Dixie and "Liberian Embassy" sites

You may recall that the Liberian Embassy's official web site has been http://www.liberian-connection.com/embassy.htm and that the parent domain has been posting the stories about SRU clients' misfortunes in Georgia, clashing with the embassy's support of SRU as described in the embassy's site.

Some months ago there had been a pair of domains constructed to give the impression that they represented the embassy: www.liberianembassy.com and www.liberiaembassy.com. The information that those domains were not legitimate embassy web sites came from several staff members at the embassy, as well as the web master for the real embassy site. At the time, the Saint Regis accreditation page contained the correct phone number for the embassy but a link to one of the bogus embassy web sites.

After Aaron Kollie's statement concerning SRU was released in September, 2003, disclaimers were added to the bogus embassy sites to indicate that they were not directly connected to the Liberian government. SRU removed the link to the bogus embassy web page from its site.

It is now the case that both www.liberianembassy.com and www.liberiaembassy.com identify themselves as "the official website." Naturally, the sites include a list of "recognized" Liberian schools.

The embassy site at http://www.liberian-connection.com/embassy.htm is still up and running, but the news concerning SRU in the domain which houses it may not be to the liking of the operators of Saint Regis, Robertstown, James Monroe, the Branford, Liberty, and Mission Academies, and the National Board of Education. So perhaps they are glad to see the Sites-Formerly-Known-As-Bogus resuming their appearance as legitimate embassy sites.

The IP addresses for the two sites are

www.liberianembassy.com = 63.123.56.202
www.liberiaembassy.com = 216.171.217.79

The latter is a Foothill Net domain (this is a California ISP); the Foothill address space also holds domains for Saint Regis, James Monroe, Branford Academy, Liberty Prep, and Mission Prep.

It is interesting looking at the html source for www.liberianembassy.com/education.html. The page uses a "cascading style sheet" whose location is given in the source code as

file:///L:/Dixie%20-%20Liberian%20Emabassy/website/styles/stylesheet.css

Now, perhaps this is a style sheet popular in the southern U.S. but, given the information in Spokane a 'hot spot' for dubious degrees by Bill Morlin (November 30, 2003):

it seems entirely possible that "Dixie" is not a geographical reference, but instead the name of "a former Spokane real estage [sic] agent."

G

 

Saint Regis ISP now official Liberian Embassy ISP?

The "Liberian Connection" web site at www.liberian-connection.com no longer holds a link to the Liberian Embassy site (previously) housed in this domain. (The URL was www.liberian-connection.com/embassy.htm. There is still some material to be found there.) The site's news page still shows the Saint Regis stories which came out of Georgia.

The previously-unofficial sites www.liberianembassy.com (IP 63.123.56.202) and www.liberiaembassy.com (IP 216.171.217.79) seem to be where one goes to reach the embassy's web material now.

A WHOIS search returns a variety of IP addresses for the latter domain: 66.150.161.134, 66.150.161.141, 66.150.161.135 all came up in response to a query. Specifying 66.150.161.134 in a browser address window shows that this is a "Free URL Forwarding service."

So we seem to have some sort of redirection going on to hide the fact that this site may actually still live with the ISP that hosts some Saint Regis sites. Specifying 216.171.217.79 as the browser address does produce the stuff held by www.liberiaembassy.com.

G