Perl.com sends visitors to porn link farm

Visitors to Perl.com, the O'Reilly Media-owned resource, were redirected yesterday (Thursday) to a link farm pushing porn sites. Geeks who hit the site were sent to grepblogs-dot-net, a site that offers links to live adult webcams, erotic blogs and adult erotic fiction, among other things. Closing the Internet Explorer browser window that contains the site caused another link farm of dubious links to open, from a site called cnomy-dot-com. It carries more porno links and banner ads claiming visitors have won a free iPod.

"I was aghast," said Tom Christiansen, author of many of the most popular Perl reference books. "I need to understand the nature of the problem."

Christiansen is the owner of Perl.com, but has turned over day-to-day operations of the site to O'Reilly, a publisher of dozens of tech books and websites.

The redirection is the result of a change in ownership of the grepblogs-dot-net domain name. Judging from this link, the address was hosted on an open source ad server by the name of phpAdsNet. Effective Thursday, however, the site came under new ownership, according to Whois records.