Fri, Nov 11, 2011
Obsolete Link To Centennial Of Flight Exploited After Domain
Expires
You might recall that in 2009, Canada was celebrating its own
centennial of powered flight. A few years before the anniversary, a
group of associations and government departments collaborated to
create a website dedicated to the celebration, at
canadiancentennialofflight.ca. The official Transport Canada
website added a link to the celebration site, and all was well
until the anniversary had passed.
As often happens, the registration of the URL was allowed to
lapse. But the link stayed on the Transport Canada website. A
sharp-eyed third party was waiting for the address to become
available, and registered canadiancentennialofflight.ca for an
entirely unrelated enterprise.
And so, for a while, Transport Canada's site included a link to
a provider of Turkish and American escort services.
The Winnipeg Free Press reports the new owner of the domain
apparently left the old site's content in place, and simply added
additional links to services such as "Istanbul Escorts,"
"Independent Escort Service" and "Washington Escorts." The
government has since forced the site to remove the official logos,
so at least visitors will no longer be led to believe the
government is involved.
Some commenters on the Free Press website expressed the opinion
that the Canadian government and call girls have enough in common
in what they do to taxpayers that any confusion was insignificant.
The new site is much plainer-looking with all the logos gone, but
the links to the special offers remain.
Or, so we're told.
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