Brian Dunham has a hot Internet business idea, but he worries that someone will steal it. So last month, the 31-year-old San Franciscan blocked potential competitors from finding his brand-new Web site.
When the rest of the world clicks on eframes.com, it sees a Web business that frames and ships digital photographs overnight. But four firms that Mr. Dunham views as likely rivals get only a dummy site sporting this message: "Coming in time for Christmas!"
Known to insiders as Web-access blocking, this maneuver is made possible by the growing ability of computer programs to identify Internet users. In a little-known trick -- technically called "domain-name identification" -- Web sites can secretly see where visitors are coming from the moment they click on. The site can then choose to let them in or not. Or it can put up a substitute site. Or it can send them somewhere else altogether.
Some companies are using this technique to elbow out competitors. Others
are displaying customized ads that only some viewers can see. For a month or so earlier this year, DoubleClick Inc., an Internet
advertising firm based in New York, furtively put up three different
editions of its home page. Most visitors saw one version, highlighting the
firm's accomplishments. Employees of a rival firm could see only another
version, with a special press release touting DoubleClick's capture of one
of the rival's customers. Clients being wooed saw only a third version.
"It's very stealth," says Christopher Saridakis, a DoubleClick vice
president. It also offers a reminder that going online is hardly a private affair.
"Most people think that browsing the Web is as anonymous as watching TV or
reading a newspaper. But it's becoming more like wandering around a trade
show with your name tag on," says Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters
Corp., a privacy advocacy and consulting firm. Even venture capitalists have to worry. New Internet firms have
surreptitiously watched which investors visit their sites, and how often.
This tracking tells them who is the most enthusiastic about their venture,
and thus whom they should pursue for money. "Absolutely, it was helpful,"
says Flint Lane, the president of a Princeton, N.J., firm that in January
began offering an online bill-paying service called Paytrust. Companies also use this intelligence to size up potential suitors in
acquisitions. "They huff out of the room, saying they're done, and then the
company sees lots of hits on their site from those same people. They can
predict they will be back," says Brad Burnham, general partner at AT&T
Ventures, of Basking Ridge, N.J. Cyberspace footprints Indeed, a sizable portion of the Australian government left footprints
on one hot site. To protest a new Internet content law, sex-site owner
Bernadette Taylor this summer posted a long list of agencies -- from the
Nuclear Science Department to Tourism Tasmania -- whose Internet addresses
showed up in her logs. Like all Web site operators, she could tell how much
time each agency visitor spent on her site. "Viewing patterns suggest this
was NOT research," she wrote about one agency. The White House and many government agencies also gather the Internet
addresses of everyone who visits them. They say it improves their Web
sites. Some also acknowledge that the data help catch hackers and
terrorists, who can be traced to their Internet service providers.
One federal agency has grown skittish. The Internal Revenue Service says
it has stopped collecting its viewers" addresses because of concerns that
it was risking an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. For companies, however, this viewer information has endless
possibilities. Entire ad campaigns have been spun from viewing Web site
viewers. For example, Al Noyes, senior vice president of marketing and
sales at SmarterKids.com Inc., says he discovered that
contrary to expectations, people were shopping at his children's-products
site from office computers. "So we focused our ads on working moms" and not
housewives, he says. Blocking -- and its related tactics -- begins with the digits that
identify every Web user. These unique numbers can't always be traced, and
an estimated 30% of Internet users remain anonymous by using big services
like America Online Inc., which
effectively shields its customers behind one Internet access point. One AOL
user looks just like another to the digit tracers. But government agencies, organizations and companies often have their
own Internet hookups, and when their employees go to the Web from their
desks at work, they might as well shout out their employer's name.
Operators of the Web site they are visiting can simply look up the
visitor's Internet address in any of several reverse directories available
free online (www.arin.net is one) and see the corporate name or agency behind the address. Conversely, the site operator can look up a rival company's Internet number
and instruct its Web site to block any visitors coming from that
address. It takes only five minutes to fix up a Web site to do this. No special
software is needed, just simple codes that are familiar to most Web site
administrators. When specified numbers come knocking, the computer can
block, steer or misdirect the visitor in a matter of milliseconds. Some of the first to use this blocking technology were child
pornographers, followed by hate groups and people who sell stolen goods.
