I received this on the Ohio Washington List, & I thought my other genealogy
friends would like to know about this as well...
Best Regards,
Patrick
-----Original Message-----
From: Mdmcounty(a)aol.com [mailto:Mdmcounty@aol.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2000 9:23 PM
To: OHWASHIN-L(a)rootsweb.com
Subject: [OHWASH] Familydiscovery Scam
To all Subscribers:
There has been a lot of postings about the site:
www.familydiscovery.com on many of the lists. I feel that I should make you
all aware that this site is a subscription site that is charging for access
to free sites. As far as anyone can tell this site has no original
information of any kind.
It uses a process called "shrink wrapping" that causes any page displayed to
look as if it is their site. You can see an example of shrink wrapping by
visiting
http://www.askjeeves.com. No matter what link you choose the
askjeeves information is displayed on your screen. The same is true of the
familydiscovery site.
What this site is doing is not illegal, but in my opinion, it is certainly
unethical.
Here is the latest word from our TNGenWeb list regarding
FamilyDiscovery.com:
FamilyDiscovery.Com (
http://www.familydiscovery.com) is a commercial
genealogical venture which *charges* subscribers to view *free*
genealogical and historical data.
The data is *not* FamilyDiscovery.Com's, but "ours" (we Internet
researchers whose transcriptions have been uploaded to the Internet).
FamilyDiscovery.Com has done this by use of "frames." You pay to access
their site where you will find links to various databases (births,
marriages, deaths, wills, deeds, census, tax lists, obituaries, etc.).
When you click the links, you are taken to HTML pages *off*
FamilyDiscovery.Com's site, including USGenWeb Project county and state
pages and government pages (A couple of days ago, their "What's New"
page listed only TSLA sites).
The catch is that
FamilyDiscovery.Com does not tell you that you are
being taken "off-site" to free areas of the Internet, but instead uses
"frames" to keep you trapped in what "looks like" their site.
Both
RootsWeb.Com and USGenNet's SysAdmins are aware of the situation,
and the initial *unofficial* response has been that there is little that
can be done at *server level* that won't possibly also result in other
problems, including busting our own frames (if any) or locking out
"legitimate" visitors to our site, and that it would be easy enough for
FamilyDiscovery.com's folks to just keep changing IP's, etc. (always a
step ahead of us).
Various government agencies (right down to local police departments)
have been contacted, but in the meantime, we can't even know if our own
sites are being hit unless we pay to look at their sites....
Personally, I think that the deception is the worse part of the whole thing.
The idea of supplying someone else's work in such a way as to make it appear
as your own is false representation. That is my opinion. Just remember,
you
can get the same and a lot more from Cyndy's List - and she never charges
anything for the same thing.
http://www.cyndislist.com/
<A
HREF="http://www.cyndislist.com/">Cyndi's List of Genealogy Sites
on the
Internet</A>
Maryann Dixon Moseby
Listkeeper
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