Checking up on urban legends leads to tasteless and offensive error message.

I recently received a forwarded email from a friend that listed a bunch of top-notch, companies that were filing for bankruptcy. The list included Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Circuit City, Bed Bath and Beyond, Linens and Things, and so on. The email went on to warn me to quickly cash in any gift cards I may have since these cards would not be honored by these companies once they file Chapter 11. I am naturally suspicious of any forwarded emails like this and usually ignore them. But since I was sitting in Kuala Lumpur airport, waiting for a flight to Penang, and having nothing better to do, I decided to check it out.

The first thing I did, was to cut and paste some words from the subject line of the email into Google. A few second later, lo-and-behold out popped pages of links to websites that had used those same words. It seems that there had been quite some discussion on this topic online. But a funny thing happened when I went ahead and clicked on the first search result. Instead of loading a webpage, I received the following error message:

Request denied by
KLIA INTERNET ACCESS SERVICES.

Reason: one or more categories denied
helper=’ZERO-CONF-WEBLOCKER’
details=’Tasteless & Offensive’

It appears that the Kuala Lumpur international airport wireless internet providers had been monitoring my activities and had, in their infinite wisdom, found my search result “tasteless & offensive”

How funny, tasteless and offensive is that!

Anyway, if you are interested in the bankruptcy story check out its truth value here