Canoe

Friday, May. 26, 2000

Porn invades Net service

About 10,000 users of a high-speed Internet (At)Home service in southern Ontario could have found themselves redirected to a pornography site if they tried to surf the Web last night.

One Cogeco customer described the porn site as hardcore, featuring two naked women. It replaced the company's "intranet" home page.

"Essentially, what's happened is someone has bounced a proxy system of ours or a proxy on the network, and it's redirected to a pornographic site out there on the Internet somewhere," said a technician at Cogeco Cable.

"This problem is probably only within our customer base. I don't think any of the other providers are experiencing it."

The local Cogeco network covers Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville, Peterborough, Kingston, Windsor, Niagara Falls and St. Catharines. There were no immediate reports of similar problems at Rogers Communications, another cable company that offers (At)Home in the area.

The Cogeco technician said the site redirection "could be" intentional. The company's network management centre was investigating, he said, but could not be immediately reached for comment.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), May 26, 2000