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You are here: Home / The thrill is gone

The thrill is gone

by | 124 Comments

This post is in: 

This was fun while it lasted:

The Republican party took down its innovative link shortening tool Tuesday after pranksters had a field day using the tool to associate the GOP with bondage sites.

[…..]

Users of the Balloon-Juice website entertained each other last night by exchanging scores of such links, which have since been blocked.

Update. Some of the URLs still work.

Reader Interactions

124Comments

  5. 5.

    ronin122

    From this whole thing, I still don’t understand one aspect: if we assume that shorting URLs make them more accessible to the average person, how is that in any way conservative? Seems kind of liberal. I knew those GOoPers were all frauds!

    Congrats on getting your site on Wired though, JC.

  6. 6.

    Keith

    I disagree with the characterization of it as the GOP’s “innovative link shortening tool”. There are no less than 3 previous “innovators” of this tech (beating the GOP by years in 2 of those instances), and the idea’s been around since at *least* the late 90s.
    Small point, but I’d rather call it out now than have to endure some future narrative whereby the GOP invented the mashup.

  8. 8.

    AB

    lol, owned so hard. Luckily, I have my awesome screenshot of Lieberman’s website with Michael Steele on it, pointing up at the GOP banner and saying, “Notice anything different?”. Man, I wish I did that with Mr. Johnson the Muppet before they took it down.

  9. 9.

    John Dillinger

    Terms of Use:GOP.AM was created as a free service to make posting long URLs easier. If you use it for spamming, illegal purposes or to promote lude content, your GOP.AM URL will be disabled.

    Lude? Too funny.

  11. 11.

    Evolved Deep Southerner

    I think you guys just crashed the site last night. Bret’s works at the moment, as do the ones posted by the Wonkette crowd.

  14. 14.

    Cris

    What’s the verb form of being called out by name on Wired? Granted, it’s not on the scale of being slashdotted, but it’s pretty cool.

  17. 17.

    Hob

    See, this is all part of their plan. You give the liberals a shiny toy to play with, and they have a great time, and then you take it away and boy are they annoyed! Ha ha WOLVERINES

  18. 18.

    Suicidal Zebra

    I do love this:

    Political Media, whose other clients include Republican candidates, think tanks and the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee’s Republican minority according to a Political Media spokesman, designed it with right-wing users in mind, but was apparently unaware that it could be hijacked in this way.

    Are Political Media

    1) appauling naive of all internet conventions,

    2) unaware that some Republican candidates have an *ahem* ‘kinky reputation’,

    3) wanting to prevent liberals from using it to link to this sort of content, but not their target market,

    4) all of the above?

    P.S. Lude, lol.

  19. 19.

    Elvis Elvisberg

    Well, I do notice something different– no Princess Leia-style tiny Michael Steele wandering onto the screen to admire the bondage, for one. And at the bottom of the screen, in lieu of anything that says “GOP” on it, the message, “GOP.am is a property of Political Media, Inc. The Republican National Committee is not responsible for any content generated by GOP.am.”

    So, still there, still stupid, still highly mockable, but slightly less fun.

  20. 20.

    carlos the dwarf

    @John Dillinger:

    Like Quaaludes. You can’t sell quaaludes using the GOP website. Because that would associate them with Roman Polanski, and hollywood is evil.*

    Anyone else wondering about Steele’s stance when he comes on the screen? Looks a bit wide to me.

    *Except Jon Voight

  21. 21.

    amorphous

    @Bret: They can’t even fail to fail correctly, which I think is, in itself, failing.

    @Elvis: We were adding Steele on there – hammerandsteele.com

  24. 24.

    amorphous

    Political Media, whose other clients include Republican candidates, think tanks and the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee’s Republican minority according to a Political Media spokesman, designed it with right-wing users in mind, but was apparently unaware that it could be hijacked in this way.

    L-O-fucking-L, dude.

  26. 26.

    Kyle

    If you use it for spamming, illegal purposes or to promote lude content….

    I knew they were in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies…

  27. 27.

    Martin

    What’s the verb form of being called out by name on Wired? Granted, it’s not on the scale of being slashdotted, but it’s pretty cool.

    It’s called ‘victory’.

  28. 28.

    Grumpy Code Monkey

    @Keith:

    Seriously; TinyURL’s been around forever in Internet years, and Make a Shorter Link before that. They just weren’t “branded” (ugh).

