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Comcast Apologizes For Super Bowl Porn Glitch
DrinkDr.Pepper writes "Just after the last touchdown by the Cardinals, with 3 minutes to go in the game, approximately 30 seconds of pornographic material was shown, seen by an unknown number of Comcast customers in Tucson, Arizona who were watching the game in standard definition. Comcast has apologized (they used the word 'mortified') and is issuing a $10 credit to any customer who claims to have been impacted. Various news accounts suggest that the incident was a malicious act, but no one knows how it was done or by whom."
First time I'll have been paid to watch porn.
the day that a news source posts a full uncensored clip of the incident is the day society has truly moved on from the arbitrary taboos of old.
Of course it'd also be the day that such an incident would merit only a footnote in an "odd stuff" newspaper section.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
Comcast needn't have apologised for broadcasting porn. What did warrant an apology was showing porn containing nothing more than an ugly guy flapping his cock all over the place. You, sirs, have crossed the line!
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I'll show you 30 seconds of full male nudity for $10.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Can we get a link to the Porn?
I googled "Porn" and nothing came up.
Anybody who's married. We're not inserting it anywhere. (without permission)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Several years ago when my home team was in the Superbowl, my comcast cable went out for several hours during the game. Their response was tough luck. They weren't willing to give me any credit. So it is pretty ironic that people "exposed" to 30 seconds of porn are getting $10 back. The moral of the story is that corporations are only responsible when the news media shames them.
Christ, grow up, and pull the stick out of your ass already.
He can't. He's nailed to it.
Laugh about the porn clip (I did, here in Tucson, I yelled "FTW!")
But depending on the origin of the video, Comcast may be on a very real hook for broadcasting copyrighted material without license, and could conceivably be exposed to distribution royalties for a much larger audience than the one that is supposed to be limited to a specific, accountable pay-per-view arrangement.
I would be very surprised if lawyers were not working this out in a damage control mode.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
You're doing it wrong.
And somewhere in that mess, someone was enjoying some porno only to have their fantasy broken by the defensive line of the Cardinals.
Some people are in to that.
I had to watch 30 seconds of Super Bowl right inbetween my porn. That's so not cool Comcast.
there are married people here?
:: ducks as his wife reads over his shoulder ::
All around, it was a rather embarrassing year to be watching the Superbowl with the family.
You mean, more embarrassing than all the other years you watched a bunch of big sweaty guys in tights slapping each other on the ass for hours?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
To be fair to the grandparent, he did say "with the family.".
I wouldn't mind virtually any amount of explicit content in ads if I was on my own, but I'd be unhappy if there were kids watching it with me.
They're just showing what the sportscasters were watching anyways. "Check out that penetration!" "Yeah John, you can see the backfield has been totally violated." "If he got his hands on that ball, he would have scored for sure."
Maybe you should tell your family this isn't the Victorian era anymore.
Don't lie. You're still interested.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I love when stuff like this happens. In the past, there have been incidents such as when someone switched over a feed of Jeopardy to the Playboy Channel. Other notable incidents:
Max Headroom Incident: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWdgAMYjYSs
HBO "Captain Midnight" incident: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFlMHCdYXLM
As an accounting major, I am just doing the math: 30 seconds of pr0n equals $10 dollars...so, that's $20 a minute and $1200 dollars an hour. By my calculations, I can watch two hours of pr0n each month and be able to pay my tuition instead of taking student loans. What a country!!!
Trust him.
Once he has seen the time-consuming, noisy, loud and dirty results that started appearing 9 months after the "insertion", he'll never ever be even interested in inserting his penis anywhere.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Maybe you should tell your family this isn't the Victorian era anymore.
But they'd already spent so much on their wigs!
The enemies of Democracy are
Most amusing was, after they cut back to the SuperBowl, you hear Madden saying "He went to the perfect guy, in the perfect situation."
I submit that this is a cultural artifact.
You either see nothing offensive in ads with explicit content or feel that you can safely ignore it because you understand the difference between real life and the image of life that such advertisements would present. However, you'd be uncomfortable showing a child the same thing. Why is this?
I suspect there are a few reasons ranging the spectrum from cultural guilt, to superstition, and taboo abeyance.
Perhaps you'd feel responsible for educating the child on the differences between real life and the image of life that are presented by advertisers. In any other context, this is something we don't even think about. We know that simply eating breakfast cereal doesn't suddenly make you super-athletic and attractive. We don't have any difficulty repeating that to children, or explaining what's necessary to achieve those goals in the real world. But since our culture has placed such a strict taboo about imparting sex education to children, we feel incapable of telling the same kids that drinking beer and wine coolers doesn't make you attractive to half-naked dancers. We don't tell them that getting drunk in order to seek sexual gratification is a really risky, self-destructive behavior.
Arguably the latter is a much more important life lesson, but that same taboo forbids us from admitting that children have sexuality, let alone that they're even more vulnerable to being pandered to than adults.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
When I was 17 my father said the following: "the reason God made kids so cute is so people would have more than one of them before they turned into teenagers."
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I don't get it, what's so bad about some superb owl porn?
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Never lived on a farm, did you. Yet through most of history most families did. And also lived in single room huts.
Exposure to sex isn't harmful to children. I have no idea why some people think it is.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Reasonable providers (read those that aren't Comcast) will separate adult and non-adult programming onto different QAMs.
Here is where the problem could have occured:
1) Video input problem: MSO Satellite Radio tuned to wrong channel. Doubtful because of authentication / encryption. This is more likely if the east coast/west coast feed of the same provider got swapped. Also if the MSO was using an over-the-air TV receiver, that of course can't happen. If the MSO gets a video fiber from the TV station, that might be a fiber carrier routing screw up.
2) Video router misconfiguration: Ff the satellite radio outputs baseband video, it may go through a video crosspoint swtich (they call them "routers"). The wrong crosspoints between the satellite radios and the modulators (analog tier) or encoders (digital tier)
3) Multiplexer/CherryPicker misconfiguration: On the digital tier, MPEG-2 programs are multiplexed together into a QAM. It is possible there was a brief misconfiguration.
Big question - did this happen on the Comcast SD digital tier, HD digital tier, the analog tier, or some combination? If it was both analog and digital SD, I would suspect a video router crosspoint misconfiguration. If it was just digital SD or digital HD, I would suspect a multiplexer misconfiguration.
Really? I sat in a bar and watched Superbowl. I didn't see anything that I'd consider particularly raunchy or inappropriate, and I didn't hear any complaints from the people around me either. Are Americans really this prudish when it comes to TV advertising?
Yes.
Funny enough, the commercial must have worked, because guess where the guy bought the domain:
% whois ComcastSuperBowlPorn.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain Name: COMCASTSUPERBOWLPORN.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com/
Name Server: DNS66-1.NEXCESS.NET
Name Server: DNS66-2.NEXCESS.NET
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 01-feb-2009
Creation Date: 01-feb-2009
Expiration Date: 01-feb-2010
>>> Last update of whois database: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:46:33 EST
Well, I think the girl in the clip has some pretty compelling evidence she was "impacted".
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.