【2004 Archives】

Prepare to cringe.

A well-known Australian footballer has accidentally aired a snippet from a pornographic film during a high school talk. On internet security.

You may remember Jarryd Hayne as the rugby league player who took on his dream of professional American football with the San Francisco 49ers back in 2015. Then he stopped suddenly a year later.

On Monday, he was helping to teach hundreds of students at Robina State High School about online safety, alongside internet security company Norton.

Hayne's phone was connected to a public wifi network and his browsing history was shown on screen, according to ABC News. It was part of a demonstration on how his information could be intercepted by a third-party, a.k.a. a "man-in-the-middle" attack.

Then suddenly, the adult website PornHub popped up on screen, and oh boy.

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While it'd be tempting to point the finger at a certain person's dubious internet browsing history, the explanation from Norton was that someone had connected to the display.

"During our wifi demo we had an open network that was available for anyone to connect to and someone had connected to the network and browsed to a site where the images were displayed," Norton Security's Paul Savvides told the news outlet.

"I've just checked and the device that connected that did that was not Jarryd's phone," he added.

They say the phone that connected to the screen was a Samsung device, not an iPhone which Hayne had in hand during the demo.

So it looks like some pesky student (or possibly a teacher) was behind the act of sabotage.

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Despite the more than reasonable explanation, it's hard not to revel in the extraordinarily awkward situation.

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At the least, it's a good lesson in why you should always secure your wireless networks, or consider clearing your browsing history more often. Silly.

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