13/08/2008: Search Warning

What is in a name... Well the difference between poor yet generally harmless network testing and dodgy trojan nasty-o-grams.

Google continues to return some .pl (Poland) domains for searches containing the word FreeNATS. The abstract shown will be (at least in part) text from the documentation or forum. The link (or cached copy) will take you to a dodgy adult site and attempt to download many exe files to your computer. This has been reported to google but is still in the search index at the moment.

Please be careful... it is a dangerous digital world out there.

On the topic of search results. When FreeNATS was born it was a made up functional term which I thought would be pretty unique. So odd sounding was the name I simply didnt bother checking out the name.

When the system did go live and I tried a search to see if it was being picked up for indexing it was a slight surprise to find a German sister-site offering a wide range of, ahem, services. Translating through google made my computer actually go blind. No, I am not linking to it here, find it yourself.

Very quickly we overtook our sister site and now, thanks to various other sites posting, have pushed it several pages back.

It turns out there are yet more FreeNATS out there though. It is some sort of crazy number thing, there is an avid CSI fan who joins forums as freenats and...

The Free Nations (The FreeNats) a unit of Antioch a chapter of dagorhir battle games. To dispel all rumors I am not a member of this motley crew but, as someone so kindly pointed out, one of them does look a bit like me, only thinner and with hair. I shall be contacting them to see if they would be willing to wage war against any FreeNATS GPL violations (not that there ever will be any).

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