Slashdot Mirror
Australian Idol And ISP Censorship
fembots writes "Teenage fans of the new Australian Idol Casey Donovan rushed to the homepage of a dead gay porn icon with the same name when a URL was advertised in major newspapers without the .au country code. ISP BigPond took matters to its own hand by redirecting millions of its subscribers' requests back to the Idol's website. On top of that, BigPond lodged a formal complaint with the Australian Broadcasting Authority on the basis Mr Donovan's site may contain X-rated material or material that would be denied classification by the Office of Film and Literature Classification."
What's your point?
The complaint is one thing (I don't presume to tell Australians how their laws and enforcement thereof should work) but the redirection strikes me as an entirely sensible compromise favoring usability over cybergeezer purity.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
While fans of the dead Casey Donovan might be upset, this seems to be a legitimate thing bigpond to do. It's pretty clear that the vast majority got sent to the site they wanted to see, and in a few weeks/months everything can be returned to normal, and gay porn fans can get their Casey back.
It's not a desirable thing but I subscribe to the cock-up (for want of a less apposite phrase) theory on this one. No-one's getting stiffed (ditto), its just an horrendous accident.
Having said that, by own sensibilities mean I'm far more offended by Simon Cowell than I am by the goatse.cx guy.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It's worth noting that the incorrect URL was published in an advertisement run by telecommunications giant Telsta, who, as well as being an Idol sponsor, also own BigPond.
Hence it's less suprising that the ISP arm of their company reacts to minimise the damage, rather than an independent ISP doing this out of goodwill.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
Isn't it a violation of Internet access contracts to re-direct URLs at the level of Big Pond?
If not, it sure is scummy.
Mr Donovan's site, which has been running for a number of years, features a naked frontal picture of the erstwhile adult star. A government source looking into the matter described an aspect of the picture of Mr Donovan as "frighteningly large".
The same source added that "heads will roll" over the incident.
"Frightenly large full frontal nude porn" and "heads will roll" all in the same sentence.
*ouch*.
so thats why I was directed to that Australian idol site...
It sounds more like good customer service.
If you don't want your ISP doing things like this then don't use a big mainstream one that caters to the great unwashed masses.
Is this the preview site for Shrek 3? I was genuinely scared, give me dead gay people any day over this. This could be the next memetic nasty URL.
Shocking. I hope her singing voice makes up for it.
*shakes head*
I am a bastard.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
So now we have a private corporation (ISP) deciding on its own, what people actually want or what they should be viewing. It was bad enough having governments making decisions for us, but this... I can see it now, your with Time Warner, well we knew that what you actually meant to do was go to this sponsor's web site.
Finally a link would have been posted on the front page of /. that wouldn't have caused a slashdotting!
That is not the problem at all. Did you RTFA?
You just need to learn how to type.
whitehouse has been a pornographic magazine for over 20 years, their website is a natural extension of that hence the
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
When her singing career goes down hill they usually turn to more sordid forms of making the headlines, so the complaint might be reversed in 12 months!
:-)
/. doesn't read anything it publishes and does ok! :-)
Although it would be a very nasty fetish site by the looks of it... *shudder*
Seriously... she could land a part in shrek 3 just for saving on CGI. A bit of green face paint and that guy out of bro-sis, and you have a winner!
Seriously, you cannot just funnel arbitary web traffic how you want because the DNS system isn't "just how you want".
Pay someone to proof read your url's, or suffer the consequences. I mean,
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I wonder how good old whitehouse.com would do over there??
[insert sig file here]
I don't which is more obscene, a dead gay porn star web site or Casey Donovan. My god, she would make a freight train take a dirt road if she was standing in the tracks. I thought PAL was supposed to better resolution than NTSC. How could you Australians pick such a beast. Were you drunk? Oh, never mind...
BigPond is a known spamhaus. They've ignored hundreds of complaints from me, over the years. I'm not at all surprised they'd also be enemies of free speech. Combine that with high prices and shitty service, and what do you have? One hell of a lousy ISP.
Kids are tougher than you think and changing heaven and earth for them isn't necessarily in their best interest.
Are you serious? And exactly how is it a problem that anyone can register a domain name?!
And why is a mistyped domain name any less legitimate than a correctly typed one.. who's to say which is mistyped and which is correct even? If they both played by the rules, and didn't force anybody to come to the site, why are one or the other at fault?
