February 17, 2004

Accessibility

Trying to access the English Heritage web site earlier using Safari on the Mac, I got this deeply amusing (in a "that's so annoying you have to laugh" kind of way) error message:

English Heritage web site

If you are a Mac user with Safari, you get diverted from http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/ to http://accessibility.english-heritage.org.uk/. You don't get a choice in the matter.

I'm sure it's entirely coincidence that the people stupid enough to do this were also stupid enough to run Internet Information Server. And to screw up one of their headers to point to an internal (10.255.255.255) IP address.

telnet www.english-heritage.org.uk 80

Trying 194.164.61.131...

Connected to www.english-heritage.org.uk.

Escape character is '^]'.

HEAD / HTTP/1.0



HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0

Content-Location: http://10.0.1.2/index.html

They are in good company, I suppose. NatWest still ask me to trust Internet Explorer Version 4 or above or Netscape Navigator 4.08 to 4.78 (inclusive), which gives me warm fuzzy feelings knowing how insecure my banking data is.

Posted by savs at February 17, 2004 3:48 PM