back to article IT bloke inadvertently broadcasts smut on vast public screen

A Chinese techie who was supposed to be fixing a big screen overlooking a public square in Jilin instead accidentally broadcast 10 minutes of a Hong Kong grumble flick over the giant LED telly. According to the Beeb, Yuan Mou kicked back to admire Forbidden Legend: Sex and Chopsticks on his laptop, blissfully unaware it was …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Forbidden Legend: Sex and Chopsticks goes under the Chinese name Xin Jin Ping Mei, and is apparently based on the 17th Century novel The Plum in the Golden Vase."

    There is his legal defence: - ahem - cultural research. A bit like in the West getting caught reading "the story of oh" or anything by The Marquis of Sade. I would recommend he studies the South Park episode where Cartman contrives a pre-emptive explanation for why (he thinks) his friends are about to see a picture of him with the penis of a sleepover friend in his mouth. His culture vulture "I'm doing mad cultural projects" explanatory tone as he preemptively shows the picture at his class "show and tell" is a wonder to behold and gets him 70% of the way to a full explanation. Hey, the remaining 30% hangs in the air like an unexplained pregnant hippo, but, that's still *almost* better than having no explanation at all, and at the end if the day, there's no escaping the truth, but at least he can distract from it a little. Perhaps. Maybe.

    OK he's screwed.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Windows

      I think Oh is written without the "h". I have done ... hmmm... .extensive research.

    2. birchanger_toper

      I've read this book, and it's fantastic. There are no explicit passages in at all, but I can see how you could make a grumbleflick from it, as the main character (whose name is - wait for it - Hsi Men) does get about a bit.

      What's great are the insights into Chinese culture and technology some hundreds of years ago. Plus the perpetual sex and corruption.

      You'll find it on eBay or Amazon, and I think there's been a new translation since I last read it.

      The title varies, but my copy is called 'The Adventurous History of Hsi Men and His Six Wives', or the Chin P'ing Mei (or similar).

      I need to get the movie now, by the sound of it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        You enjoyed the book, but for the movie...

        Don't bother. It's not very good.

        Its sequel (which continues the story) is even worse, though also has a rather darker tone to it.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You've got to admire...

    El Reg for its thorough description of the subject film. Who said research journalism is dead?

    1. Francis Boyle Silver badge

      Thought the description was a bit perfunctory myself

      Clearly demands further research.

      1. Evil Auditor Silver badge
        Go

        Re: Thought the description was a bit perfunctory myself

        Yes, further research! And more gonzo journalism, please.

        Although, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to mix the two together. Any thoughts on this, Lester?

  3. kbb
    Happy

    What? No jil(l)in(g) jokes?

    1. Gray Ham Bronze badge
      Pint

      Since this was in Jilin, we have to know ... was the big screen visible to the NORKS?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Never mind that

    Is the film available via bittorrent??

    1. FuzzyTheBear
      Pint

      Re: Never mind that

      The vid of the incident is here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DK-1sIiLNM

      Quite funny actually .. some versions of that short clip have been censored ! LOL

      Thanks for the laughs

  5. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    I never understood...

    What kind of moron would watch pr0n movies at work?

    This seems to be happening quite a lot recently. Only a few months ago a Dutch professor got into trouble at the Uni in Wageningen because he basically did the same thing; watching pr0n on his laptop while forgetting that the laptop was connected to the main screen.

    I mean; don't you have better things to do while being at work?

    1. Cliff

      Re: I never understood...

      Maybe this is the 21st century 'ciggie break' analogue?

    2. wowfood
      Coat

      Re: I never understood...

      I know it's absolutely rediculous. Smart people watch porn on their phones at work, less chance of being caught.

    3. Dom 3

      Re: I never understood...

      Lots. I had to do an on-site audit of some sort a few years ago which involved checking the firewall log. There was one user who would kick off every day nice and early with about 15 minutes surfing for pr0n. Maybe he'd found that he had just enough time to crack one off before anybody else got in to work.

      1. Anonymous Coward 15

        Re: I never understood...

        If you use your phone, you can run Tor or VPN on it too so the BOFH won't know what sick shit you're into. (Although, for the sake of other users, don't suck assloads of bandwidth streaming video over Tor.)

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I never understood...

        > checking the firewall log. There was one user who would

        >kick off every day nice and early with about 15 minutes

        >surfing for pr0n

        When we first put content filtering in place in the 90s we found one bloke (who had his own office) would get to work commendably early and then go surfing for pr0n non-stop for about eight and a half hours.

