Tech

A Defunct Video Hosting Site Is Flooding Normal Websites With Hardcore Porn

Stories on major news sites like ‘The Washington Post,’ and ‘New York Magazine’ currently have porn embedded in them because of an old site called Vidme.
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Hardcore porn is embedded all over regular-ass websites because a porn company has purchased the domain of a popular, defunct video hosting site. 

As pointed out by Twitter user @dox_gay, hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites. This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in 2017. Its Twitter account is still up, but the domain lapsed. 

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Seemingly any vid.me embeds now redirect to the 5 Star Porn HD homepage. The site vid.me also redirects there. For example, if you check out this New York magazine article about former House Majority leader John Boehner's "creepy kissy face," you will see photos of Boehner but also images of a man with a gigantic penis fucking a woman.

Archived versions of this page show that there was formerly a vid.me embed on the page; the page's source code shows the same.

Over at the Huffington Post, an article about Martin Shkreli being banned from Twitter is augmented with videos titled “Getting Into Porsha’s Ass” and “Why Don’t We Tag Team Your GF?”

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A pre-Trump-presidency Uproxx article about Trump’s performance at a GOP debate is illustrated with thumbnails for videos titled “Aria Lee Is Back For More” and “Naughty Spy Girls Part 2.”

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This is funny, unfortunate, and also, an example of a much larger problem: The internet is a collective hallucination that is fading away thanks to link rot.  

5 Star HD Porn did not immediately return Motherboard’s request for comment.