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.

FMI: www.tc.gc.ca/eng/menu.htm