F—ked in Park Slope just got f—ked!
Someone has hijacked one of the neighborhood’s most popular (and most ascerbic) blogs, replacing the site’s main page with an advertisement for pornography.
Details are sketchy — the blog’s founder, Erica Reitman, has so far been unreachable — and there’s no way to access the old site, which featured raucous commentary about life in the Slope.
But this Interweb takeover was completely legal — Reitman’s lease on the domain name fuckedinparkslope expired today, and someone bought the website out from under her.
“Someone probably saw that the domain was almost expired — they’re called ‘domain squatters,’ ” said Greenpoint web developer John McKinney. “[Squatters] can do two things with a domain. If someone forgot to renew it, he can hold it for ransom and sell it back. If the person doesn’t want it anymore, then they just scored a domain with some history.”
Worse, it’s nearly impossible to find out who the hijacker is, and he or she probably only paid about $10 for the website at the instant that it expired.
McKinney noted that the pornography on the current site is probably an automatic placeholder, generated by another computer because of the dirty language in the domain name.
For now, Reitman is working on getting the site back and is relaying messages to her readers on her Twitter page.
“I’m freaking the f—k out right now,” she wrote at about 4:30 pm, adding, “It wasn’t a hackerm but we’re working on fixin’ it, pronto!”
She also set up a temporary site that mirrors her defunct blog at fuckedinparkslope.squarespace.com.
Such ’Net hijinks happen all the time, even to big Coney Island landowners. Last year, Joe Sitt’s website, thefutureofconeyisland.com, was hijacked and redirected to the indispensible Belgium-based porn site, sexeporno1.com.
Sitt had let the site lapse like Reitman — though it’s unclear whether Reitman let it go on purpose or not.
The greatest example of cyber squatting was two years ago, when former President George W. Bush’s archives website, georgewbushlibrary.com, expired, and a group of domain squatters bought it for $10 — then sold it back to the Bushies for $35,000.
