Hardcore porn videos have suddenly popped up on Very Serious™ news websites like The Washington Post, Newsweek and Australia’s very own Herald Sun thanks to a cheeky trick that’s flooding the internet with hole pics and cum… lots of cum.
Motherboard reports that a website called 5 Star HD Porn bought the domain name Vid.me, which had previously been used by a YouTube competitor up until 2017. Overnight, the new owners apparently decided to fuck with the entire internet by changing what a bunch of historic embedded videos linked to.
Now heaps of totally innocuous videos which had been embedded into news articles have been replaced with hardcore porn. In high definition, too, apparently.
Other affected websites include those for American magazines like Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, New York magazine and even Teen Vogue. British newspaper The Daily Mirror and online-only publications like BuzzFeed, Vox, The Verge and Polygon were also hit by the incident.
And yes, even faithful old PEDESTRIAN.TV and our sister sites like Business Insider and Kotaku were affected by the porn plague. But don’t bother looking for the damage, ‘cos we’ve already cleaned up everything over here.
Remember VidMe? The one-time competitor to YouTube?
The domain was recently allowed to expire after the company was shut in 2017, and has been bought by a porn site, resulting in countless old articles with embedded content that is now full blown hardcore porn.
For example. 😬 pic.twitter.com/6L353lEMnp
— Mark Deeks (@MarkDeeksNBA) July 22, 2021
So that website VidMe died a little while ago and the url got bought and transformed into a porn site
Now every article that linked to a video on there links back to porn pic.twitter.com/CQlwXkOkPK
— Brent (@SkyCladBrent) July 22, 2021
https://twitter.com/mellwood96/status/1418323646817480718
good morning! hardcore porn has been retroactively embedded in news websites all around the world, including the washington post, teen vogue and… australia’s very own herald sun pic.twitter.com/vZtsbskE2y
— Zac Crellin (@zacrellin) July 22, 2021
This is perhaps one of the most extreme and prominent examples of link rot that many readers will encounter, but it’s a serious issue which threatens to tear apart the fabric of the internet if we don’t take the upkeep of aging hyperlinks seriously.
Thankfully (or not thankfully if you’re insatiably horny) most of these news websites have picked up on the issue and have swiftly removed the content from their wholesome and chaste news articles.
It’s kind of gross that people will have been unwitting subjected to this kind of porn first thing in the morning, and it’s a particularly serious issue on youth-oriented sites like Teen Vogue or BuzzFeed.
and buzzfeed new’s former australian outpost @bradesposito pic.twitter.com/VAmKEsLCMG
— cameronwilson is typing… (@cameronwilson) July 22, 2021
But there’s also something a little bit funny about an adult going to watch “the most Australian prank call of all time” but instead being greeted with some pornstar’s spread cheeks.
Congrats to everyone who had ‘porn takes over the internet’ on their 2021 bingo card!
