LANCING, MI — When Web users step outside of the Microsoft box there’s just no end of strange delights that await them. Recently, users of the Mozilla Firefox browser who visited the Lancing City Council site found that it led to unexpectedly exotic pleasures — exotic pleasures not available to users of Internet Explorer, Safari, or other such browsers.Specifically, visitors that clicked on the site’s newsletter headline found themselves transported to a 2002 photo of Playboy model Feather Frazier. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it wasn’t what folks hoping to read about the more mundane goings-on of the city council likely had in mind.
Browsers able to recognize the malformed URL that lead city council watchers to the adult site Frazier’s photo called home stayed put, denied the sight of Frazier’s assets.
According to Lancing IT officials, the whole thing is just a wacky coincidence. “The configuration that has been in place and the information that is there has been there since 2004,” city computer and communication services manager Eric Tumbarella explained. Given that he and his team were unable to duplicate the error, Tumbarella concluded that the state news computers were at fault.
Rich Wiggins, who works as the senior information technologist for MSU’s Academic Computing and Network Services agreed to some extent. “If you look at the URL, it’s not valid,” he pointed out. “(The browser) will do a search for the string. If you go to Google and try that string, the first hit is the picture of the Playboy model.”
Since browsers such as Firefox don’t require complete Web address in order to load a site, such browsers would have followed the incomplete string to the infamous Frazier photo.
Wiggins figures that “somebody with access to the server to the council must have pasted that string, knowing that on certain browsers it will do that search.” It’s also possible that the naming system for the newsletter was similar to the website in question.
However it came about, Tumbarella assured visitors that the IT team was on the job and would fix everything once they figured out what had gone wrong. “It’s an error we don’t want,” he admitted. “It will be fixed so that particular problem won’t happen again.”
The council’s newsletter has not been updates since October 31st, is searchable via Google, but is not advertised on the site’s main page.