        Seeing as we were only logging the blocked pages he must have been both very persistent and also frequently frustrated.

        Not to mention quite sore after the first month of this (after which point the logs went to management as they had requested and he received what might be termed a dishonourable discharge).

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I never understood...

          Sounds like, for him, that was about the 100'th dishonourable discharge of the month.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I never understood...

      Apparently -and I'm only going by the rumour mill here, but a teacher at a school I went to managed to accidentally subject a bunch of middle school pupils to some grot because he'd put his grot and the educational program ON THE SAME DISC.

      I know teachers are often complaining about their wages, but come on, blank media is a pittance these days.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Better things to do than watching porn....

      Train drivers apparently do.....

      http://www.thesaid.net/news/train-driver-caught-masturbating-during-delay/

      The signals must have been a real turn-on.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Coat

        Re: Better things to do than watching porn....

        must have been that alluring red signal.

    6. Pedigree-Pete
      Coat

      Re: I never understood...

      Better things to do at work, like posting on El Reg!

      Guilty m'lud. Exit stage left.

    7. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I never understood...

      A few years ago when i was a network admin we found one bloke who came in on a Saturday morning and downloaded several Gigs (in the days of not-so-fast internet connections) of pr0n and burned it onto DVD to take home and enjoy that evening. We were alerted due to the huge spike in ftp traffic over the weekend and investigated Monday morning.....only to find the muppet had left it all on the departmental file server.... needless to say a few mins after he was seen being escorted out of the building......

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I never understood...

        A guy where I work was busted for porn: not just watching it mind you, but actually running a porn site for profit from his work PC! Who could possibly think that was OK?! Yes he was gone within minutes of being discovered.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I never understood...

          I believe one of the big porn torrent sites was originally started by a bofh using his works pipe.

    8. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I never understood...

      Maybe we all aspire to being Paul Raymond. He got quite a reputation for doing well out of watching porn at work.

    9. sisk

      Re: I never understood...

      I can top that bit of stupidity. We had a middle school teacher here several years back who INTENTIONALLY showed a grumble flick to a room full of 12 and 13 year olds over his classroom projector. That struck me as potentially the stupidest 'porn at work' incident ever (not to mention the sickest).

  6. The Nameless Mist

    CD ?

    What he didn't have the file on a Digital Download ?

  7. Khaptain Silver badge
    Coffee/keyboard

    Could have been worse

    If his webcam had been switched on at that moment , the embarrasment alone would have been enough punishment.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Has to be said...

    The Chinese have considerably more elegant names for their p0rn than we do. "The Plum in the Golden Vase" sounds considerably more tasteful than "Horny Nymphomanic Housewives VII". Maybe it's a cultural thing, or used to be a long time back in China.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Has to be said...

      "Xin Jin Ping Me" sounds like a good name for a geeks porn film. I've never heard that euphemism before. One clearly learns something every day during company time from the good folk at El Reg.....

    2. Otto is a bear.
      Thumb Up

      Re: Has to be said...

      Perhaps it's time for a new english euphemism and "Plum in the Golden Vase" is a lot better than most.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Has to be said...

      "...used to be..."

      Definitely a thing of the past.

  9. AbelSoul

    "Cock up cockup... "

    Fantastic work.

  10. Gil Grissum

    How could the bloke have been unaware that his laptop was plugged into the giant screen? He was there to work on troubleshooting and resolving a technical issue, or otherwise WORK. What kind of idiot watches porn at work on what is most likely not his personal laptop, but company equipment?? They're going to throw the book at him.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Trollface

      > They're going to throw the book at him.

      Probably the Kama Sutra?

    2. Otto is a bear.

      Well Now

      One USB, HDMI or VGA cable looks much like another, but I suspect it was a soft streaming IP connection, and oops I forgot to exit the service. We are all human after all, who was it who said "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer".

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: Well Now

        Especially when you are in a bit of a hurry to get that movie on screen.

  11. Anonymous Coward 15
    Pint

    This pint goes out to the guy.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Or, to give the book it's full title ...

    The Plum in the Golden Vase - Memoirs of an A&E Nurse.

  13. Graham Marsden
    Happy

    Pictures...

    ... or, at least, Playmobil!

  14. Dramoth

    Is worse than...

    While I was at university there was one night when a couple of groups doing the software engineering project were in the same lab and there was one other student in there... sat in the back row, in the corner and he was apparently watching pr0n and rubbing one out when one of the distaff group members noticed it... and promptly fled the room.

    Security was called and the students name was taken and he was escorted from the building and his student card was confiscated.

