October 8, 1996
THE DAILY FED
www.huh?.com
How could that be?
Just before Dole announced his decision to name Jack Kemp as his running mate, a Virginia entrepreneur named Ron Fitzherbert guessed that Kemp would be chosen and then obtained the legal rights to the web addresses he thought the campaign would use. Then he approached the Republicans with an offer of his web services. The campaign already had its own web development team, so it rejected Fitzherbert's offer.
Because he had already obtained the rights to the names "www.dole-kemp.org" and "www.dole-kemp.com," he decided to have a little fun with them.
"It was done as a spoof thing to show a couple of friends," he told The Washington Post.
When a web surfer accesses one of the two pages Fitzherbert set up, a message appears:
Pssst . . . the past is over. Click below to make the right choice for the future . . ."
An arrow below the message, in bright yellow, leads to the Clinton-Gore home page.
Over 40,000 people have accessed Fitzherbert's prank sites.
[Webmaster note: Web sites described in this article are no longer operational.]
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