Pitfalls of the Anonymity of the Internet :

A NOTE ABOUT NEO-NAZISM AND ITS EXPLOITATION OF THE PALESTINIAN ISSUE

Neo-Nazi and other racist /anti-Semitic sites have seized upon the issue of Palestine as a Trojan Horse, professing solidarity with Palestine to further their own antithetical agendas. Such sites sometimes host pages or media that may appear reputable by themselves on quick perusal, and well-meaning people may disseminate them unaware of the domains on which they are hosted, or the symbolism they carry. As an example, a video may look very much like a real news clip, but whereas the original clip would say "and then the soldiers opened fire", the bogus one would say "and then the Jews opened fire". I have taken great care to assure that no such page or media is herein linked; however, if any link in my site is found to lie within such a domain, please email me.

I hope the section below will be of help to people who are not familiar with the structure of URLs.

 

URLs ("links") will begin with www. or http:// or http://www. (most browsers assume the http://)

The domain will end with any of the many extensions, the most common of which are .com, .net, .org, .edu, and some newer ones such as .biz, and .info. Sites may also use extension identifying a specific country.

Click here for a list of country extensions. Theoretically (though not assuredly), such a country-specific extension will tell you the country origin of a site.

Specific pages within a site will be preceded by a slash /. A page may end in .html or .htm, or just with the slash, or even with nothing. A direct link to media (video or sound) will have different extensions, the most common being .mpg, .mp3, wmv, .wma, .ra, .ram, and .mov, these specific to the type of file and what program your computer will, by default, use to play it.
Below is the simplest url.
Note that there are no periods and no slashes within the name itself (you will often see a slash at the end).

An example of this would be www.palestine.org.nz/
This url is to a specific page within a domain. As on a computer, the file might be organized
within one or more folders.

An example of a link directly to a page within a site is http://www.jfjfp.org/government.htm
If the actual domain is a reputable site, such as bbc.com, and assuming it is not a site that resells space within it, a url from that site should be reputable. However, harmless sounding links may appear on an undesireable domain. In this case be wary of the content of the link and of the site's motivation for putting it out. (For legal reasons I will not offer an example of this.)
Further, some hate groups may put their file within a folder with a disarming name. In the hypothetical example below, the domain has nothing whatsoever to do with BBC News -- they have simply used the term to label their folder. Ignore the folder name, as it has no meaning. Look at the core domain. It alone is relevant.

If you don't know what the core domain is, remove everything from the address after the extension (in this case, for example, you would remove <bbc-news/rachael-cory.mpg>).

 

Hit <ENTER> after removing everything after the extension to have your browser go to the home page of the site, or hosting site.
Some sites do not have their own domain, but instead buy space within another site, as a "sub-web". This is quite fine -- there is nothing wrong or suspect about it. Just be aware that the hosting domain does not necessarily have anything to do with what you are seeing.
Internet providers often allot their subscribers such a page.
And a "sub-web" may also look like this, the site you are viewing being before the hosting domain, separated by a period.
An example of this is the excellent blog http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com , in which Lawrence of Cyberia has hosted his site on www.blogs.com, and lawrenceofcyberia.com is a registered but inactive domain unrelated to the blog site. Whereas domain names are of course globally unique, the subdomain names within them must be unique only to that domain.