    Apparently all the chairs in that lab got replaced, the student got expelled and much better filters got put into the schools firewall software.

    So... the moral of the story is never watch pr0n while you are in a work situation.

    1. Otto is a bear.

      Re: Is worse than...

      Unless you are the security people, obviously they have to assess the degree of transgression before firing anyone, and that must involve watching all the films, start to finish.

      (And yes some really do, and are only to proud to show others around them.)

      1. theblackhand

        Re: Is worse than...

        In a past life, due to my sins, I helped administer a web filtering server.

        In spite of regular (i.e. hourly) downloads of the latest filtering databases, our reports always showed porn sites being accessed between midnight and 3AM. While investigating why this kept on happening, we discovered just how determined individuals (in this case, security guards on the night watch) were in their use of Google.

        They were finding sites faster than the major web filtering vendor we used was.... Often 48 hours or more before....

    2. Chris King
      Big Brother

      Re: Is worse than...

      In my last job, it was considered that all of the student labs had a "Perv's Corner", where such users would congregate. The labs were later equipped with cameras, and I made sure that each of these little corners had good camera coverage to discourage such activity.

      It was quite funny, watching students wander in wearing baseball caps - and in one case a crash helmet - to avoid being identified. I'd just check the logs, wander over to the lab and poke my head round the door... "$USERNAME, stop that - you'll go blind !"

      Peer group pressure is a wonderful thing in these situations - every pair of eyes in the room would gravitate to Perv's Corner. FAR more fun than a firewall, but no doubt that kind of behaviour would get me in hot water nowadays for harassment.

      Another one made the mistake of printing out lots of dirty pics to a lab printer, which happened to be out of paper. Unfortunately for him, my boss spotted that the print queue was building up, and he popped a ream of paper in the tray... Ooops. "Next time, go and buy yourself a magazine. I hear they're in colour these days".

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Is worse than...

      Almost as embarrassing as the student retrieved from the audience at my university when Paul McKenna did a show (before he was famous - the show was far more risqué than his TV equivalent). He had all the "susceptibles" in robot zombie land lined up on stools in front of the audience. Mr McKenna instructed them to do "whatever they most felt like doing at that moment."

      One guy unzips his flies and starts spanking the monkey.

      So that alone would be embarrassing enough, but McKenna then asks this guy "Why are you doing that?"

      The guy just points to one rather lovely looking female audience members and says "because of her" the rest of what he said can't be repeated.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Plum in the Golden Vase

    I've never heard it called that before!

  16. Sir Barry

    Breaking News...

    The next broadcast of this movie will be 6PM tomorrow at Kings Cross station.

  17. ceayers

    Sounds familair

    Sound's like an episode of 'Still Game' to me.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They don't get any smarter do they?

    Years ago I worked for a defence contractor that was building a computerised telex system for the government. We had a chap in QA who brought smutty books to work and copied passages of the book into the test messages he sent through the system. Wouldn't you know the system crashed whilst one of his naughty messages was in the system. SOP was to dump the contents of core to the line printer to be included with the crash report. He panicked and stripped the naughty parts out of the printout and threw it in the tip out back. The devs noticed the missing parts in the core printout, someone looked in the tip and found them, and QA consulted their test logs to see who the guilty party was. Confronted with his handy work the chap denied it, but the weight of the evidence was against him and he was dismissed; not for the actual deed, but for lying about it. Apparently he wasn't the sharpest tool...

  19. ChrisBedford

    I once had to watch porn for my work!

    Not so long ago either... Installing a hotel video system, the video on demand included "Adult" films... we had established the normal "blockbuster" movies were working, but there was a problem with the HD and so I had to call reception, get them to release the room no I was in, and attempt to watch a pr0n. Hey - it worked - but just to be *absolutely* sure, I watched one full scene - must have been about 20 minutes - before I chickened out and switched it off. One of the better days at work.

    But to get sort of back on topic, I just checked the pirate bay, and the movie in question is listed as "video" in most of the torrents, not as "porn". A quick check of the uploader's comments in one example yielded this:

    "This movie is, in essence, softcore chinese kung fu (kinda) porn.

    "While sustaining a budget far beyond most asian porn flicks, this movie (lacking penetration or any weiners or anything) keeps up with the "man! asians are f&*%^ing weird!" film category.

    "Worth a watch, if you really like asian boobies, which are copious in this film, as well as very neatly trimmed bits o' pubage."

  20. ecofeco Silver badge
    Big Brother

    Isn't the first rule of Techie 101...?

    Don't connect your pRon to a network/cable/device?

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