Music
Russian iTunes accidentally launches with porn placeholders
by Tyler Munro
December 6, 2012
iTunes finally launched in Russia this week, but it had to be taken down this morning with visitors to the digital store were greeted not with the usual songs and movies but by a bunch of naked ladies and links to porn sites.
According to the BBC, IT experts think the smut popped up by mistake, with programmers reportedly using a “.xxx” placeholder while they uploaded new content. Unfortunately for them, triple-x became a real domain around this time last year.
Making things even funnier is that while the store was filled with porn placeholders, anyone trying to buy any of the adult-oriented content would end up instead purchasing whatever was being covered up. Imagine the embarrassment someone must’ve felt when they tried to buy Space Nuts and ended up instead with Pixar’s Cars 2.
“It’s like when you go to a real-world video rentals store and all the DVDs are there but the covers for some of them are wrong,” said IT researcher MIkko Hypponen, who explains the mistake as the result of taking too many shortcuts.
“It’s accidental – as I understand the situation, as they were adding content, they were a bit rushed and didn’t have images for every single movie cover,” he told the BBC. “So for those images that they didn’t have yet, they had to enter a web address – a URL – of where the image was supposed to come from, but there was no URL to put in yet – so they just put xxx.xxx thinking that they will put in a real address later.”
Yikes.