  29. 29.

    freelancer

    @amorphous:

    Predicted this:

    “That sounds excellent, Chesterton. Yes, this will really get a wrench stuck in the gears of those liberals. We’ll show them that they’re not the only ones who know how to use the Net. BTW, did you ever see the movie the Net with Sandra Bullock? Quite spooky. We’re lucky to live in a world where no one uses ‘The Net’ for nefarious, evil, or subversive purposes, ‘cause that would be doubly-spooky. Now, let’s get this thing unwrapped!”

    Reposting of Cthulhu Jesus GOP:

    http://gop.am/W4a4

  30. 30.

    arguingwithsignposts

    From the creator’s twitter feed a few days ago:

    KEEP FINGERS CROSSED – I may be launching the coolest thing in internet advocacy in a LONG time tomorrow. #fb #tcot #tlot

    Yup. coolest thing in a while for libs.

  39. 39.

    gnomedad

    The thrill is gone

    Maybe not. If these guys had any brains, they’d:
    a) Take the thing down and admit they made a mistake (unpossible!) or,
    b) Just ignore us until we get bored; we’re not affecting the intended users.

    Now they’ve just upped the ante.

  42. 42.

    freelancer

    Could we tag all links NSFW if they aren’t?

    Somebody reposted the alt.com link and didn’t warn us. Who knows what my IT dept is gonna choose to care about? and I don’t want to be all hoocoodanode?

  48. 48.

    AB

    I got a screenshot of “lude” instead of “lewd”. I don’t have fraps on this computer, but someone should grab a video of Michael Steele lecturing about how awesome a bondage site is and send it to TDS or TCR :)

  49. 49.

    Midnight Marauder

    Political Media, whose other clients include Republican candidates, think tanks and the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee’s Republican minority according to a Political Media spokesman, designed it with right-wing users in mind, but was apparently unaware that it could be hijacked in this way.

    Political Media.
    Inside Politics…Outside The Box.

  52. 52.

    CaseyL

    @jenniebee: That last one, Bondage and God’s Will, is so perfect for the Goopers, they might not realize it’s “unapproved” content.

    I note, BTW, the disclaimer at the bottom, about how the GOP isn’t “responsible for” any content that this, their very own site, contains. Heh indeedy, bitches!

  53. 53.

    RareSanity

    GOP re-branding indeed…

    Do they really think having Phil in Marketing whip up a new PowerPoint will make people forget years of douchery?

    I can’t wait to see what the next “out of the box” internet idea gets turned into Grand Ole FAIL…

  54. 54.

    jibeaux

    apparently unaware that it could be hijacked in this way.

    Wait, we got rid of the Internets Loyalty Tests?

  55. 55.

    Sentient Puddle

    @jenniebee: Man, reading Redstate entries like that makes me wonder if Republicans just decided to start paying attention to the Internet after, what’s it, a decade?

  58. 58.

    Ash Can

    OK, I’ve damn near killed myself laughing here. With the premature demise of my laptop we’ve been temporarily reduced to a one-computer household (with said computer monopolized at night with the husband’s work-related stuff), so I couldn’t read the last thread until this morning, after the links had been disabled (no doubt by some Republican IT mope who was absolutely astounded that people would do such a thing). And even then I was pulling muscles laughing at the thread.

    My oh my. Christmas done come early for us here. It’s almost enough to make me sorry for these poor bastards.

  63. 63.

    Catsy

    I was late to the party so couldn’t look at any of last night’s links, but for me the funniest part of this was that the GOP used the TLD for Armenia for their URL shortener. Why do they hate America?

  64. 64.

    Bad Horse's Filly

    You guys are all sick! Sick I tell you. That must be why I like stopping by. This is all just too, too awesome.

  65. 65.

    gnomedad

    At some point last night I slapped my forehead for not realizing that this was obviously a false flag operation and that this morning the prank would be revealed. Not only was I wrong, but they are still trying to make it work. Shall we call this “the surge”?

  67. 67.

    chuck

    They even created a Ubiquity command for this: “gopurl”. In the metadata for it, there’s your reason the guy picked the .am tld:

    author: {name: “Alex Malinovich”, homepage: “http://the-love-shack.net/”, email: “[email protected]”},

    the-love-shack.net? (eh okay it’s just a blog)

  68. 68.

    jibeaux

    Are they still trying to make it work by just purging the ones that have already gotten through? Because there is a finite supply of bondage sites on the internet? This could actually be even more fun than originally promised.

  70. 70.

    Randy P

    Damn you people, I have to defer my laughs till tonight if they still work, since I’m sure none of your links are SFW.

