Goatse.cx

Goatse.cx was an infamous Internet shock site that became well-known among various Internet forums because of trolls who posted links in order to shock other forum readers. Its front page featured a picture, hello.jpg, showing a naked man stretching his anus open to a diameter roughly equal to the width of his hand, with the inside of his rectum clearly visible. Below his gaping anus, his dangling, semi-flaccid penis and scrotum were visible.

The site goes offline

As of January 14, 2004, the domain goatse.cx was taken offline, but many mirrors of the site are still available, and the image is displayed on many websites. The most common mirror was goat.cx; but this, like its predecessor, was taken offline as of February 22, 2005. As of February 27, the domain goat.cx, like goatse.cx, was suspended by the Christmas Island Internet Administration; but it appeared, as of April 2005, to be back online showing only the message "eat my goatse'd penis!" As of May 2005, there is an image on the site showing a pumpkin with some hands around it as if it is stretching its anus.

The goatse.cx domain name was reported sold at an Auction on 30 April 2007 to an unknown bidder. According to seobidding.com, the first auction ended with fake bids so the auction was reactivated. This was again won by fake bidders, so Seobidding.com announced that the website would be sold for $500,000 and that legal action would be pursued against the fake bidders.

At some point at the start of March 2007, the registrar reclaimed the domain from its legal owner, with no notification or justification and put the domain up for sale.

Website

Goatse.cx had four sections, two of which had images intended to shock the viewer:

• The "Receiver" page, titled "Eh", showing the aforementioned hello.jpg. Hello.jpg has the alt attribute "stinger". Before the picture is the text in black, "The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! So.. if you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!" This text was not a sincere warning, as hello.jpg is very close to it. This is also a catch-22, as one cannot find the photograph offensive without having seen it first. The site also had links to http://www.dolphinsex.org/ and http://www.urinalpoop.org/, and it once had a link to http://www.biganal.com/ (all of which are now occupied by cybersquatters). The text below hello.jpg reads, "IMPORTANT NOTE: There are many merchandising attempts for goatse.cx around the web-- none of them are real, none of them are official. Do not buy this gimmick merchandise. The official goatse.cx merchandise is coming soon!"
• The "Giver" page, titled "Woah", shows a picture (giver.jpg) of a man reclining in an orange convertible (later versions show him on a yacht or speedboat of some kind, with ocean or river waves in the background). He has an oversized penis which reaches up to his chest, which was done using photo editing techniques. This is clearly conspicuous when careful examination is given to the pixels surrounding the genitalia. The website layout contains an anal sex joke: That the receiver is stretching his anus so that the giver can insert his oversized penis into it, and therefore, bring on highly pleasurable gay sex for the two men.
• The "Feedback" section, titled "Got mail?", exhibits emails that were sent to the site.
• The "Contrib" section showcasing visitor contributions to the site. Contrib has additional variations of hello.jpg and giver.jpg, as well as other images and files. The title of this page is "Contributed Work".
  • bush.jpg is a picture of United States President George W. Bush, calling someone on a telephone in his office, with hello.jpg displayed on a laptop computer on his desk.
  • goatse-wwii.jpg is a picture of a large snowball, with "goatse.cx" written on the side, chasing Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo.
  • giver2.jpg is a picture of the Goatse giver holding his oversized penis.
  • magiceye.jpg is a Magic Eye picture. The initial image, a legitimate autostereogram of a helix, changes after about 16 seconds to that of a lower resolution, 256 color version of hello.jpg. It attempts to fool viewers by exploiting the fact that, although the server sends a MIME type stating the filename is a JPEG image, the image is in fact an animated GIF.
  • warning.jpg is a warning sign picture telling people not to go to goatse.cx
  • goatsex.swf is a Flash Movie, set to the hook from "MMMBop" by Hanson. The movie shows a large dildo being inserted into the anus of the man posing in hello.jpg. The background is from another gap.zip picture, gap8.jpg.
  • Goatman.mp3 is an MP3 Music file. It takes up 518 KB.
  • Foxy_goatse.mp3 is another mp3 music file, a parody of the Jimi Hendrix song Foxy Lady. It takes up 1061 KB.
  • goatsecx-winamp.zip is a ZIP file containing a Winamp skin, depicting hello.jpg. It takes up 313 KB.
  • hello.mpg is a movie, first showing the text "HI" on a black background, followed by shots of gap.zip pictures. At the end of the movie, the following text appears next to a picture of a teenage boy:
    "http://www.goatse.cx
    The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! So.. if you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!"

