Ever type in a URL incorrectly and wind up on some crazy pop-up ridden landscape of porn and sundries? Those "search" sites are bad enough, but try going to neoppets.com and see what Santa has for you... Microsoft has been tracking "typo-squatters" through its Strider Typo-Patrol Project. And they now have a tool so that you can track the worst offenders. The tool looks at a number of common typos: misspellings, missing dots and so forth. These common errors wind up making big bucks for the offenders, as they have an elaborate scheme of grabbing clicks, which can result in AdSense money (or other clickthrough payments). Hey, they're not scamming you for fun... Microsoft is being a good corporate citizen by throwing some of its research money at this problem, and the Strider tool is one of the first tools of its kind I've seen come out of the lab. Between this and the already-good anti-phishing tools from MS, Vista could really be chock full of consumer protection devices...

[Via eWeek]