And what does either of those issues have to do with this story?
MODERATOR!!
http://www.haxwell.org
Let's face it, the vast majority of viewers for that site will be kids (based on the published URL, not coz they are after a porn site :-). As a result, I would rather Bigpond redirects users in the short term then getting a whole lot of parents jumping up and down demanding that the Internet be censored.
Frankly, i think the long term benefits far outweight the short term 'loss of rights' issues.
A Big ISP pushes their services via a Big media hype, Idols, by advertising a winner-Idol's site.
.au extention, pretty major slip, the 'net is bigger then down under mate. They also fail to check if similar names are used on the 'net by people whom they wish not to associate with.
They however cock up: they fail to publish the
And after all these blunders, they file a complaint because a website exists, with a -similar- name, about a dead Gay Porn star being indecent?
So they -steal- the clickies to the dead porn star, claiming it really, probably, is their clickies...
How weird is that? I must be misunderstanding this article.. yeah?
If I was the Dead Gay Porn Star, id sue BACK, for re-directing -my- traffic to -their- website.
Thats like stealing my mail, claiming the sender really did not want to send it me. That might be true, but how does that justify stealing someone elses mail, or traffic?
"/Dread"
... she suspiciously looks like Ron Jeremy without the mustache.
I can see why they did what they did and I can see that it's probably prevented a huge number of complaints etc etc However. The site that sprang up when they punched in the .com URL was NOT the one that is supposed to come up (the content of the site doesn't matter a jot). What we have here is a precedent where an ISP has decided not to show you the page you asked for, but rather the page they thought you should look at - and without telling you.
Maybe a slightly better solution would have been to tick up a page stating the cock-up with the printed URL, that this was a temporary measure and asking whether you wished to go to the .com or .com.au site.
I think the point I'm trying to make is that this (although done for innocent reasons I'm sure) is worse than chinese-style site blocking. Imagine if you tried to look for something mildy subversive and your friendly big-brother ISP quietly substituted it for propaganda (and you never realised).
Several years ago the Government of New Brunswick (The Canadian province, not some place in NJ USA) issued a bunch of "safety cards" to elementary school children. These cards had colorful pictures and good messages to warn kids about the dangers of drugs, etc, etc.
One card of interest warned about the dangers of internet strangers and had an image of a snake peeking out of a computer.
Now New Brunswick is an offical bi-lingual province (English/French) and all of the cards had to be bi-lingual. So to cut on production costs they would use words that where the same or similar in french and english when possible.
So back to the dangers of the internet. This card had the innocent looking url anaconda.com to go along with the snake in the internet theme(if it's the same as it was I don't recommend for work viewing). Well the url went to a nice S&M site with a very umm colorful splash page.
The big ISP/Telco here immediately blocked the site at the request of the government.
Personally I love these PR nightmares for the entertainment value.
Lol yeh shes pretty ugly, and her singing voice is also crap... dont blame me though, you'd have to be stupid to watch that crap :p
My girlfriends name is heather boyle and told me to google her when we met, so I did- here's the first link- NSFW
I'm not really sure what my point was, but I thought this was somewhat related.
people make mistakes with url's all the time- hell, Cheney even did it during the debate with factcheck.org
and then there's always the whitehouse site that's been screwing up kids, parents and teachers for 7 years
of course none of this changes the fact that the isp should keep their fucking hands out of what their client host as long as it's not spam or child porn.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
If they discovered that a subversive person was actually aware of the similar URL, and _intentionally_ provided it for publication.
all that I really have to say about his is about how hard I laughed when I read this. "Teenage fans of the new Australian Idol Casey Donovan rushed to the homepage of a dead gay porn icon with the same [on accident]" has to be funniest quote of the year. though I think its riddiculous that ISP BigPond redirected them back to the "correct" site. this should not be the ISPs responsibility. its a mix up on account of the "Major [unnamed] Newspaper." I visited http://www.caseydonovan.com.au/ and instantly felt retarded when it loaded completely and the music started playing. I don't want to sound harsh, but it sickens me when I see the stupid things that people use the internet for. children's entertainment, snuf, TV shows, and most of all the commercial ads. when did the internet of information and free speech turn into the comercial-net of kiddy-porn, barney, and profiting gluttons? A long time ago...too long ago to make it all right again.
