After reading Shirley Ujest’s Adidas thread in MPSIMS, I decided to Google around for a cite about Graco standing for “God Rewards All Christian Organizations.” Well, I clicked on this link and saw a lot of suspicious titles. I don’t want to click on any of them in case I get something I don’t want on my computer. Am I being paranoid or should I start making some phone calls? Is there any way of “pre-screening” sites before you actually go to them?
If you don’t use Internet Explorer, and don’t click on links such as “Child lolitas sex” (from the site given), then you’ll have a low risk of anything unpleasant getting on your computer.
Back in the days I still used IE, I did find a tool (possible on download.com) which put many thousands of untrustworthy domains into the blocked-site list, or whatever it’s called. Try looking for that, it can only help.
Don’t bother. The registrant of the domain name is a spammer/link farmer.
Another one of their sites, from the same template and just as useful:
Part of the reason that their sites look so sketchy is that they conceal the destinations of links from your browser. Not specifically to trick you in all probability, but to prevent search engine spiders from indexing their clients, because that would lead to traffic being generated by people using useful search engines instead of their useless index.
As a rule, I never click on a link unless I can tell where it leads – by having the links sent by server-side scripts, you can’t tell where they lead unless you have a browser that can be set to load page source without rendering it, which is a pain in the ass.
I wouldn’t fret about it-- you just wandered past the 3 card monty men onto the boardwalk of the internet.
Thanks GorillaMan and Larry Mudd for your posts, I really appreciate it. However, I am led to ask another question…if that site is acting as a portal for illegal activity, i.e. child pornography, should it be reported?
Of course, any such site should be reported.
I’d be very surprised if you found any links to anything that’s blatantly illegal there, though. The “lolita sex” link, as expected, appears to point to a lot of legal porn. Paysites, run by people desperate for traffic and too clueless to spot the sham nature of the index they payed to be listed on.
They just take money from people to “advertise” on a low maintenance site that nobody is likely to look at. Unethical, but not illegal.
As for illegal stuff, you’d probably find more in the MLM links — a goodly percentage are probably pyramid or ponzi schemes, and the “grey area” folks like advertiser.ws are a bit less likely to recognize their “clients” as trouble of the “I ain’t going anywhere near that, are you crazy?!” sort than if they were flogging kiddie porn.