Mildly Embarassing the Government

Last week, I discovered that a long-neglected subdomain of UK Gov’s Department for Transport was showing pornographic content, and I wrote a rather sarcastic piece about it here.

Naturally, it was posted to a few subreddits, and from there it was picked up by Hacker News, and made its way to the front page.

Holy shit.

Articles from The Crow have made it to the HN FP before and the result is the same. I start to worry when Matomo shows 200 visits per hour. Once it reaches 1500, I really start to worry. At 3,000 visits per hour, Matomo is barely functional, and when it gets much higher than that, my little Pi collapses into a sobbing heap.

I moved the site onto a VPS, and once traffic calmed down a little, I moved it back home.

It’s now almost a week later, and if you look at Google News for Department of Transport, you will see dozens of links to articles all based on my original story. The Mail, The Sun, The Star - Hell, even Russia Today and Sputnik picked it up.

Google News results for Department for Transport are less than savoury thanks to yours truly

The Crow (and by extension, me) is now on the first page of Google results (In the UK at least) for the search term: UK porn

Why anyone would want to search for UK porn is beyond my understanding, but hey ho, if I was a pornographer, that would be useful.