Harvard.edu: An Ivy League pornographic playground

Warning: The contents of this post are strongly adult-oriented. While the post itself will maintain a professional-though-adult tone, some of the pages I link out to are quite risque. As such, approach all links with caution and I recommend not visiting any of the links from this article with young, impressionable eyes around. Any links that link directly to a page with images that load will be noted as (NSFW) (or, Not Safe For Work) so that you can have complete confidence in knowing what is in store for you when clicking-through. If any of the links to follow don’t work, then it’s due to them having been nixed (which is a good thing for them). And now, without further ado…

UPDATE 5/18/11: It appears many of the links contained within this post have been removed by their owners. As such, expect mixed results if this is your first time viewing this article.

Imagine, if you will, the seemingly crazy notion that the Web site of an Ivy League school as prestigious as Harvard could have pornographic images in plain sight on public domain. It’s bad enough to think that a server of Harvard’s may have been hacked by someone who replaced/injected a page leading out to XXX content or something of the likes, but what is one to make of the Harvard physics council Wiki site that contains pages with terms like “barely legal blow job“? For that matter, there are a whole slew of these rogue Wiki sites with all kinds of fun and educational pages; like this one about “panty job free video clips“! Look up in your address bar when clicking those links, folks. That’s Harvard.

Worse yet, how does one reconcile blog entries on a Harvard Law blog that contain pornographic images with no educational or law-relevant value to them whatsoever? Sounds ridiculous, right? I mean, how on earth could the Web site of a school as prestigious as Harvard contain this type of content — never mind a fair amount of it at that! Just look at this screen shot of the home page of Harvard.edu (click it to see a larger version of the image):

Harvard.edu Home Page

So prestigious! So fresh! So clean! So… corruptible!

Remember those blog entries on a Harvard Law blog that contain pornographic images that I mentioned just a second ago? Well, below are screen shots from two out of a number of posts on it that I found containing such images (click them to see larger versions):

Should you want to see each post for yourself, here are the links to each them, respectively:

M & M’s Mom Carjacked in Detroit (NSFW Image)
Ingenious New Use for Our iPod (NSFW Image)

But wait, there’s more! For your consideration, here is an entire sub-domain totaling ~100 pages on Harvard.edu which seems to be dedicated to nothing but pornographic spam entries! We can easily mine these pages out via the following Google query: site:dev.flex.med.harvard.edu

And while we’re on the topic of pornographic spam pages littering Harvard.edu, take at look at this one enormous collection of links on one particular page. And there are many more like this I have been able to dig up, all thanks to a little bit of Google Fu.

Perhaps the icing on the cake is the fact that Harvard’s site utilizes a Google Custom Search box for their site-related searches. That means that if you visit Harvard.edu and utilize the search page that’s linked to in the upper right-hand corner of the home page, you’re going to see results from Google — albeit within Harvard’s Web site. Give the following a shot and see for yourself how hilariously fun this is:

• 1 - Visit the Harvard.edu search page by clicking here.
• 2 - In the search box, type the acronym “MILF” and hit the search button.
• 3 - Giggle/cringe in disbelief and/or pee your pants just a little because of what you see.

For those of you who aren’t the interactive type, you can see what these results look like in the picture below (click it for a full-screen view):

Got MILF? Harvard does!

Now, don’t get me wrong here; as far as I’m concerned, what someone wants to do with their own Web site is fine with me. Personally, I’m not the slightest bit offended by pornography; nor do I care who’s into what. We’re all human and people are into whatever they’re into. With that said, I can’t imagine that the image Harvard wants to portray is one of pornographic endeavors.

From an image/branding standpoint, posts like these make Harvard look trashy. From an editorial and administrative standpoint, the comments below the posts make Harvard look lazy and apathetic. Perhaps the latter is the worst of all, considering it is from that standpoint where it seems a particular ignorance and apathy have been fostered, thus allowing for anomalies like rogue Wiki sites that are publicly editable.

With such a wide array of pornographic entry points to the site, Harvard should consider undergoing a thorough investigation of both internal and external pages to help shore up their brand image and maintain the prestige. From an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) standpoint, those links are undoubtedly of some value to the spam sites they link out to. Harvard may also benefit overall via such a purge by reducing the total number of links that link out to garbage sites.

Also, I’d like to point out the fact that pornography is just one of many facets I decided to focus on where this type of investigation is concerned. Perhaps even more detrimental to a school’s image than pornography would be racism. When thinking on that path, it doesn’t take long to dig up pages dedicated to things like “Ku Klux Klan Chat” — never mind much more offensive and derogatory words I prefer not to write here. Now, do I think Harvard is a racist institution? Of course not. But the fact remains, that page is there. Spam or not, it just plain looks bad.

With that said, head on over to page two where I expose more schools with similar types of content and I list some particulars to look out for should you want to avoid or alleviate these types of issues on your very own Web site.

Warning: The contents on the following page are far more risque than those found above, so if this page was overload for you, then you may not want to continue…

Not just Harvard, but many others as well… »