Some companies such as Home Depot take a realistic approach to knock off, rogue and spoof web sites, after a knock off site jumped to over 20 thousand hits a day.

A number of well-travelled online news sites began posting links to homedespot, amused by Mr. Nugent’s knockoff of home renovation behemoth Home Depot Inc.’s Web site.

Home Depot isn’t worried.

Some companies, such as Home Depot, are unfazed by the publicity, even by the copying of its orange and white trademark colours on the Homedespot site. “We do not view it as a commercial matter. And we are not taking any action at this time,” said a company spokesman.

WalMart fought back legally.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., for example, fought sites wal-mart canadasucks.com and WalMart PuertoRicoSucks.com, registered by Newfoundland resident Kenneth Harvey, in an arbitration process in 2000. The world’s biggest retailer won the dispute — arguing that the company owned the insulting versions of its domain name — but that doesn’t seem to have afforded it sufficient peace of mind.

The Bentonville, Ark.-based corporation has bought up dozens of derisive names, including walmart-sucks.com, walmartsucks.com and walmartcanadasucks.com, as well as the .net and .org incarnations.

However, pursuing rogue web sites through legal means usually winds up generating more bad publicity for a company than the web site ever would.
Air Canada didn’t win any brownie points with consumers that way.
Canadian Tire wound up buying domain names.
This seems like the most reasonable response being taken by UAL.

Mr. Vassos advises companies to look for opportunities to use the criticism frequently aired through such sites.

UAL Corp.’s United Airlines has seen the wisdom in such thinking. For years it threatened to sue Jeremy Cooperstock, the one-time University of Toronto graduate student, now a professor of electrical engineering at McGill University, who set up untied.com to complain about the airline. But for the last few years the airline has chosen to work with untied.com. And Mr. Cooperstock passes all complaints the site receives on to the airline.

US-Canada Border
Frightened immigrants in the US on work visas are showing up at the Canadian border, overwhelming Canada customs and being turned back into the US only to be detained. The problem appears to be two-fold. Immigants are fleeing the US after the implementation of a new U.S. anti-terrorism policy requiring males from Pakistan and 24 other countries, most of them predominantly Muslim, to register with immigration authorities.
Canadian officials have been unable to process the immigrants right away, leaving them in limbo - and, some say, in danger of being arrested.
Hundreds were detained in Los Angeles this summer, causing rumors, flight and too many people showing up at the Canadian border.

Some of them, like the Lakhanis, stayed at the Salvation Army as they awaited appointments with Canadian officials. Advocacy groups say others were arrested by agents of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service as they came back across the border from Canadian customs.

Patrick Giantonio of Vermont Refugee Assistance said up to 40 detainees have been held at the Oneida County Jail in Utica, N.Y., in the last two weeks.

INS spokeswoman Amy Otten would not confirm or deny that.

“We don’t discuss where we’re detaining people,” she said. “We don’t give out any numbers.”

The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in Baltimore has been overwhelmed with calls from frightened refugees according to spokeswoman Anne Wilson.

She said she understood the motivation behind the stepped-up immigration enforcement, since the Sept. 11 attacks were carried out by Muslim extremists. But she said wholesale crackdowns likely would hurt law enforcement’s efforts to learn more about those seeking to harm the country.

“To get that intelligence, you need to make friends, not enemies,” she said.

Alberta Adoption Website
The province of Alberta has put profiles of adoptable children on a web site.
It has sparked a ’shop for a child’ discussion at MetaFilter.

Ebola
An outbreak of Ebola in the Congo, has killed 38 people, and 80% of a gorilla clan. It is likely going to spread and health officials are worried. They have been met with resistance from villagers who have faced this before.
In a 1997 outbreak, these villagers were mistreated by Guyanese troops sent in to contain the population and the spread of the killer disease. 95% of people who contact Ebola die.

Power Law
Clay Shirky’s article on web logs is spawning interesting counter-debate and a new tool to link up lesser known blogs. Sifry’s Alerts has designed Technorati 100, which targets lesser known blogs.

Live from the Blogosphere
Following in the wake of the Yale Blog conference Los Angeles will host a conference on blogging February 15th. The following speakers will attend.
Mark Frauenfelder, Heather Havrilesky, Evan Williams, Susannah Breslin, Doc Searls and Tony Pierce. More at boing-boing.