An adult entertainment website has managed to sneak its ads onto a bunch of reputable news websites thanks to an expired domain name.
From 2014 to 2017, VidMe existed as a reputable video hosting platform, which billed itself as a combination of YouTube and Reddit.
But the continued success of YouTube ultimately led to the site’s demise, with the platform ultimately shutting down in 2017.
The domain name was then snapped up by adult entertainment site 5 Star HD Porn.
The transfer of the domain name had more or less been uneventful over the past four years up until this morning, when a social media user noticed graphic pornography appearing alongside innocuous news content.
https://twitter.com/dox_gay/status/1418189401188970503?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1418189401188970503%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnet.com%2Fnews%2Fwhy-nsfw-porn-clips-are-showing-up-on-regular-sites-today%2F
US titles such as the the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post were hit with the error, as was Australia’s own Herald Sun, according to Gizmodo.
According to The Verge, stories that previously displayed VidMe videos have now been hijacked with pornographic content, due to a phenomenon called ‘link rot’.
Link rot is simply when links expire and no longer send users to the originally intended page or file due to the link being relocated to a new address.
In the case of VidMe, this has meant old embedded videos are now sending users to porn instead.
As you would expect, the publishers have started to rectify the issue.
“We are in the process of permanently removing this content whenever it appears,” a spokesperson for the Huffington Post told CNET.
However, it won’t be a shock if we continue to see these videos keep popping up.
Image: Uproxx