    I hate delayed gratification.

    The “lude” misspelling is still up there on the invalid link page. So I don’t see what’s wrong with the bondage links so long as they didn’t include any quaalude references.

    Does anyone have an answer to the question of what they thought was innovative about reinventing tinyurl?

  74. 74.

    Breezeblock

    This is not anywhere near as fun, but I must pick the nit, if no one else caught it.

    Their Terms of Service:

    Terms of Use:GOP.AM was created as a free service to make posting long URLs easier. If you use it for spamming, illegal purposes or to promote lude content, your GOP.AM URL will be disabled. This service is provided without warranty of any kind.

  77. 77.

    r€nato

    Political Media’s Ward told Wired.com he saw the pranks coming a mile away (updated). “Believe me, we were well aware that this was going to happen,” he said. “We’ve been on the internet doing business for every aspect of it since 1996. I was well aware exactly what was going to happen.”

    Uh huh.

  78. 78.

    jibeaux

    @Randy P:

    The innovation was apparently leaving up the GOP banner and/or creepy animated Michael Steele on every page. Although personally I would call being willing to stick your stamp of approval on anything on the internets really more “mavericky” than innovative.

  79. 79.

    Shell

    Does anyone have an answer to the question of what they thought was innovative about reinventing tinyurl?

    Really, that was my first thought. Maybe they were carried away with the awesome cleverness of the slogan ‘Making Url’s Conservative!’

  80. 80.

    r€nato

    Maybe they were carried away with the awesome cleverness of the slogan ‘Making Url’s Conservative!’

    They can’t be conservative. They work when you use them.

  82. 82.

    Sentient Puddle

    The updated article has another strange one from Steele:

    “If it’s going to be ‘outside the box’ — then not only keep it outside the box, but take it to someplace the box hasn’t even reached yet.”

    Aren’t the places that the box hasn’t reached yet, by definition, outside said box?

  84. 84.

    r€nato

    @Sentient Puddle:

    Aren’t the places that the box hasn’t reached yet, by definition, outside said box?

    That’s what a mavericky maverick he is.

    If you were a maverick, you’d get it too.

  87. 87.

    Hunter Gathers

    Instead of shutting down the whole thing, they seem to be looking at them one by one and deleting any ‘objectionable content’. Sadly, they took my NAMBLA URL down.

  88. 88.

    jibeaux

    Aw, remember back in the day when you could vote and submit suggestions to the Republican party about what they should do as part of their grand makeover and make people not hate their guts again? And Number one for a long time was to buy every American a pair of TruckNutz? ™ Good times.

  91. 91.

    freelancer

    “Our objective is to keep it clean,” said Ward. “We’re not going to remove someone who puts GOP.am on Barack Obama’s page, we’re not going to remove somebody who puts it on the communist page. The links that we’re going to edit are the pornographic ones, the lewd ones – obviously those type of links or anything that is overtly… hateful, we’re going to remove those.”

    What’s wrong with a little commerce? Why’d you break my link? Oh well. Take 2.

    http://gop.am/XMmQ

  92. 92.

    jibeaux

    @r€nato:

    “We’ve been on the internets since, like, 1932, y’all. We totally knew that was going to happen, mmkay? But we had to wait for it to happen first so we would know which tubes to block. And sooner or later the novelty will wear off. At least we hope so because if not we might could run out of tubes. But probably not.”

  94. 94.

    jibeaux

    @freelancer:

    I’m thinking because it stirred up mixed feelings, a broth of self-loathing and arousal yet strangely only halfway done, and just made them uncomfortable and feverish for reasons they themselves could not adequately articulate.

  96. 96.

    MattR

    @freelancer: I am kinda looking forward to seeing how they define “overtly hateful” given the links that teabaggers and/or freepers will use. I wish I could bet that comparing Obama to Hitler will not be taken down for being hateful.

  99. 99.

    chuck

    Seeing gop.am framing stormfront.org wasn’t quite as weird as seeing bit.ly shorten stormfront’s url to “obamaquote”.

    It’s just a plain old phpBB/SMF board, nothing really worth spreading around.

  100. 100.

    Midnight Marauder

    “Bottom line is if we haven’t done it, let’s do it. If we haven’t thought of it, think of it. If it hasn’t been tried, why not? If it’s going to be ‘outside the box’ — then not only keep it outside the box, but take it to someplace the box hasn’t even reached yet.’” — Michael Scott Steele

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, Michael Steele, how I hope your rank incompetence and general buffoonery never get you fired as Chairman.