1001100 1100101 1100001 1110110 1100101 1001101 1111001 1000010 1101001 1110100 1110011 1000001 1101100 1101111 110111
...the propogation of errant domain names into the media by Telstra was just an exercise in gaining publicity at the expense of morality.
I mean, what better way to solidify the name in the eyes of teenage girls than to have news story after news story directing them to -- or explaining how people were being mistakenly directed to -- a website which features an image of a large penis (and the male human it's attached to).
Very clever... and to top it off, Telstra BigPond get to be seen as making the internet safer for young girls. It's a win win win scenario.
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
... a story about dodgy URL's to be read at work,
I am currently posting this on his home computer after being escorted of works premise with p45[1] in hand[2]
[1] P45 - in the uk a slip to say "you're fired" (has tax details etc.. on it).
[2] My excuse and I'm sticking to it
With tongue firmly in cheek
Jaj
After your nefarious actions my gay 14 year old son was redirected towards a Pop Idol site and has turned quite banal. His mother is currently sobbing with shame at the trite, pre-packaged and artistically shallow lyrics he is now often found to be singing around the house. I can no longer even look my neighbours in the eye after they complained he was playing some auto-tuned squawker on his stereo as he washed my car last week. yours, a distraught father.
I'm all for them blocking access to the offensive web site to "protect" their customers for inadvertent exposure to objectionable content, but it seems to me that the redirection amounts to domain hijacking. Remember, in most cases of domain hijacking, it hijackers are promoting totally unrelated content. The fact that people correctly typing in the dead porn stars web address would get the "Idol" website amounts to free advertising, however small in scale. It's one thing to say "We understand it's likely that our customers might end up viewing objectionable material because of an unfortunate typo, so we're protecting them". It's an entirely different thing to say "We know you typed in URL A, but we're pretty sure you want unrelated URL B, so we're going to send you there."
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
This would not be an issue if the idiots said the CORRECT address on air, printed the correct address in the paper and said the correct address over the radio.
This is NOT the kind of mistake that happens by accident, somewhere some people wanted this to happen for a laugh.
Here is the link to the original Casey Donovan for those interested ;)
Sindri Traustason.
The Moral Entrez: "The Internet has become an important public space and to ensure the ability of our citizens to browse without being attacked by disgusting, vile content, it has become a necessity to actively prohibit webservers from abusing the Internet public space and must adopt fair, yet effective filtering for all websites reachable by our citizens."
The Liberal Conscience: "While we believe we must preserve the freedoms of the Internet we also think some kinds of content are too objectionable and too often make their way into the common browsing experience to allow public webservers to remain unregulated. So, we must adopt fair, yet effective filtering for all websites reachable by our citizens."
And then will come the licenses, and then the market for licenses, and then the consolidation of licenses, and then we will have to look for a new decentralized medium.
Ah well, nothing lasts forever.
I see a growing trend towards this kind of crap. Value judgements: well OUR users think they want to go there, but WE know better - we will send them here instead, Internet standards be damned. So what if in *this particular case* most of them really did want to go to the idol site? That doesn't mean next time it will be the same.
Trends like this is how big chunks of the Internet could become compartmentalized and commercialized and ultimately no longer adhere to common standards. The next big thing could be ISPs selling redirects to other sites. (stranger things have happened).
Type a URL and the results of where it takes you vary depending on which ISP you have. Fun.
"BigPond's Middleton said the ISP made the complaint to the ABA so as to 'leave no stone unturned' in a bid to cover its ass^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H protect the interests of Australian teenagers."
The person who chose the Australian Idol's URL should share in the blame. When registering a .com.au domain, one should realize that a good percentage of visitors will accidentaly type it in with just a .com at the end. The same goes for people registering .net or other non-.com domains. A good webmaster should be aware that since .com is what the majority of people are used to, a portion of their traffic will end up at the matching .com domain. That's why .com domains resell for much higher prices than other domains. They should have realized this and checked out where the .com version of the domains they were considering pointed to, especially for a site targeted torwards children.
This incident got the publicity, but I'll bet that before this, there were a lot of people trying to get to this site and ending up at the porn site.
Perhaps BigPond should also redirect subscribers to CaseyDonovan.com.au when they try to look up tubgirl
Which is exactly why the cybersquatters at whitehouse.gov need to be shut down. They're giving the real whitehouse a bad name.
The Age newspaper reports that Telstra/BigPond lodged the complaint primarily so "to enable it to advise web-content filtering providers about the site's content and to have it blocked for customers who subscirbed to filtering services.