People sometimes link to goatse.cx images not shown on the actual webpages, such as loopback.jpg, a picture of a man looping his penis into his anus. There are also numerous other files in the directory http://www.goatse.cx/contrib/.

The image hello.jpg originates from a set of forty images depicting the man performing various anal sexual acts. In those images, the man used dildos and butt plugs to stretch his anus. The images were located by Stile Project and are also available from the "Contrib" section of the goatse.cx website under the filename gap.zip. hello.jpg is the third file in the archive, gap3.jpg.

Goatse.cx also had a Robots.txt file at one point.

Geographic location

The site used the .cx country code, the top-level domain of Christmas Island, whose operators will not disclose registrants' personal information. The actual server of Goatse.cx was not located on Christmas Island, but in the United States and is owned by Hick.org, a website about computer programming and bathroom humor. The Hick.org domain was registered by Matt Miller in Overland Park, Kansas. Both Goatse.cx and Hick.org originate from the same IP address; the server is located in the Kansas City, Missouri metro-region. Goat.cx, formerly a mirror of Goatse.cx, was located in the Dallas, Texas metro-region, while current mirror Goatse.cz seems to be located in Clifton, New Jersey.

Goatse in popular culture

Because many frequent Internet users have been tricked into viewing the site at one time or another, it has become something of an Internet meme. As such, hello.jpg and the other images on the site are common subjects of parodies and tributes.

File:BBC Goatse.cx Alternative Olympic logo.png

A parody was submitted to BBC News under the guise of an alternative Olympic Logo for the 2012 games.

• An adventure in the web game Kingdom of Loathing in The Daily Dungeon called "Seriously, I Just Read It For the Articles." If the adventurer does not have sleaze resistance, s/he buckles down and looks at a centerfold, only to have it be from the magazine "Secret World of Goatse."
• Alex Albrecht of Diggnation fame made a reference to Goatse.cx on episode 20 of Tiki Bar TV. The Tiki Bar crew were having Internet bandwidth issues, and Alex (playing the character "Son of the Internet"), said that their issues were affecting the whole Internet. - "Goatse's down, people are happy about that."
• The video game web comic VG Cats featured a comic referencing the goatse.cx picture, although the actual image was not shown.
• Following Hurricane Charley in August 2004, a photograph purporting to show "the hands of God" in the cloud formations in the aftermath of the disaster circulated via email. The image was eventually proven to be a photoshopped Goatse parody.
• The cover of the 20 September 2004 edition of Time magazine bore a striking resemblance to hello.jpg.
• In February 2006, a parody involving inkblots was made, one resembling the goatse image.[1]
• In May 2007, the third place winner in "The BioShock Cover Art Contest" involving designing the limited edition box for the videogame BioShock is a reworking of goatse, including the ring on the ringfinger of the left hand.
• In June 2007, a parody of the highly derided 2012 Summer Olympics logo appeared on the BBC News website under the alternative Olympic Logo entries and was broadcast on their BBC News 24 channel. Two hands were pulling the 0 from 2012 apart. The image was later shown as part of a gallery of viewers logos on BBC London News and BBC News 24, but was subsequently removed from the website. The editor of the BBC News website acknowledged the mistake in his blog, saying his team "simply didn’t spot it".
• In July 2007, an Internet Hoax was submitted to Digg.com and other social media sites. The hoax claimed that the goatse image made it on to CNN during the CNN-YouTube Presidential Debates. The news made it big until people realized that it was just photoshopped images.
• The cover to the third issue of the 2003 comic book series JLA/Avengers features a drawing of two planets being merged together which resembles the goatse image.
• 2k Games placed an homage to Goatse in Xbox 360 game, Bioshock.