Goatse.cx

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Goatse.cx
Goatse.fr homepage.png
Screenshot of goatse.fr (a mirror site of the original goatse.cx)
URL http://www.goatse.cx/
Commercial? No
Type of site shock site
Available language(s) English
Launched 1999
Current status For sale

Goatse.cx (pronounced either "/goʊtsi: dɒt si: ɛks/" or "/goʊt sɛks/") was an Internet shock site. Its front page featured a picture, hello.jpg, showing a naked man stretching his anus to a large size with both hands, with the inside of his rectum clearly visible. Below his gaping anus, his dangling penis and scrotum are visible, as well as a ring on the ring finger of his left hand.

The image, originally named gap3.jpg, originates from a set of forty images called gap.zip. In those images, the man uses dildos and butt plugs to stretch his anus. The images were located by Stile Project and are also available from the "Contrib" section of the goatse.cx website.

Contents

Site suspension

On January 14, 2004, the domain goatse.cx was suspended[1] by Christmas Island Internet Administration for AUP[2] violations in response to a complaint, but many mirrors of the site are still available,[3] and the image is displayed on many websites. A Christmas Island resident named Rhonda Clarke filed the complaint that resulted in the suspension of the goatse.cx domain. She became prominent in some internet circles afterwards.[4]

In January 2007, Christmas Island Internet Administration put the domain goatse.cx back into the pool of available domains. The domain was subsequently registered on January 16 through domain registrar Variomedia,[5] and the current registrant tried to auction off the right to use the domain.[6]

The goatse.cx domain name was reported sold at an auction on April 30, 2007 to an unknown bidder. According to seobidding.com, the first auction ended with fake bids so the auction was reactivated.[7] This was again won by fake bidders, so Seobidding.com announced that the website would be sold for $500,000 and that legal action would be pursued against the fake bidders.[8] On November 25, 2007, the site was for sale on seobidding; "goatse.cx asking: $50200 minimum."

Control of the domain was passed to the secondary market, and was taken by a domain investor who was trying to sell the domain name for 10,000 euros.[9]

As January 2008, the front page of the site features a stylized rendering of the Goatse.cx image and notification that the goatse.cx domain is once again for sale.

As of June 2009, there is a banner for the No Clean Feed campaign. That banner and hello.jpg both link to www.nocleanfeed.com.

The October 21st, 2009 edition of the Rick Latona "Daily Domains" newsletter advertised the Goatse.cx domain for sale at an asking price of $15,000, noting it as being a "famous site, tons of backlinks"

Website

Goatse.cx had four sections, two of which had images intended to shock the viewer:

  • The "Receiver" page, titled "Eh", showing the aforementioned hello.jpg. Hello.jpg has the alt attribute "stinger". Since 2000,[10] the page also displayed the following text before the picture: "The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! So.. if you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!" [11] Newer versions of the site had links to http://www.dolphinsex.org/ and http://www.urinalpoop.org/, while older versions linked to http://www.biganal.com/ [10] (all of which are now occupied by cybersquatters). The text below hello.jpg reads, "IMPORTANT NOTE: There are many merchandising attempts for goatse.cx around the web-- none of them are real, none of them are official. Do not buy this gimmick merchandise. The official goatse.cx merchandise is coming soon!" The oldest versions had a counter tracking the number of visits.[12]
  • The "Giver" page, titled "Woah", shows a picture (giver.jpg) of a man reclining in an orange convertible (later versions show him on a yacht or speedboat of some kind, with ocean or river waves in the background). He is depicted with an over-sized penis which reaches up to his chest, faked using digital image editing techniques. The website layout, bearing a man stretching his anus as "The Receiver" and a man with an oversized penis as "The Giver" contains an anal sex joke: that the receiver is stretching his anus so that the giver can insert his oversized penis into it.
  • The "Feedback" section, titled "Got mail?", exhibits emails that were sent to the site.
  • The "Contrib" section showcasing visitor contributions to the site. Contrib has additional variations of hello.jpg and giver.jpg, as well as other images and files. The title of this page is "Contributed Work".
    • bush.jpg is a picture of United States President George W. Bush, calling someone on a telephone in his office, with hello.jpg displayed on a laptop computer on his desk.
    • goatse-wwii.jpg is a picture of a large snowball, with "goatse.cx" written on the side, chasing Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo.
    • giver2.jpg is a picture of the Goatse.cx giver holding his over-sized penis.
    • magiceye.jpg is a Magic Eye picture. The initial image, a legitimate autostereogram of a helix, changes after about 16 seconds to that of a lower resolution, 256 color version of hello.jpg. It attempts to fool viewers by exploiting the fact that, although the server sends a MIME type stating the filename is a JPEG image, the image is in fact an animated GIF.
    • warning.jpg is a warning sign picture telling people not to go to goatse.cx.
    • goatsex.swf is a Flash movie, set to the hook from "MMMBop" by Hanson. The movie shows a large dildo being inserted into the anus of the man posing in hello.jpg. The background is from another gap.zip picture, gap8.jpg, taken at a different angle than hello.jpg, showing the man in the image from the side as opposed to the back.
    • Goatman.mp3 is an MP3 music file. It takes up 518 KB.
    • Foxy_goatse.mp3 is another MP3 music file, a Frank Zappa-inspired parody of the Jimi Hendrix song Foxy Lady. It takes up 1061 KB.
    • goatsecx-winamp.zip is a ZIP file containing a Winamp skin, depicting hello.jpg. It takes up 313 KB.

