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In light of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's admission this month that he should
have designed World Wide Web http addresses without the double forward
slashes, TIME looks back at some other memorable screwups involving
the Internet.
01- Slashing the Slashes
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with
creating the World Wide Web in 1989, doesn't seem like a man who
has many regrets. But he admitted earlier this month at a symposium
in Washington that his decision to include those annoying forward
slashes in http addresses was made on a whim. If he could change
one thing about the Internet now, he says, he would slash the slashes,
which are completely unnecessary.
02- The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
The BBC is undoubtedly one of the best broadcasters in the world,
with a proud history and popular website. But even the "Beeb"
isn't immune to screwing up once in a while. Consider the case of
its "Internet expert" Guy Goma, who participated in a
studio discussion in 2006 regarding music downloads and Apple Computer's
victory at the London High Court against Apple Corps, the record
label for the Beatles. None of the producers noticed anything funny
about Goma until he responded to one of the questions by saying,
"I don't know. I'm not at all sure what I'm doing here."
Turns out that Goma thought he was going to be interviewed for an
IT job at the BBC, not interviewed on air.
03- An Apple Premiere
Two years ago, Apple posted for sale on iTunes what it thought was
the season premiere of the sci-fi TV show Stargate Atlantis. The
episode happened to be the show's fourth installment, however, which
hadn't yet aired. The accidental leak occurred because of a mix-up
over the episode's production and broadcast numbers. Apple removed
the episode 24 hours later, but by that point, peer-to-peer networks
were offering it to their users for free. To make amends, Apple
gave customers who mistakenly bought the
04- Google Gets Spammed
Google's spam-fighting system is apparently too good. A couple of
years ago, Google accidentally mistook the company's own Custom
Search Blog as spam. The Google blogging team in charge of updating
the website didn't notice the warning messages indicating that the
blog would be deleted if the user didn't clarify that it wasn't
spam. When the blog was automatically deleted, another Web user
took over the domain name for the site. The Google bloggers initially
suspected an external hack job, but then they realized what had
gone wrong. They got the domain name back — and then presumably
blogged about the whole ordeal.
05- Game Over
The box for Capcom's Killer7 video game said it all: "Action-packed
thriller." Anyone who went to the game's official website,
listed on the box as www.killer7.com, would have found a totally
different kind of thriller, though. That URL belonged to a hard-core-porn
site. The game's site should have been listed as www.killer-7.com.
06- Never Use Your Name As a Password
Choosing a strong password is a challenge for many of us. Who out
there hasn't used (or thought about using) password or 1234 at one
point in their life? A staffer working for the state of Nevada proved
abysmally bad at selecting a user name and password two years ago
when step-by-step instructions were accidentally posted on the state's
official website giving instructions on how aides should send out
the governor's weekly e-mail updates. In the instructions, the Outlook
user name was given as governor and the password as kennyc. The
former governor's name? Kenny C. Guinn.
07- Via-comedy
The media behemoth Viacom has engaged in numerous battles with YouTube
over copyright infringement over the years. But two years ago, Viacom
ended up in the embarrassing position of mistakenly bringing to
light the fact that it had committed some copyright infringement
of its own. When Viacom demanded that YouTube remove a clip of a
North Carolina politician's campaign commercial from a VH1 program
called Web Junk 2.0, it emerged that VH1 hadn't obtained permission
to use the clip in the first place. The politician, Christopher
Knight, was clearly miffed, summing up the situation thusly: "Folks,
this is, as we say down here in the South, 'bass-ackwards.' "
Thankfully for Knight, Viacom backed down, and YouTube reinstated
the video.
08- You've Got (More Than) Mail
In 2006, AOL voluntarily released the search data of 650,000 of
its users over a three-month period — some 20 million Web
queries in total. Although the AOL user name had been changed to
a random ID number, one could analyze all the searches done by a
single user and deduce who the person was. Understandably, the online
community was outraged, and AOL acted swiftly, removing the data
and issuing apologetic press releases.
09- Doing the Worm
On Nov. 2, 1988, Robert Morris, a Cornell computer-science graduate
student, wrote an experimental program that he injected into the
Internet. It became the computer world's first "worm."
Although the student's intentions were not necessarily nefarious
— he was testing how large the Internet actually was —
the worm wreaked havoc online, rendering about 600,000 computers
unusable. Morris was convicted of violating the Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act and sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of
community service and $10,000 fine. He now works for MIT.
10- In the Dark
Earlier this week, about a million Swedish Internet sites went down
for an hour when routine maintenance caused disruption to every
single .se address (the country's domain). The problem was caused
by an "incorrectly configured script" in an update of
the .se domain. Imagine if this would have happened to the .com
domain, taking down tens of millions of websites around the planet.
It probably wouldn't have stopped the world from turning on its
axis, but it may have come pretty close.
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