Ecorazzi

The main blog for Al Gore’s groundbreaking environmental film An Inconvenient Truth was earlier discovered to be hiding a sinister underbelly: links from penis-pill promoting spammers!

The nasty junk on the climatecrisis.net site pointed to websites hawking online pharmaceutical drugs such as Viagra and Cialis in an apparent attempt to climb in search engine rankings. From The Register,

“The approach is a more aggressive variant of comment spam attacks, which involve posting links to dodgy sites on blogs. Search engines, such as Google, give priority to sites linked to from popular web destinations, such as the climatecrisis.net domain. Spammers and their hacking accomplices try to take advantage of this behaviour in order to illicitly gain higher places in search page rankings.”

The links have apparently been removed, but it’s not difficult to see why the exploit occurred in the first place. According to records on the blog, it has not been updated since September 2006 and is using an outdated and vulnerable version of WordPress.

Question:  Why did Al Gore and company decide to let a popular website — for a still popular movie — fall into disuse? I’m pretty sure one could find some green bloggers out there happy to carry the torch and continue talking about the issues on climatecrisis.  Did they feel there was nothing more to be said? You would think that Gore would relish the opportunity to respond with updates on issues important to him through the site. What happened?

via the register