Because the site is R-rated, instead of X-rated, and hosted in the United States, it cannot be taken down or blocked."
Egg on Telstra's face & damage limitation, that's all I'm drawing from this at the moment.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
www.caseydonovan.com without any particular .html page extension takes you to a big blue page asking if you're sure you want to look at adult material, including the word gay (and porn star) 5 or six times.
THERE IS NO PHOTO.
This is pretty fucking stupid.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
The ISP's motives in implementing the redirection are good. They are trying to correct a mistake of their parent company, and conveniently redirecting the vast majority of users to the site they actually intended, and away from one they'd rather not see.
However, a precedent legitimizing silent redirection is a real problem. People should get what they asked for, precisely, not what some editor thinks they want, well meaning or not.
Cases like this clearly call for some correcting measure. Goldcd suggested a good solution, redirecting users to a 'There's been an error, which site do you really want?' page. Only a little inconvenient, and provides an alert and a choice to the user.
Mod the parent up.
I wonder if you could use the same argument to redirect those that went to factcheck.com instead of factcheck.org after Dick Cheney mentioned the wrong site in his debate? Think about it. Lots of those that went to the wrong site were probably offended by what they saw. At the time, factcheck.com was an anti-bush site. So I'm sure that lots of those that went there were Bush/Cheney supporters and were quite offended by what they saw. Would it be acceptable if the ISP of factcheck.com forward requests to factcheck.org, because "That was the site that most of the users really wanted"? If that is not acceptable, then what really is the difference.
Ok, being a parent, I would have preferred keeping my kids from seeing Mr. Donovan's "large" picture. But the point is, this can open up a really big can of worms.
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Don't want to check to closely whilst working on client site.
C. Pornstar Donovan's posthumous agent should file complaints against both the ISP for routing *all* traffic to C. Teenidol Donovan's website, and the newspapers for advertising their porno site as the other site. Then the agent should settle with no damages. I dunno about Australia, but in the US, trademark owners must "vigorously defend" their marks against "dilution": confusion of their mark with others, or with other trade - or *lose* the trademark exclusivity rights. One could argue that C. Teenidol Donovan's agent must do likewise, or lose their own trademark. Then trademark vultures could use the Teenidol's mark to market anything they like, *including gay porn*.
The people who screwed up, the newspapers with the wrong URL, should have to publish a retraction. There are little or no actual damages. And since the Pornstar site assumedly isn't suitable for children, though it's public on the Internet, this was bound to happen - a few hits at a time, or a wave of misguided teenyboppers like this. If lost parents ask me for driving directions to Disneyland, and I give them directions to Mickey's S&M Palace instead, *I* am responsible, though the other parties should work together to ensure their markets don't cross, to their mutual detriment.
--
make install -not war
(it's a Simpsons reference)
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
So with reckless abandon they set out to prove that, we have the technical ability to censor the internet, and we have the will to censor the internet. Bye bye common carrier. :>
I wonder if that was considered when they decided this. Should they now have all url's classified by the ABA?
Does this mean that http://www.whitehouse.com/ traffic will be directed to http://www.whitehouse.gov/?
The Houkster "Oh yeah brother, what you gonna do when Houk O' Mania runs wild on you? Besides wet your pants in laughte
I dont see why this ISP had to come in and play savior? It seems to me the person that miss-typed the URL should have been held responsible.
So does this mean that ISP's can now step in and change any URL to point somewhere else, just because they feel a moral duty?
Is that REALLY how you would word entering a gay porn site?
DO you need protection to enter?
v.
I thought the only political thing dead people did was vote democrat. Dienfranchised cadavers for Kerry in '08!
Haha
What about the fine purveyors of gay porn being sent to a site of some fat oz chick who cant sing? Will somoone please think of the children!!!!
We do have .com.br, .gov.br, .edu.br, .nom.br (=real people name), .psi.br (=internet service providers), .... and many more.
.br only.
ITOH, our universities and research institutions have the right to have
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
You _can_ sue an ad agency for some sort of action like this, provided you can prove it was malicious.
But it is ultimately the site owners' duty to pay the bandwidth bill. The bandwidth provider doesn't care how the traffic was directed to your site, and whether it was wanted or not. At no point does the ad agency enter into that contract.
If they can get any money back by suing for damages, I suppose that's the fairest outcome.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I called a 1-800 number once, and got a recording. It went something like this:
"The number you have dialed, 1-800-nnn-nnnn, has been erroniously advertised to two different companies. To reach company A, press 1. To reach company B, dial the correct number, 1-800-abc-defg."
An earlier respondant suggested the same idea for web pages that were mistakenly advertised.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Do you allow them to roam the streets at night without supervision? Sorry, Charlie, but your kids are going to eventually experience "the stress of life" and "porn," too.
As a parent, you have a choice: either teach them how to deal with that stuff at an early enough age so that they get a good education from you or you can shelter them so they don't have to learn about it until they get out on their own. We call the latter the "Freeway to Failure(TM) method of parenting."
Yeah, right.
And this is directed at teenagers? What makes you _POSSIBLY_ think that any one of those teens will go "ya know- I'd love to see some kid sing rather than some hardcore American arse"... Try adding a few words like "gay porn" and maybe you'd loose a lot of those teenagers... or gain them... who knows. -M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Worse, the evildoers at whitehouse.gov have been known to engage in the same activities as the organization at whitehouse.com, which is a clear trademark violation. They must be stopped!
How many more of these stories are we going to have to read about before anyone starts using the .kids domain names.
This has been amply proved by history. Almost every dictatorship in the last century had noble ideals at the beginning. The problem is when people start thinking that the ends justify the means.
Then, in the end, anyone who complains will be shot as a "revisionist counter-revolutionary enemy of the people", or whatever is the accepted speech of the dictatorship. Remember that quotation by some guy named Niemoeller (sp?) that goes like this: "first they came after x, I wasn't X and I didn't care, etc, and when they came after me there was no one left to care".
Well, it theoretically just might land them on some Colombian website instead, but as the .CO ccTLD is far from as popular as is .COM, I suppose the URL most likely wouldn't work anyway.
I mean if people are going to jail for what's on their own PC then why the fuck can't we regulate the carriers?
Why the fuck not?
Lots of fans are undoubtly using the various search engines to find their "idol". Does that mean the Australian ISP should feel compelled to change the result pages ?
here is the actual redirecting link
You should be able to see the redirecting page here
A guy named Goatse Giver is chosen as the leading actor for the sequel: "Titanic II - a different ending", and all the teens around the globe start googling for this new actor.
the redirection strikes me as an entirely sensible compromise
/. would be up in arms, lambasting the ISP for its evil censorship.
Not to pick on you personally, but I see a lot of support in this thread for the decision to redirect. I wonder how different the reaction here would be it was Jenna Jameson instead of some gay dude.
If this were hetero pr0n we were talking about, I have a feeling all of
I was gonna mod you -1 troll, then I got the joke so I was gonna mod you +1 funny, then I realized anonymous users can't mod.
Telstra doesn't give a rat's arse about 'protecting' people from anything. It is solely concerned with profits and public image, and can not afford to be seen standing idly by, in effect endorsing this because as unfortunate as it is, our society loves to place blame on others for anything that parents have miserably failed to teach their children about.
I would be extremely suprised if the majority of those teenages viewing the .com would be offended or surprised by finding gay porn on the net.
In addition, it's not like the .com doesn't warn you. There's a font size=+4 warning telling everyone that you're entering the site of a "gay porn superstar", and asks you to confirm you want to enter.
How are young people supposed to learn about anything like this if they're desperately shielded from it until their 18th birthday. It's like the UK driving laws.. you're not allowed to drive on the motorway at all until you have your full license, which means you can't possible get any practice at it before being expected to be an expert.
The word I think you were looking for was "blasé", and while "blaséness" isn't a word, you could have gotten away with "blasé-ness". That is all.
Thank you for being enough of an adult to admit your error (certainly a rarity on slashdot). Welcome to my friends list.
Who was the idiot that chose .com.au as the TLD for Australia in the first place? What the heck is that?
.co.au like the UK, (.co.uk) or just .au like canada (.ca)?
Why not
Dumb Dumb Dumb.
country codes should not be TLDN's, but should proceed the .com or .net .etc.
Then there will be pressure to apply it to whitehouse.org, which is an anti-Bush satire site.
Then redirecting al-Jazeera to Fox News...
RULE 1: NO POOFTERS!
licet differant, aequabitur
Click here for the website of dead, gay porn icon Casey Donovan.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
When the TV show "Survivor" first came out, CBS didn't bother paying money for the web site survivor.com. So tons of people, looking for more info, ended up here.
:^)
What sort of bothered me about it, when that happened, is that the person who ran Survivor Software discovered that he did not actually own his domain name--the ISP did. Thus, his ISP sold him out, changed him to survivorsoftware.com, and did a nice redirect to CBS.
Personally, if something like that had happened to me, I'd've set up a frame with the CBS Survivor website and placed as many porn ads around it as I could. Let them complain to CBS...
i wonder how small he must be (or her husband in the case it's a she)
what fetish are you referring to?
shows no gay porn, you have to click through a huge ass warning that says if you click here you are going to see large gay man porn.
So even if someone did get sent to the wrong site they would have to be a total dweeb to actually see gay porn unwillingly.
I think I've corrupted my wuttle mind.
Why can't we force the use of .us domains ?
This brings out the whole problem with the way .com is used and given out. It's meaningless. It's become a virtual zero-level domain. When you see what proportion of domains are in .com, why bother with it? We might as well dispense with .com and have a flat domain model - just type in "ibm" or "slashdot" or "caseydonnovan". Subdomains can still be used within those.
.com entries except for proveably multinational companies, allow registered USA businesses to use .com.us. Same goes for .org, .edu, .person (where is your address or citizenship? your incorporation?)
I'd actually rather it went the other way. Expire current
-- All your bass are below two Hz
Another great day to be an American. That Australian Idol chick is ugly. At least Kelly Clarkson looks good most of the time.
Did you ride the short bus? http://sh.ortb.us
People want to see someone who upholds their ideals be elected. Who would look out for the rights of the deceased better than a former member of the living?
Well as an Australian I wouldn't put it past Telstra, the company responsible for BigPond, to stuff up something of this magnitude and then try to blame it on someone else or bring in a kind of internet censorship to cover their asses. Not a Telstra fan.
Subject: Redirecting caseydonovan.com to caseydonovan.com.au may be illegal
1 /P A006100.htm
I've also heard rumours that other ISPs are doing much the same thing. I'd like to point out that doing this is: 1) Bad; 2) Sets a very bad precedent; and 3) Is probably illegal.
Technically speaking, they have done the only thing they could do (besides proxy-intercepting).
I'm not in favour of immediately coming up with the lawbooks (I'm also not in favour of putting signs everywhere how much your fine will be if you do or don't do things), but let's see what is happening here:
- PR department makes a mistake. Asks technical department for a solution. Whatever the technical departments comes up with, it's good enough for them to do it because it reduces the damage.
- The only people affected are the people whose computers use the Telstra nameservers, i.e. people within the Telstra network.
- This is a fix of a genuine fuck-up, not an attempt from Telstra to block access to competiting websites.
Now, your statements:
1. Bad
Yes. Of the PR department, not of the technical department.
2. Sets a very bad precedent
Does it? It happens all the time.
But I have three zones in my DNS server which are doing the same for domains which were expired and hijacked. It doesn't affect anybody outside our network, and it prevents a number of dumbwits to have to change configurations. And after two years we'll re-register them again anyway. This is a technical solution for an administrative problem.
Comdindico and NTT have zones in their DNS which have been moved away from them ages ago, but they don't want to remove them because they need an official paper (whois information isn't authoritatve enough for them). This is just bad of them.
3. Probably illegal.
Talk with your lawyer about it. And keep in mind who is affected. If I was the judge, I would put a time-limit restriction on what Telstra did (say for most 2 years), but I wouldn't forbid it.
http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/0/28/
CRIMES ACT 1914
- SECT 85ZD
Wrongful delivery of communications
A person shall not intentionally cause a communication in the course of telecommunications carriage to be received by a person or carriage service other than the person or service to whom it is directed.
That sounds like it's illegal to have transparent HTTP proxies and POP3 virus scanners.
bash$
...between sheathing your pork sword in poo and despising someone who does.
I have a number of friends who are bent, and I get along fine with them (well... most of them, one or two a really in-your-face about it and that's seriously annoying), but the actual concept of wet posterior swordplay is quite nauseating and I'd be highly disinterested in being unexpectedly dumped in front of pictures of it or blokes obviously prepared for it.
I asked in carefully neutral terms, and this also matches the considered opinion of my 14 yo daughter.