They looked up the digits used by government investigators and then
programmed their Web sites to screen them out. But law enforcement
officials soon caught on to the tactic, and a cat-and-mouse game
ensued. When Detective Michael Menz of the Sacramento (Calif.) Valley Hi-Tech
Crime Task Force sidestepped the block by purchasing Internet access
through a local firm, for example, the pornographers tracked him down again
and blocked that address as well. He now uses an undercover account, and
says the last site he noticed that was blocking law enforcement agencies
peddled pirated knockoffs of the film "The Blair Witch Project." 'Couldn't let go' "It didn't bother us at all," says Benjamin Frueh, product manager at
Allaire, which eventually discovered the block. "It's flattering for people
to think you're enough of a competitor that they have to take these
steps." Some blocking is pure spoof. A few months ago, Oracle Corp. employees who clicked
on the Web site of their smaller rival Siebel Systems Inc., of San Mateo,
Calif., were whisked to Siebel's job opportunities page -- the only part of
the Web site they could access. "It was especially funny because at the
time they were trying to hire Oracle employees," an Oracle spokesman said.
Siebel declined to comment. In the same vein, Cisco
Systems Inc, computer-networking giant,
showed a holiday party picture to some of its competitors -- before sending
them to the hiring page. Later, Cisco used a reverse-blocking technique to
defend itself. A competitor was sending its Web site viewers to an outdated
Cisco Web page in order to boast that its product was better. So Cisco
grabbed all those referred viewers as they came in and bounced them to the
updated site. "People are getting a lot more sneaky," agrees Peter Corless, an
Internet services architect with Cisco. Much of the blocking that occurs is aimed at thwarting corporate
espionage, and some security experts scoff at its ineffectiveness. A
blocked executive can simply use a home computer to get into the site. "The
good corporate spy is never going to go directly from A to B," says Mark
Fabro, director of professional services of Secure Computing Corp. "I'm going to use a private account." But often a blocker just wants to slow down any rival snoops until a new
venture gets rolling. Says Dunham, the picture framer, "The longer we
can keep people from jumping on it, the better." Advertisers have discovered their own uses for knowing who is visiting a
Web site. They can pay for their ads to be shown only to select viewers.
International Business Machines Corp, for example, recruited employees by
posting ads on Web sites frequented by students. Every school -- whose
Internet address would be detected by the Web sites -- got its own pitch:
"Is there life after Boston College?" 'This cool thing' Reali of ExperTelligence suggests that Web sites will soon be able
to auction ad space based on the identity of incoming viewers. "If you can
see it's really Bill Gates coming to your site, who would bid the highest
to show him an ad on golfing?" he says. Web sites can't identify Gates,
for now, but they can spot someone coming from Microsoft. Federal agencies only recently began posting privacy notices divulging
that they gather Internet addresses. No law requires such disclosure, and
only some companies have voluntarily followed suit. Inevitably, all this snooping around is prompting even casual Internet
users to start masking their identity. Companies are selling services that
promise to make any computer user entirely anonymous. But these programs
have Internet addresses, too. And since computer hackers also use identity
shields in their mischief, Web sites are starting to block these as well
when they can identify the shields' own addresses. "If you're not going to show me who you really are, why should I give
you any service?" says Michael Lambert, a computer security expert.
"It's interesting how naive people are about the footprints you leave in
cyberspace," Burnham adds.
Technology firms have been in the forefront of blocking competitors from
sniffing around their Web sites. In August 1995, ExperTelligence Inc., a
Web development firm in Santa Barbara, Calif., noticed its trial software
being openly downloaded by a rival, Allaire Corp., of Cambridge, Mass. "I couldn't let it go," says ExperTelligence Executive Vice President
Robert Reali. So he looked up Allaire's Internet access code and designed a
special Web site that only Allaire would see. It omitted the real Web
site's list of customers, and offered only an old version of software to
download.
The technology is also allowing some very personal ads to turn up in
seemingly public places. DoubleClick, the Web advertising company, once
posted this banner on hundreds of sites throughout the Internet:
"Congratulations on the twins, John Nardone." But the only people who could
see the banner were Nardone and his colleagues at Modem Media, of
Norwalk, Conn., a DoubleClick client. "I was out for a few days and had 50
people forward me this cool thing," says Nardone. "They were seeing it
all over the Web."
