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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."
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.
You typed www.linux.org - we are sure you wanted to go to www.microsoft.com instead ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Kids are tougher than you think and changing heaven and earth for them isn't necessarily in their best interest.
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.
If the ISP wants to redirect anything, they should redirect it to themselves, to a nice plaintext page explaining the situation with links to _both_ websites. It would be a much more fair solution.
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.
Hmmm.. I'm not going to draw a line in the sand like you are.
Because I'd rather not be limited by such absolutism.
I'd say that it was an accident. Mistakes were made, measures were taken, and that would be the end of it. Oh, and the IDOL star needs a new URL.
Not everyone who enters your URL wants to go to your website. But everyone who wants to go to your website has to enter your URL.
I figure I'd reimburse you for the lost uptime, but thats it. Much easier than having 60,000 people call my support centers, complaining about all the porn on the internet.
I think it is a sensible thing to do, so long as it is temporary. If this is left as a long term solution, then it is very wrong.
.com.au domain - they probably should have followed the UK way and set the domain to be .co.au - at least that way, if the .au isn't there, the URL just won't work.
I would agree with the other compromise - redirect to a site stating the error, and proving the correct link - this will both educate people to the correct link, and allow those who want to visit the gay site to be able to do so (though I think that is illegal under Aussie law anyway, isn't it?)
To an extent, it is also their own fault for having the
T.
So you think its the ISPs place to decide which site you realy wanted to go to? What if they decide that everyone who looks for information about the Patriot Act should get redirected to a partisan puff piece explaining how giving up our freedoms is a good thing? I could list other examples but I think you get the idea, if the ISP is going to claim to be a common carrier they have NO buisness redirecting traffic. As soon as they do that they become responsible for the content.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
This cuts both ways: suppose I am a fan of that idol guy (so I know his name) and I guess his domain name, assuming that it ends in .com.au (as most .au domains I know do)... In that case, Bigpond is now offering me a link to the porn stars site which I would never have found otherwise!
Ok, I admit, it's a small chance - but it could happen. And if this were America, you could bet your money on the fact that someone would exploit just this situation to start a nice little lawsuit.
Well, here in .au, if you want a cable internet connection, you have two choices: the two big telcos, Optus and Telstra. So unless you're happy with dialup or ADSL (the latter not being available to many people, even in urban areas - i'm in a location where, until recently, i could get cable but not ADSL), you have to use a "big mainstream" ISP.
Should the Ad agency be liable for the american site's bandwidth bill, in this case? Assuming they did get a huge bill, it would be due to an error from the original advertising agency. On the one hand, the american site is open to anyone to visit. On the other hand, someone else, through misinformation, directed a huge amount of traffic to their site.
I can't say I have an opinion one way or another. It's analogous to telemarketing or spamming, in some sense - you have a publicly available way to be contacted, but overuse or inappropriate use can be a big imposition.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
It's the new age. Four million eight to fourteen year olds with mum and dads mobile phones carry a shitload more umph than the half dozen people older than that age who *accidentally* tuned into that atrocity.
:-D
FFS it was more fun to get drunk & have a bbq
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
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.
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!
Open a page asking you if your sure you want to visit the pr0n site?
This is the same thing the anti-abortion camp pushes in the USA. Trying to get doctors to present all sorts of information and extensive questioning to 'discourage' the practice.
I know its not what you were thinking, but its a slippery slope.
Question: How long is the wait on the redirection page? I can't safely test it from where I'm sitting (on a watched network). See, the sort of text you describe is commonplace when doing a web redirection, and is often the message that appears ONLY if the browser doesn't immediately redirect. It's the fallback if the browser doesn't support automatic redirection. If it does support it, then the message flashes only for the briefest moment, sometimes so fast the browser doesn't even bother displaying it. So, the relevant question is, did they give the reader the time to actually read the message, or is the redirection instantaneous?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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