Imagine that you’re a volunteer and trying to determine if this is the real web site for WABY-AM, which last we knew was a nostalgia music station on AM 900 in the Saratoga area called Saratoga Moon, but for some reason it is flagged as maybe a problem
Well, that looks “Legit!” click Accurate, and move on. If you can’t trust Dean, Frank and Sammy, who is left to trust?
Hold the phone. Hold on – the frequency of the station is 900 and the logo says 1160.
While not listening to talk radio, I’m adding more “smarts” to the station editor – looking up the IP address of the web server, and then seeing if it is located in an unexpected / unsafe place. Well, look here:
This web site is actually registered in Europe – and if you spend a few more seconds looking at the page, you’ll see it is written in German and seems to be a web site to get you to sign up for a hotel in Germany. In addition to hijacking the domain, they also grabbed an image
Right now that’s just annoying. But who controls that fake website? It would only take a minute to replace it with a rogue web site to launch an “internet terrorist attack”.
Looking deeper, the web server is located in a data center in England. However, the “owner” of those IP addresses is an entity called Future Hosting with this Business Address:
39555 Orchard Hill Place, Suite 600
Novi, MI 48375, US
which is this company
http://www.futurehosting.com/
Future hosting seems to have moved to Southfield, MI and not updated their RIPE records. The Novi address was a mail drop place. The Southfield address matches this company:
http://vpsdatacenter.com
So who actually controls the web server with the German hotel videos?
The Great American Firewall is coming. To some degree Google is already in that role, actively filtering out rogue web sites from their search results.
If you’re interested in the resolution, this is the current web site
http://www.wabyalbany.com/
The stations changed hands last year, and the new owner did a call sign swap between 900 and 1160. The 900 frequency was simulcasting a time/warner local news channel, and now appears to be the other way, although the station’s corporate web site doesn’t yet reflect the change.
Trust nothing.
Oh, and they are streaming 🙂
If you’re a radio station and you’re not paying performers to play their music, can you use their image on your website without their permission? What about the rights of the photographer who owns the copyright to his work?
In the past couple years, radio stations have been sued by an entity called National Photo Group, LLC and learned the hard way. The big player in this business for non-celebrity images – the ASCAP/BMI of photographic images is Getty Images – but that is the photographer’s rights, not the celebrity in the image.
The above “but we play their music!” is a red herring. Even if radio stations paid to play the music, that would not give the radio station the right to use the image of the singer on their web site.
On Linux, I’m mostly using Firefox and the default is to check with Google whether a web site is hosting bad stuff. It did catch one web site that appeared to have been taken over. The only content on the page was flash, which has been a cesspool of security flaws. I don’t know if it is or isn’t rogue at this point – part of experience is learning to not be curious and touch the stove to see how hot it is.
Hmmm…I never would have noticed. I will definitely start paying attention with an eye toward catching one. That would make my day!
Things are not always as they appear – I just looked at a religious broadcaster who is using an IP address assigned to central america, but the web server is actually located in Chicago IL in a big data center. My guess this is due to the shortage of IPv4 addresses which are now becoming a commodity to be bartered