Eight clicks to pr0n!!1!
Juanita Doyon, a candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Washington State, may be a sensible person with good ideas for running education in Washington. I don’t know. I do know that she shouldn’t have wandered into my world.
According to KATU News in Portland, she accused the incumbent SPI of the shocking crime of allowing the state’s education web page to link to pornography. Through a chain of eight links. You know where we’re going next, right? Juanita to porn, in less than eight links.
Let’s start from her page at juanita2004spi.com/resources, a list of resources for her Mothers Against WASL campaign. That links to rereformed.com, which has apparently let its domain registration lapse. With lots of hosts and registrars, that would be game over, one link to porn, but not this time: we get a list of “search” results. The related search for Reformed offers up a “sponsored result” for shopping for Reformed at Yahoo, with baffling contents. Upper left corner, we get a link to get somewhere we know, Yahoo’s home page. With nowhere better to go, we search for the popular term Jennifer Lopez, then decide we don’t want to pay for J-Lo, so we click the related search for free Jennifer Lopez and, game over, the number one result, free-jennifer-lopez-nude.biz/jennifer_lopez_free.html is, not too surprisingly, pornographic. Seven clicks, and I didn’t even try very hard.
If you so completely fail to understand the web that you think people are somehow responsible for thing seven or eight clicks away from them, it’s probably best to avoid linking to such hotbeds of porn as Yahoo and Google (and Amazon: the covers on some of the erotica they sell just two or three clicks away from Ms. Doyon’s own book are pretty racy). In fact, your only safe course is to not link to anything. Rather like that ostrich on your main page. It’s a scary, nasty intarweb.
Oh, how did I find that story? At Fark, following a link from Time Magazine. Given Fark’s policy of never being more than one link from boobies, that means Time is now two links from porn, and will be unless and until Meet Joe Blog falls out of their archives.
It’s sad in this day and age that a person running for public office (in education, no less) isn’t savvy enough to understand how the Web works.
If I was a Washington State resident, I’d pointedly ask Ms. Doyon what formal technical education she’s had, because it is quite obvious she’s lacking in that functional requirement.
Anyway, good exercise Phil, I’m sure that Ms. Doyon will appreciate your help. ;-)
From the resources page:
Now you’re at the Yahoo root directory, and from there you’re only a few clicks away from all the porn you can handle. In the interest of completeness, here’s but one of many possible paths:
And there you are. (And any dissertation on the fine differences between ’erotica’ and porn are, of course, lost on one who’d make an issue of an 8-link chain to begin with, so we’ll just assume it’s one and the same, mm?)