Goatse.cx

Goatse.cx

Type of site	shock site
Available in	English
URL	http://www.goatse.cx
Commercial	no
Registration	none

Goatse.cx was an infamous Internet shock site. It was spread by trolls who intended to surprise their viewers. Its front page featured a picture, hello.jpg, showing a naked man stretching his anus open to a diameter roughly equal to the width of his hand, with the inside of his rectum clearly visible. Below his gaping anus, his dangling, semi-flaccid penis and scrotum were visible, as well as a wedding ring on the ring finger of his left hand.

Site suspension

On January 14, 2004, the domain goatse.cx was suspended by Christmas Island Internet Administration for AUP violations in response to a complaint, but many mirrors of the site are still available, and the image is displayed on many websites. The most common mirror was goat.cx; but this, like its predecessor, was taken offline as of February 22, 2005. As of February 27, the domain goat.cx, like goatse.cx, was suspended by the Christmas Island Internet Administration. As of March 2007, there is an image on the site showing a pumpkin with some hands around it as if it were stretching its anus open.

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

The goatse.cx domain name was reported sold at an auction on 30 April 2007 to an unknown bidder. According to seobidding.com, the first auction ended with fake bids so the auction was reactivated. 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. On 2007-11-25 the site was for sale on seobidding; "goatse.cx asking: $50200 minimum."

Christmas Island Internet Administration does not administer, regulate or intervene in the secondary market. Since it is not possible to "own" a domain name it is technically impossible to "sell" a domain name. A registrant can only sell / auction the right to "use" a domain - and is free to do so for whatever price the market will bear.

In January 2007, the registrant of the domain, a private individual, found that the Christmas Island Internet Administration had revoked control of the domain, with no notification or communication. Christmas Island Internet Administration still refuses to communicate with that registrant (as of January 2008). Since the revoke, the administration allowed control to be passed to the secondary market, and has since been taken by domain squatters who are trying to sell the domain name for 10,000 euros.

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 , before the picture is the text in black, "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!" 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/ (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.
• 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 has an over-sized penis which reaches up to his chest, which was done using photo editing techniques. This is clearly conspicuous to an experienced photograph editor or experienced viewer thereof when careful examination is given to the pixels surrounding the genitalia. 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 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. The photograph in this movie was 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.
  • hello.mpg is a movie, first showing the text "HI" on a black background, followed by shots of gap.zip pictures. At the end of the movie, the following text appears next to a picture of a teenage boy:
    "http://www.goatse.cx
    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!"

People sometimes link to goatse.cx images not shown on the actual webpages, such as loopback.jpg, a picture of a man looping his penis into his anus. There are also numerous other files in the directory www.goatse.cx/contrib.

The image hello.jpg originates from a set of forty images, known as "Tales of the Goatse Man," depicting the man performing various anal sexual acts. In those images, the man used 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 under the filename gap.zip. hello.jpg is the third file in the archive, gap3.jpg. The man is only referred to by the initials D.M. or C.O.B. in the accompanying text.

Goatse.cx also had a Robots.txt file at one point.

Archives of Goatse.cx can viewed at the Wayback Machine.

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 is 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. Both Goatse.cx and Hick.org originate from the same IP address; the server is located in the 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.cz seems to be located in Clifton, New Jersey.

Goatse in popular culture

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

File:BBC Goatse.cx Alternative Olympic logo.png

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

• The New York Times article "Loosing Google's Lock on the Past" featured Anil Dash, a blogger seen wearing a "Goatse"-themed shirt in the article.
• An adventure in the web game Kingdom of Loathing in The Daily Dungeon called "Seriously, I Just Read It For the Articles." If the adventurer does not have sleaze resistance, s/he buckles down and looks at a centerfold; the centerfold is revealed to be from the magazine "Secret World of Goatse."
• The first documented GOATSE personalized license plate in the United States was successfully acquired, as referenced at Uberzine.com
• Alex Albrecht of Diggnation fame made a reference to Goatse.cx on episode 20 of Tiki Bar TV. The Tiki Bar crew were having Internet bandwidth issues, and Alex (playing the character "Son of the Internet"), said that their issues were affecting the whole Internet. - "Goatse's down, people are happy about that."
• 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 photoshopped Goatse parody.
• Threadless, a community-centered online shirt store, makes a goatse-inspired t-shirt.
• In June 2007, a parody of the 2012 Summer Olympics logo submitted by "Sean Stayte" appeared on the BBC News website 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".
• In July 2007, an Internet Hoax was submitted to Digg.com and other social media sites. The hoax claimed that the goatse image made it on to CNN during the CNN-YouTube Presidential Debates. The news made it big until people realized that it was just photoshopped images.
• A Flickr page entitled "First Goatse"[1] has images of people's initial shocked reactions to the image, which are usually either disgust or laughter.
• The webcomic xkcd referred to the goatse image in the comic for September 19, 2007 .
• VG Cats referred to Goatse in the "Just a Flesh Wound" comic.
• The Swedish newspaper Näringsliv had a frontpage with a Goatse inspired image on October 9th, 2007.
• An animation by Andrew Kepple titled Hello.jpg parodies the Ghostbusters as the "Goatsebusters". Hello.jpg is not actually visible in the movie, so the movie "just relies on a certain 'educated audience'", as Kepple himself puts it.

External links

• The Goatse Story