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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."
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...
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.
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.
Not sure this would work. Anyone who's worked in IT for any length of time knows that something like this is likely...
You entered caseydonovan.com.
Due to a printing error, it is likely you really want caseydonovan.com.au. You won't bother reading this anyway - nobody ever does, they always click "yes" anyhow. So why we've gone to the hassle of setting it up I don't know.
Are you sure?
YES NO
Which is exactly why the cybersquatters at whitehouse.gov need to be shut down. They're giving the real whitehouse a bad name.