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."
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...
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which is exactly why the cybersquatters at whitehouse.gov need to be shut down. They're giving the real whitehouse a bad name.
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!
Don't want to check to closely whilst working on client site.
(it's a Simpsons reference)
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
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!
here is the actual redirecting link
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