Web thieves!

[Magmar]

So this is one of those things where I really know nothing about the legal laws surrounding internet copyright, but I just get a feeling this is a whole hella lot of illegal, yo.

Exhibit A: My school Rhode Island College's Web site.
Rhode Island College (http://www.ric.edu)

Exhibit B: Enter... Stanly University's Web site.
Stanly University (http://www.stanly.us/default.php)

They have the same... president as RIC, same... dorms, buildings, classrooms, and ... anything else you'd need to know about RIC.

What the heck?

For further weirdness:
Their "About Stanly" (http://www.stanly.us/info.php?id=1) is the EXACT SAME as the About RIC (http://www.ric.edu/aboutRIC/)!

I'm kinda at a loss for words, haha.

[Blademaster]

Maybe they're trying to double their Internet traffic... for some reason...?

[Master Rudy]

Well.....I was originally going to say that it's possible that the two schools might be affiliated with one another. However......

"Stanly University is located on a 180-acre campus in the Mount Pleasant section of Providence....."
"Rhode Island College is located on a 180-acre campus in the Mount Pleasant section of Providence....."

Two schools. One is in Cali and one is in RI. Both of them are located near Mount Pleasant and Providence on 180 acre campuses.

Yeah.....someone stole that shit as I highly doubt this is a one in a billion shot of two schools on opposite ends of the US being that similar in size and location. And since I personally never heard of Providence, CA I think we know who did it.

In fact upon closer inspection run a virus scan to be safe. The school in Cali is listing a phone number of 323-9088-554. While a typo is entirely possible bear in mind it's not using the .edu markup that schools normally use not to mention some hackers have set up fake websites in the past that look like real ones.

EDIT: Forget might.....I'm starting to think this IS a fake website of some sort with potentially nasty things on it:
http://www.stanly.us/detail.php?id=4
First off that's a news story from your school in RI. Second off there's CHINESE WRITING on parts of the page. Alert your own school ASAP and let them know someone has ripped off their webpage but tell them to use caution!
Why they'd want to use your school I have no clue. However something about all of this is striking me as off. My own scans bring back no threats but still.....I wouldn't spend too much time on that website.

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

Chinese writing? I wanted to do some research, although this info may be useless.


隆
prosperous, plentiful, abundant

炉
fireplace, stove, oven, furnace

掳
capture, seize

卤
salt

篓
bamboo basket

Seems quite random. Is 隆炉 a name or something? Source I used: The Unicode Consortium (http://www.unicode.org/)

[Jeff]

Fake school website?

It's a real-life South Harmon Institute of Technology!

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

Hehehe Jeff. I loved that movie, have watched it like 5 times, which is a lot given that it's an American college movie!


The Dean in ACCEPTED
You know, a lot of people say that college is the time when young men and women expand the way that they look at their world. When they open their minds to new ideas and experiences, and when they begin their long journey from the innocence of youth to the responsibilities of adulthood. Now isn't that a lot of horseshit!

[DarkestLight]

It is Tax/Fasfa season. Could be a easy way to gather financial information :o.

[Jeff]

OK, now that I looked at that page, I can explain the random Chinese characters. They all seem to be showing up where there should be quotes or apostrophes, which tend to have issues when a page is telling the browser that it's using a certain character encoding, but it's actually using a different one. I guess it's because word processors tend to replace the normal ASCII versions with left and right versions, which are non-ASCII.

Long story short, the Chinese characters aren't intentional, they're just there because the page got screwed up.

Still though, considering the page specifically mentions RIC by name several times, and the creators lacked the professionalism to do something as simple as make sure the character encodings matched up, it's most likely not a real college website.

[Telume]

Considering it's using .us and not .edu, I think we could have assumed that a while ago.

Advice doesn't change though, you may want to notify the Media Services dept. in your school (or similar).