Geographic location

The site used the .cx country code, the top-level domain of the Australian territory of Christmas Island. The actual server of Goatse.cx was not located on Christmas Island, but in the United States and was owned by Hick.org, a website about computer programming and bathroom humor. The Hick.org domain was registered by Matt Miller in Overland Park, Kansas.[13] Both Goatse.cx and Hick.org originated from the same IP address; the server was located in Kansas City, Missouri, metro-region. Goat.cx, formerly a mirror of Goatse.cx, was located in the Dallas, Texas, metro-region, while current mirror Goatse.fr is in France.

Reception and parodies

A parody was submitted to BBC News under the guise of an alternative Olympic Logo for the 2012 games.[14]

Because many frequent Internet users have been tricked into viewing the site at one time or another,[15] it has become something of an Internet meme.[16] As such, hello.jpg and the other images on the site are common subjects of parodies and tributes.[17]

Following Hurricane Charley in August 2004, a photograph purporting to show "the hands of God" in the cloud formations in the aftermath of the disaster circulated via email. The image was eventually proven to be a fabricated Goatse.cx parody.[18]

False BitTorrent files supposedly containing disc images of a leaked Mac OS X build that can run on standard "x86 architecture" computers distributed during 2005 had been known to display the Goatse image when booted rather than loading Mac OS.[19]

In June 2007, a parody of the 2012 Summer Olympics logo submitted by "Sean Stayte" appeared on the BBC News website[14][20] under the alternative Olympic Logo entries and was broadcast on their BBC News 24 channel. Two hands were pulling the 0 from 2012 apart. The image was later shown as part of a gallery of viewers logos on BBC London News and BBC News 24, and was subsequently removed from the website. The editor of the BBC News website acknowledged the mistake in his blog, saying his team "simply didn’t spot it".[21]

References

  1. ^ Miller, Garth (2004-01-12). "Notice Regarding AUP Complaint Version 1.1" (PDF). Christmas Island Internet Administration. Archived from the original on 2004-05-31. http://web.archive.org/web/20040531080510/http://www.nic.cx/complaints/goatse.cx/aup.noticeofcomplaint.pdf. 
  2. ^ Council of Country Code Administrators - Acceptable Use Policy .cx - Christmas Island (.cx ccTLD) > Policies - Sections
  3. ^ "Goatse Mirror (viewer discretion advised)". http://web.archive.org/web/20030623201150/http://goatse.cx. Retrieved 2007-05-08. 
  4. ^ Clarke: Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases. Icon Group International, Inc. 2008. via Google Books. Page 388. Retrieved on September 30, 2009.
  5. ^ Variomedia AG - Domain-Registrierung, Webhosting, Reseller
  6. ^ Portail d'informations Ce site est en vente! (French)
  7. ^ "Goatse.cx Now For Sale!". http://blog.wired.com/tableofmalcontents/2007/04/goatsecx_now_fo.html. Retrieved 2007-05-08. 
  8. ^ "Seobidding.com Auction". http://www.seobidding.com/buy/auction/goatse.cx. Retrieved 2007-05-18. 
  9. ^ "goatse.cx is for sale." Sedo GMBh
  10. ^ a b "The Receiver," Goatse.cx 2000
  11. ^ "The Receiver," Goatse.cx 2004
  12. ^ "The Receiver," Goatse.cx 1999
  13. ^ "Whois.net Lookup for Hick.org". http://www.whois.net/whois_new.cgi?d=hick&tld=org. Retrieved 2006-10-25. 
  14. ^ a b "Goatse on BBC." CollegeHumor. June 6, 2007. Retrieved on October 3, 2009.
  15. ^ Johnson, Bob (2004-12-02), "The Goatse Prank", zug.com, http://www.zug.com/gab/index.cgi?func=view_thread&thread_id=49351 
  16. ^ Kirkpatrick, Stewart (2004-06-09), "Lazy Guide to Net Culture: NSFW", The Scotsman, http://news.scotsman.com/lazyguidetonetculture/Lazy-Guide-to-Net-Culture.2535852.jp 
  17. ^ Tribute to Goatse.cx (Warning: Many pages display hello.jpg)
  18. ^ "The Hands of God." Snopes. June 15, 2007. Retrieved on February 23, 2009.
  19. ^ Sample, III, C.K. (August 12, 2005). "Jumping on the bandwagon: OS X on x86! OMG!". TUAW. http://www.tuaw.com/2005/08/12/jumping-on-the-bandwagon-os-x-on-x86-omg/. Retrieved 2009-05-04. 
  20. ^ "_43006883_sean_stayte_416.jpg." BBC. Retrieved on February 23, 2009.
  21. ^ Herrmann, Steve. "Shock tactics." BBC. June 5, 2007. Retrieved on February 23, 2009.

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx"