Roughly 800,000 Maryland drivers with license plates designed to commemorate the War of 1812 are now inadvertently advertising a website for an online casino based in the Philippines.
In 2012, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, Maryland redesigned its standard license plate to read "MARYLAND WAR OF 1812." The license plates, which were the default between 2012 and 2016, have the URL www.starspangled200.org printed at the bottom.
Sometime within the last year, www.starspangled200.org stopped telling people about how Marylander Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the national anthem "The Star Spangled Banner" after watching British ships bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812 and started instead redirecting to a site called globeinternational.info, in which a blinking, bikini-clad woman advertises "Philippines Best Betting Site, Deposit 100 Receive 250."
[...] "The website printed on the plates is not owned by the Motor Vehicle Administration. The plates' design and content originated from the War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission created in 2007. Star-Spangled 200, Inc. is the nonprofit entity affiliated with the Commission that led the efforts to raise funds for bicentennial projects and events," they said. "The MVA does not endorse the views or content on the current website using that URL, and is working with the agency's IT department to identify options to resolve the current issue."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday June 02 2023, @05:55PM (1 child)
20 years ago this squat would have been something funny instead of someone trying to squeeze a few more bucks out of a detected flow of traffic.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kazzie on Friday June 02 2023, @07:19PM
15 years ago it would have been a redirect to a popular youtube music video instead.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by bzipitidoo on Friday June 02 2023, @10:31PM (1 child)
Sadly, government website fail is all too common. It's a little more frequent than commercial website fail.
There's the annoying web form that disables autofill, because security, then forces the user to start over when there's one tiny little problem with the 44th line of input. Then there's not building enough capacity, so that the website buckles and folds on the day of the deadline for whatever that government agency handles. That one happened to the Texas Comptroller's website in May this year, and they announced they'd extended the deadline another 2 days. Another is anti-social politics. That one is why the IRS still isn't allowed to do a whole lot more of people's income taxes. That would hurt the profits of the tax prep industry.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Sunday June 04 2023, @04:42AM
My favorite was when people were bitching about the Obamacare website not being reliable.
"So...this website had to interface with *every* hospital website in the country, and millions of people are using it, and you're saying it *didn't* have a smooth rollout? Just because it had to cover basically infinite edge cases? shockedpikachu.jpg"
But no, I'm sure they paid for enough man-hours of qualified programmers, and they just coincidentally happened to be idiots. Clearly that's the explanation.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday June 03 2023, @12:49AM (2 children)
Hmmm. Well. At least this is better than the "In god we trust" badge of stupidity they put on Georgia license plates.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Saturday June 03 2023, @06:35PM (1 child)
That's purely for added irony after a collision between one or more vehicles bearing such a plate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 04 2023, @04:38AM
Sounds like a fun theological question to pose to the parties in question: "So if you're both Christians, and believe that bad things only happen to bad people, and God could've prevented this...which one of you is he punishing?" :)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday June 03 2023, @08:03AM (1 child)
You used to see that same mistake with a lot of EU projects and technology conferences.
It was stupid of them to register a whole, separate domain just for the one project. We've seen that for decades now, some fools register a whole new domain for a short-lived project separate from their normal domain for their long-lived project. So instead of www.starspangled200.org, they should have used www.starspangled200.md.us or www.starspangled200.maryland.gov instead and they'd have control of the host name indefinitely by default.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Funny) by janrinok on Saturday June 03 2023, @09:35AM
You are, of course, correct.
But had they done that, what would I have to read about on a Saturday morning while my bacon cooks..... You have completely ignored the 'bigger picture' :-)
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Sunday June 04 2023, @04:35AM
I hope whoever made that foul-up was fired with a nice severance package lol
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"