better be some sort of due process. nasa.com was not held because of a trademark dispute, according to the letters we have received" said a host.net spokesperson.

Related stories:

• There's value in a near miss
  Aardvark Weekly July 14

• Doing Mars on $10 a day
  Aardvark Weekly July 7

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