Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/17/porn_fiends_barbie_scam_nonsense/

Porn fiends' Barbie scam nonsense

Daily Mail gets cross, over what?

By Kieren McCarthy

Posted in Legal, 17th November 2000 13:08 GMT

Voice of middle Britain the Daily Mail, is outraged again at the Internet.

This time its fury is levelled at "Internet porn fiends" who are "luring the young". How? Well, these fiends are putting well-known kids toy brands in as meta tags to generate extra traffic and are subsequently destroying the sacred innocence of our children.

A study by software firm Envisional - whose business, utterly coincidentally, is protecting brand names online - has shown that thousands of porn sites feature toy brands in their meta tags. In the extremely wide-ranging survey, it tapped in 26 brand names including Barbie, Pokemon etc and found that of the unsuitable links, 30 per cent featured hardcore filth.

"I'm horrified that youngsters... [blah blah blah etc etc]," said the Envisional chief exec.

We decided to run our own study. And so, entering the word "barbie" into Google, we were disgusted to find that the 42nd link was to www.barbie.nu - is this a French porn site? Frothing at the mouth and writing a letter to our MP while clicking on the site, we were disappointed when it was nothing but a barbie site "based" in the Pacific island nation of Niue.

We gave up when link number 80 still didn't herald any porn. Perhaps Excite would be filthier. Nope. Fifty links in and still nothing. Hacker Barbie wasn't bad but no flesh on show.

Sod it, we thought, and typed in "barbie and porn". Aha! That'll get em. Numero uno - Latin Barbie. Right! Nope. Nothing. Just pictures of a group of (dressed) latin american women. But hang on, link six is a link to a news story "Mattel sues Barbie porn site". Eureka.

We read the story - the offending site is www.barbiesplaypen.com. We go there. All the pictures have been pulled off! Bloody hell. Last go. We go to pornsearch.com and type in Barbie. Yes! Porn sites featuring the word Barbie. But they're all pay-per-view.

Which leads us to believe that our kids are safe from utter corruption and deprivation for another day. ®