There's quite a gap between toleration and participation.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
sony.co.jp
bbc.co.uk
Why is Australia different?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I live in NZ and a few years ago a free internet provider appeared, called i4free (they made there money on an unbalanced interconnect deal between rival networks). My internet provider then, ihug, blocked all access to there sign-up page, if I remeber correctly redirecting you to there own page without any notice. Their reasoning, they didn't think the economic model was viable and therefore consistuted a danger to the people. This is despite the fact that ihug had upto that point never blocked any websites and carried all newgroups even though they contained illegal material that should be subject to censorship laws. Talk about double standards.
Whats amusing is the advertiser is the ISP Telstra. Telstra is also the biggest ISP in Australia. They were offering free downloads of the Stupid idol's single. However a fool in marketing forgot to have the .au in the add.
Interesting that they are trying to shift the blame to the government cencorship hahaha.
Telstra is still 51% owned by the Australian government.
I never mentioned anything about the .com TLD.
.com.au
.com domains, this sort of error must happen all the time.
What I did say is it was dumb to create one called
Considering the popularity of
Not everything is about US nationalism. Get over it.
You know, I happen have absolutely nothing against appendectomies (or any surgery, come to think of it), and childbirth. In fact, I think these are great things having undergone them myself--but if you think I have any comfort level watching either of them, you're missing a clue.
The same can go for bum darts, washing dishes, writing software, watching paint dry or pretty much anything else someone can concievably approve or disapprove of.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
I actually think censorship is common here in oz. ...but at the end of the day, I think bigpond did the right thing for the right reasons.
We don't have an adult computer game rating for one thing.
Somewhere there is a sub-editor and an editor saying "I thought *you* checked it!" to each other, while fixing up their CVs.
It's the choice of the individual country, of course, but i'm curious why you'd question it. Australia is following the norm, those other countries are doing something different (yes, i'm aware a lot of countries use ".co.(country code)").
Another point, Australia uses ".edu.au" rather than ".ac.uk" as the uk does.
Hmmmm... maybe things have changed since I was a kid that needed protecting from nasties, but how many kids these days actually read *newspapers* (the URL typo was published only in print media, not online)?
Seems this was all a little over-hyped to me. The vast majority of the kids that followed Aus Idol would have been hitting the australianidol.com.au, which has *always* linked to the correct caseydonovan.com.au site...
What the main post doesnt say is that Bigpond both did the incorrect advertisements AND redirected people.
.au ending, meaning nationwide visitors loaded up a gay porn site for porn star Casey Donovan. It contains R-rated pictures.
Bigpond is part of Telstra (in effect a department specialising in internet access), and is Australia's biggest ISP. (Telstra is the biggest Telco/ISP)
What happened was this:
1) Aussie Casey Donovan wins Australian Idol.
2) Bigpond managed to secure rights to make her single downloadable from the internet 24hrs before the CD was available through shops.
3) Bigpond to advertise this took out half and full page ads in every major newspaper in Australia bignoting you could download the song via them before CD release.
4) At the top of the ad Bigpond had the URL for what was supposed to be Casey Donovan's Australian site. The genius working for the advertising company paid by Telstra to do the ad campaign didnt check the ads before printing them. Neither did the newspapers or anyone else involved.
The ad forgot the
I was not happy with Bigpond deciding that its internet customers would get a redirect site. I do not pay them for a modified and sensored version of the internet - I pay them for the pure internet in all its glory. Good and bad.
If they want a kiddies service that stops people seeing certain things, then they should sell a kiddies account.
I was disappointed that rather than live with their mistake and any grief it might cause, they tried to change people's perceptions. The redirect page did NOT give you enough time to read the text prior to redirecting.
Telstra must have paid Mr Donovan some money I presume, because I note now that the redirect is gone, AND the porn pictures on the front page of his site are too. Its now much more explicitly stated that its a porn site and you must click to enter.
(Telstra makes AUD$4B profit per year...they could afford to make him happy....)
Its not a good precedent. I dont like it at all.
And guess who I work for....
This is probably more of a commercial decision as opposed to a moral one.
.au website.
BigPond is the ISP run by Australia's largest Telco, Telstra, which in a previous life was the government owned telecom monopoly.
Telstra is sponsoring Australian Idol so they have a vested interest in its success. If people are hitting a porn site instead of the official website then they aren't going to get value for their sponsorship dollar. I'll also hazard a guess that bigpond is providing the
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.