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."
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.
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...
I don't know the Australian legal system works, but I do recall cases where ISPs have used a "common carrier" defense (similar to telcos) to claim that they do not control what illegal uses their subscribers use the services for.
Does this make BigPond an "editor" for their users, thus nullifying the notion of their operation as a common carrier?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
here is the actual redirecting link
You are misinformed - the redirection wasn't completely automatic, it went through a page that told you what was happening, and gave you a link to the .com site along with a warning about its content (see it at http://144.135.18.91 assuming it hasn't been taken down by now).
Yeah, a direct redirection without any choice in the matter would be way over the top, but a redirection implemented this way seems quite reasonable.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.