McFreedom

Shark Blog, a Bay Area blogger, noticed that Marina Middle School in San Francisco had a link to "Youth Power Online" at www.osom.org. Any link on www.osom.org goes to some very not-safe-for-work (or school) pictures.

I think when he linked to it, it was in the sense of, "ha ha, those middle-schoolers really put one over on their administrators, some kids are gonna get detention when they notice this one..." I was curious and looked into it, and here's what I think happened.

First of all, osom.org used to be "Our Schools, Our Media." They still have an old page up which describes their mission, which is "producing student-driven community publications." A call to the number on their front page got a random person's answering machine, and another old number I turned up went to a voicemail box with no voicemail service activated. I'm guessing they're defunct. UPDATE 01/30/03 12:23 PST I just got an email from an board member; they shut down in 2000.

A whois on the current owners of osom.org turns up "OM Enterprises" of Sydney, Australia. I think their business is to buy up recently expired domains for resale (often back to their original owners, I suspect). I believe they link to porn not just to generate money, but to pressure the original owners to buy the domains back. I contacted them and suggested they sell me the domain at cost, given the fact that all of their traffic right now is children, but they countered with $400, which is about $385 more than I'm interested in spending. They also ignored my suggestion to put up a warning page before the porn.

Once I'd realized this wasn't some adolescent prank - which would certainly be found quickly as the perpetrators bragged to their friends - I thought I'd email the school's webmaster and let him know, before sixth grade girls were seeing stuff like this (NSFW) off their school's home page, and before the whole thing ended up in the Chronicle. It was obvious to me it wasn't anyone at the school's fault, the website they linked to had changed.

Unfortunately, they didn't have an email address. So, I called the school. The secretary I got told me they already knew(!!!) but that since the porn was off their site, there was nothing they could do about it. I suggested that they stop linking to it, she seemed suprised that you could do that, and promised to look into it. She took my number in case the principal wanted to talk to me.

Next day, it was still there. I considered calling the Chronicle, which would certainly be the most amusing way of dealing with it. Instead, I found their Feedback Form and decided to try that. I wrote a long missive explaining the problem, hit submit, and got a "405 Resource Not Allowed" from IIS. The more I looked at the school's page, the more I thought that the school probably didn't have the slightest thing to do with it, so I decided to go up the tree.

Now I called the San Francisco Schools' IT department's main number. They gave me the Help Desk's number, where a woman who finally seemed to be vaguely clueful heard my story. She promised to add osom.org to their filtering software. I told her that was great, and all, but that they were still linking to hardcore porn from a middle school's web site. She loaded the page up, and clicked on the link. "Oh." She promised to fix it.

Now, two hours later, the Marina Middle School page is, finally, simply gone. Which is an improvement. But it's amazing that it took them at least 36 hours from my first call to simply remove a link And they knew about it for some unknown amount of time before that!

UPDATE 01/30/03 14:24 PST I just received an automatic ticket email stating that my "Blueform request status was changed to Resolved." It then provides a link I can login to to get a "detailed description," but, of course, the server doesn't work (and I don't have a login, anyway, not being an employee of the school system). As best as I can tell, the "resolution" was simply to revoke Marina Middle School's web page, because when you go there now, it just takes you straight to the school board's basic "about Marina Middle school" page. Even better, in the list of schools, Marina Middle school's link is simply greyed out. Amazing that this was easier than removing the link to osom.org!