(BTW, I feel like I need a shower just typing three k’s in a row)
A long time ago as a software engineer When Things Were Really Rotten With Programming The Web[SUP]®[/SUP] (something around 1995-1998 or so), I was researching domain names. All over the map, but eventually I was curious as to whether or not the racist organizations had pinned anything down yet.
So I typed in kkk.com and landed on naacp.org!!! And I stopped to think about this a bit.
Everyone in my small company of roughly 100 people were wondering about this. My first thought I think was right.
My Guess:
Someone purchased kkk.com and in an attempt to get the best possible price from them decided to provide the speed-up incentive of having their name drop people onto the NAACP in the meantime.
Does anyone else remember this? I cannot find it anywhere, even when googling it. It was brief, and pre-google I think. Everyone was alta-vista at the time.
If this is what happened, I sure hope they got a lot of money.
I can easily see a few alternatives to your story on how this got redirected to the NAACP. But first, I’d like to just tell those outside the U.S. that the NAACP is an abbreviation for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the KKK is an abbreviation for Ku Klux Klan, a white suppremicist group.
Now, one theory I have is that the NAACP snatched it up to prevent it from actually becoming the KKK’s site. This is completely logical as a method of prevention against people reading KKK propaganda and signing up with the KKK. Another theroy is someone thought it would be funny. Yet another theory is that a member of the NAACP bought it for the hell of it.
Really, there are a billion reasons that it could have ended up like that; it is the Internet after all.
All those were considered at the time. Remember though that it didn’t last----kkk.com did point to the KKK eventually. For some reason (I could be wrong) I find it unlikely that the NAACP (as an organization) would sell it to them. I can see all the other points, but certainly whoever had it would have considered the KKK’s desire to obtain it, and certainly would be able to guess that having it land on the naacp IP would be just so painful for them.
I’m wondering if anyone remembers this at all. I find it odd that I can’t seem to find it. It was very early in the internet timeline though, so many semi-obvious domains were still unclaimed.
Well, in that case, your theory is a possibility. One way to possibly find out more about it would be to look at the Way Back Machine at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php