    And I love how in Michael Steele’s world, boxes are not only sentient beings capable of getting up and moving around, but apparently, they are nefarious creatures from the depths of Mordor, hellbent on chasing after any and all ideas that haven’t been consumed by Evil Boxes yet.

  102. 102.

    DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)

    You peeps are the bestest! Now we are on day two of WIN and it just keeps coming. Yeah, I am sure that they were expecting us to make a mess of things so that’s why they let us.

    Makes sense to me. ;)

  104. 104.

    Lee

    “We’ve been on the internet doing business for every aspect of it since 1996. I was well aware exactly what was going to happen.”

    I think this means he is fully aware of all internet traditions.

  107. 107.

    valdivia

    Sorry I still don’t get what the whole purpose of this thing is supposed to be, aside from making us die of laughter? Why would anyone use this?

  108. 108.

    arguingwithsignposts

    From the comments, the author says:

    I asked Larry Ward from Political Media about that just now, and he says they bought several two-letter domain names (as many other companies do – last.fm, bit.ly, etc.) and decided on ‘.am’ because it represents “morning” and constitutes the first two letters of “America.”

    Morning in America, bitchez!

    Also, in all seriousness, WTF do people think that web site owners are going to be pleased by these “branded” URL shorteners? It’s taking up screen space and screwing up their usability. Didn’t Comcast have to backtrack on one of these ideas? Same goes for Google.

    If I had a web site that was run through GOP.ass, I’d find some way to block the shortener for brand abuse. Someone should sue them.

  110. 110.

    Darkrose

    Yup, still funny. More so, actually, with the “We meant to do that!” I’m picturing them like my cat when he falls off the bed, grooming himself and trying desperately to pretend it didn’t happen.

    Joxur is dumb as a box of hammers. These people make him look like a frelling genius.

  111. 111.

    gex

    @twiffer: Well part of the innovation that comes with the toolbar and the Michael Steele is that they track where you visit with your browser via the toolbar. Beyond going to the link you followed. It’s just no fun for the Republicans if they can’t spy on their fellow Americans, you see.

  112. 112.

    John Dillinger

    @John Harrold: The thought of Sarah P. as a lesbian is enough for Rich Lowery to have to change his pants.

  113. 113.

    Susan Kitchens

    So sad it all went away. Happily, had a browser window still open. Captured movie of it. Am compressing it now, want to gift it to John Cole or any Balloon Juicer w/ YouTube account for uploading and sharing.

    Also, here’s how to say bye bye cookies in Safari:

    1. Safari menu > Preferences

    2. Select Security tab

    3. Locate and click the Show Cookies button

    4. In window that appears, locate search area, upper right. Type ‘gop’

    5. Select the resulting cookie listings from gop.am (and gop.com?)

    6. Click the Remove button (lower left of windoid)

    7. Click the Done button.

  114. 114.

    Avi

    @arguingwithsignposts:

    If I had a web site that was run through GOP.ass, I’d find some way to block the shortener for brand abuse.

    Someone else can probably come up with a more effective approach, but here’s what I’ve been doing in my sites’ .htaccess files:

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://gop\.am [NC]
    RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

    Any traffic sent my way via gop.am gets a 403 Forbidden error. I’ll probably change that last line to RewriteRule .* http://some.url/ [R,L] once I decide what some.url should be.

  116. 116.

    MattR

    @Avi: I am sure the good folks here can come up with suggestions for where to redirect the traffic. Are you looking for something funny, political or “lude”?

  118. 118.

    Ken

    So far all the short URLs are only four characters long, and all characters in A-Za-z0-9. That’s only enough for about 14.8 million URLs, which would not take long to exceed – especially if some of the script kiddies get involved.

    Part of me thinks they must have thought through this, and that it will just move on to five characters, then six, and so on. On the other hand, they don’t seem to have heard of tinyurl, and they didn’t think of the obvious potential for abuse, and it looks like they’re going to try to hand-filter every submission. Given that display of intelligence, maybe they didn’t think of the overflow problem…

  123. 123.

    Steeplejack

    As a coda to this thread, and for the Balloon Juice archives, here is the screen capture of Tunch’s incursion into gop.am last night. Notice how the white paw of death is poised to strike. And yet the White One remains Zen, remains . . . “I’ve got this.” The Tunch abides.

    It is written: “The mountain does not move, because the mountain does not need to move.”

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