amy alexander: Plagiarist, the elusive proprietor of plagiarist.org, became inspired by the ever-increasing scope of corporate takeovers. Realizing that the domain name has become a metaphor for corporation, Plagiarist set out to form the world’s largest corporation– by acquiring 27 of the world’s largest corporations into the plagiarist.org domain. The existing sites of corporations such as Microsoft, McDonald’s, and Starbucks, were given addresses within the plagiarist.org domain – i.e. microsoft.plagiarist.org, mcdonalds.plagiarist.org, starbucks.plagiarist.org, etc. The “Plagiarist Acquisitions” page listed all 27 of the acquired subdomains, with links to the corresponding websites under their new plagiarist.org addresses. If relative links were used within a given corporate website, visitors could traverse the entire website with the site’s plagiarist.org address continuing to appear in the location bar throughout. In June 1999, DuPont Company, apparently unhappy to discover search engines indexing their site under their new dupont.plagiarist.org address, threatened legal action from DuPont and the 26 other corporations against the art school where I am a faculty member. (IBM and GM subsequently contacted the school as well.) I was forced to remove the Plagiarist Acquisitions site, but I replaced it with documentation of the legal dispute (which DuPont also attempted to have me remove). Although I was forced to disable 26 of the 27 subdomain addresses, the one unofficially corporate acquisition, http://whitehouse.plagiarist.org is still functional as part of the plagiarist.org family.

Lazy about typing URLs in your Location bar? Go for shortcuts: http://www.altavista.com/ translates to http://www.av.com/ aka "av" (without the quotes) in your Location Bar. Any other shortcut ? Tell us.

We asked Rhizome people: >why you once changed from .com to .org ? Mark Tribe: We switched from Rhizome.com to Rhizome.org when we converted from a for-profit into a non-profit organization. We also changed the name of the organization from "Rhizome" to "Rhizome.org" because it's an efficient way of indicating that we are both a nonprofit and an Internet-enabled entity.

We asked Fuck.ru people: >why you changed from fuck.ru to fuckru.net ? Symerk Bogov: Franco Nero (SkeLeTroN), vladelec www.fuck.ru ne delal fuck.ru i ne chital, no nes otvetstvennost - on sdelal zapros v yandex na poisk svezhih ssilok na www.fuck.ru - i s udivleniem dlya sebya obnaruzhil, chto ego resurs vse rugaut kak stavshii beztalannim. Togda on zakril fuck.ru na karantin i skazal, chto vse hogoshie pisateli perehodyat na novii samii glavnii sait - www.podonok.ru, a vse plohie pust ubirautsa na vsyakie stranichki tipa yadurak.da-da.vsekozli.da.da.da.ru. Malokto ponyal, chto eto oznachalo vozrozhdenie - i vozvrat uvazhenia Runetom. Bolshinstvo duraleev perepugalos. Tusovatsa v gestbuke i schitat' sebya pisatelyami virazaya drug drugu vzaimnoye uvazhenie im bilo slishkom vazhno. Sredi nih okazalsa trudolubivii malchik s ambiciami, kotorii i zaregistriroval www.fuckru.net i stal prodoljat' te plohie tradicii, iz-za kotorih SkeLeTroN zakril fuck.ru. Ya obeshal etomu parnu slomat nos - i sdelau eto dlya razvlechenia, potomu chto on svoei aktivnost'u unizil 3 desyatka moih priatelei-literatorov. Tolko ya ne znau, kto on, pseudonim Pol Neuman. Etoi istorii primerno uzhe polgoda. Ya ustranilsa ot etogo resursa polnost'u, chtobi rebyatki priobreli samostoyatelnost. A potom zashel v ih gestbook i napisal im chtoby oni ne razbegalis ni v koem sluchae - potomu chto oni nam nuzhni, chtoby my mogli vsem govorit', chto est takoe nichtojnoe mesto v runete, gde mi sobrali vseh durakov, getto.

Domain Name Service (DNS) allow use of wildcards in hostnames, thus allowing virtually any domain to host a plethora of VirtualHosts. For example, if you own a domain named, hmmm... isgay.com, you can allow any host name to point to your actual website. Now let's pretend your homepage is a script that takes the hostname called as a parameter. Your URL is like : http://[arg].[arg2].[arg3].isgay.com/ As URLs are limited to 255 characters, it leaves you some space to mind something really disturbing... It's astonishing how fast news can spread online. Especially if they look like they were true while they feel like they're false.

Tout est dans l'URL / Everything is in the URL

Eryk Salvaggio : The actual web site is four frames, each frame linking to a different server. The web site name comes from the scrambling of the four servers: JODI, D2B, One38 and Kalx. Thought it may interest you.

An example of a peaceful solution. Solution for the 21st century.