Daily BrewBritish Columbia fire department’s old website ‘sniped’ by porn site
When one searches online for a volunteer fire department, one should expect to find information about recent events in the community, perhaps a post about an uncoming pot luck and maybe details about a semi-steamy calendar on sale for charity
But residents in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley may be surprised to find a local fire department's old domain name links to a pornographic website.
The Naramata Volunteer Fire Department recently uncovered the cause of "domain sniping," and based on a press released issued on Thursday, you can tell they are furious about the misappropriation.
“We’re in the business of fire prevention,” Fire Chief Tony Trovao said in the statement. “Today that prevention is providing information so other organizations don’t get burned like we did.”
The volunteer department operated a website from 2003 to 2012, when it moved its online presence to myNaramata.com.
They left their old website's registration to expire and, when it did, some risque new tenants moved in. The adult website is easy to find with a few cursory web searches, but let's not link to it here (very NSFW).
Unfortunately, the old domain was still linked to a website belonging to the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen and it seems the connection caused some unwelcome surprises. That connection has now severed. But the board is warning other communities to take caution.
“This is not something a fire department — or a community of good people, for that matter — should have to deal with,” board chair Mark Pendergraft said. “The Regional District is working with Chief Trovao to clear this parasitical connection and protect the integrity and reputation of the Naramata department and community.”
Domain sniping is relatively common and entirely legal, although one could question the morality of snatching up lapsed website names with the specific intent of benefiting from the confusion.
In 2011, the domain RobFord.ca was purchased after it was abandoned by the city's recently elected mayor. The site briefly redirected visitors to the Toronto Star's website, an organization Ford was feuding with at the time. (The Star confirmed at the time they were not involved). The site now redirects to a web search of the mayor's name.
In 2008, then-Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach threatened to sue a university student (and Liberal Party of Alberta employee) for registering EdStelmach.ca, although that was a case of grabbing the domain name before Stelmach, rather than grabbing it after the registration expired. For a time, this was a relatively common political tactic.
Plenty of other examples are out there, but none of them answer the question of why the purveyors of a very specific type of pornography would want to associate themselves with the volunteer fire crew in a small town in British Columbia.
It is one of those odd mysteries of the Internet.
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