Old Vidme embeds turn into a hub of porn after domain purchase
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Here’s (yet another) argument against using third-party embeds on your respectable website: Porn company 5 Star HD Porn bought the expired domain for video hosting site Vidme, which went out of business in 2017. This means that any websites with Vidme embeds now have porn on them. According to Motherboard, which reported the story first, the list of websites with unexpected porn embeds includes New York Magazine, the Washington Post, HuffPost, and others. And yes, we discovered one such embed on The Verge and have since disabled it.
Old Vidme embeds now redirect to a porn site
It’s a very extreme example of link rot, which is what happens when online content or images are deleted or otherwise broken, so the links...
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