The UnderGr0uNd

From Info page!

Why did you have to
shut down Netdisaster?!"

Reading the feedback from disappointed Netdisaster users, I realize that it's not clear to everyone why I had to shut down the site.

First of all, it's a heartache to me shutting it down (so no need calling me "asshole" or whatever – unless you really like calling me that, of course): basically, it's eBay who got the site shut down, not me. What happened is that they complained to my hosting provider that Netdisaster was phishing at eBay users. Well, they are THE eBay, you know, one of the internet giants. So my hosting provider shut down my account.

It was the second time Netdisaster got such a complaint (the first time was from Yahoo!).
So what is this phishing thing?

The Internet, just like the world itself, is full of people trying to make money. Some of them try to make money in dishonnest and illegal ways. Phishing is when you design a web page that looks just like some other site's web page – say, eBay's login page, for example. Then you send e-mails pretending you're eBay and asking the receiver to go to your fake eBay page and login with their secret ID (login and password).

Since you are the owner of the page (and not eBay), you will collect all user data from this form. When you have collected any eBay user's ID, you can then login to the real eBay site and steal money from the users, or whatever (I'm not an eBay user myself).

So, all internet giants being threatened with this kind of fraud, they have become really concerned about phishing and they have phishing agencies hunting down every single phishing page. When they happen to stumble upon a Netdisaster link, what they see is a Netdisaster URL (http://www.netdisaster.com/...) displaying an eBay page.

Of course, it's the very purpose of Netdisaster choosing a website and targeting it with some (virtual) "weapon".

Although Netdisaster has no way of collecting user data in this process, although Netdisaster was not built to collect any sensitive information, although there might have been a giant spray can over the target-page, the phishing agency still thinks it's a phishing page.

After the Yahoo! incident, I had worked on Netdisaster scripts so that users could not send disaster URLs anymore. That should have prevented Netdisaster from its phishing effect. So I was quite confident. But it seems I failed on this point, since eBay based its complaint on a specific URL.
So what now?

For the time being, Netdisaster is down and I don't intend to re-open, unless there's some way of getting the site back online while being sure that no other phishing agency might come complaining again. I can't see how.

I might offer an new version for everyone to download and use offline...

As I said, my main issue is time... Netdisaster is a personal project, which I ran on my free time, between job and family. I still want to find a way for Netdisaster to be reborn, when I read feedback about kids being so disappointed...

However, if you have your own site or blog, you should still be able to use the Netdisaster-Yourself feature. Give it a try if you wish...

denis@netdisaster.com