iTunes accidentally serves up porn in Russia on launch day
When you fire up iTunes to listen to a little music or make a purchase, you expect to see thumbnails of album covers and what’s hot. You’d never expect to see what some Russian users did when they installed iTunes for the first time.
Apple works pretty hard to make sure its corporate image is every bit as clean and shiny as every single gadget Sir Jony Ive signs off on. But yesterday when iTunes finally launched in Russia after a decade-long wait, the company wound up with a bit of egg on its face. Why? Because the iTunes app was serving up advertisements for porn websites to Russian users. Yes, this is the same Apple that makes sure the App Store doesn’t feature anything remotely resembling porn amongst its app collection and even warns users when an app such as Google Chrome could be used to access adult material.
The embarrassing pictures that popped up in iTunes weren’t the fault of an advertising system gone wrong, and they weren’t inserted by hacktivists looking to send a little negative publicity Apple’s way. Instead, it’s believed that the porn site ads were being served up thanks to a slight programming oversight on Apple’s part.
Apparently in the iTunes software that was being downloaded by Russian users, Apple’s team had used temporary placeholder text for links to the actual ads that were supposed to be added at some point in the future. Presumably that would have taken place when a minor version update was pushed out. The actual placeholder text that Apple chose, however, proved to be a big mistake. Apple used a string of Xs to fill in the blanks, but the way they were strung together pointed to an actual porn site in the .XXX domain.
Whoops.
Based on the screenshots users have shared, it looks like Apple linked to a placeholder website for the company that owns the .XXX registry. It could have been a lot worse for Apple — the unwanted content that was displayed in iTunes was a lot less explicit than it could have been. Also, the ad was only displayed to those users who happened to browse to a secondary section within the software called “Movies in different languages,” according to Russian bloggers at iPhone.ru. It’s probably safe to say that if the inappropriate ad hasn’t been removed already, it will be in the very near future.
[Source: 9to5 Mac]
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Thanks -Mira