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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."
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.
Considering the target audience of the Idol shows (young children to teenagers mostly), many would argue that BigPond were acting in virtually everyone's* best interests by re-directing traffic.
:->
Sure, there may have been a handful of people denied their man-porn for a few hours, but they will have been in the vast minority. These were exceptional circumstances, and seeing this as a step towards BigBrother-dom is overreacting IMO.
Basically BigPond stopped little kiddies from being exposed to pr0n (as well as saving their own faces, see my earlier post), which is Good Thing (TM); though one could debate the relative qualities of what they viewed instead
*Casey Donovan (the man)'s estate excluded, perhaps
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
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"
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).
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.
Here's something interesting -- studies have been done on children in war-torn countries like Afghanistan. They mature faster and become hardened and more cold-blooded at very early ages. You're right -- they *are* able to handle it. Its also almost irreversable.
Afghanistan has an entire generation of warlord children out there trying to figure out what this peace crap is all about.
Just because they *can* handle it doesn't mean they should have to handle it. I don't want my kids having to experience the stress of life that I experience, and they shouldn't have to figure out porn either.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
BigPond was covering their owner's ass. It had virtually nothing to do with the children.
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.
"virtually everyone's"
"best interests"
"vast minority" (oxymoron?)
These are all scary terms to be throwing around. Especially when we add another scary term "precedence". it's tempting to say oh, it's gay porn - of course we should redirect, but if we set a precedent, then a commercial company can start redirecting us with opt-out rather than opt-in clicks.
Who's got an ISP with Republican/Democrat/People's progressive party for democratic Communism leanings? Or owned by Microsoft?
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
Beyond that, I feel sorry for BigPond. They had a tough problem (not caused by them) to solve, and no matter what solution they picked (redirect silently, redirect with warning, do nothing), they're going to get flack for it.
In case you hadn't realised, ".com" is not a US TLD, it is an international TLD.
Plenty of countries use ".net.(country code)" or ".com.(country code)". Get over it.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
There's quite a gap between toleration and participation.
Yes, and looking at a picture isn't 'participation.' If you're literally nauseated by the very concept of man-on-man anal sex (which, bluntly, isn't that mechanically different from hetrosexual vaginal penetration, let alone hetrosexual anal sex) then maybe you're not as tolerant as you think, even if some of your friends are gay. (Again, you don't have to go far to find biased people who proclaim that they can't be biased against X because some of their friends are X, so much so that the phrase "some of my best friends are..." has become a joke in the gay, lesbian and bisexual communities. (Try googling on the phrase). In fact, so well worn is the phrase, that at this point I can't tell if you're trolling or not.
There's also quite a gap between "not wishing to have members of class X segregated into ghettos by the police" and genuine tolerance, which why the tail end of the "Some of my friends are X..." trope traditionally runs "...but I wouldn't let my daughter marry one." If your 'tolerance' can't pass this sniff test, well, you may not despise gays, but have to admit you've got some hang ups.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who