Someone had to pay for the Biggest Mistake Ever at AOL, and it is CTO Maureen Govern and two other employees.

In case you missed it, AOL released the search logs of some 600,000 customers to the web because... well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Russell Brown over at Public Address covered the gaffe and with the help of Netguide sidekick Nigel Horrocks discovered some rather disturbing stuff:

User 1627022 reeled off searches for "alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.child.male", "boylove belarus" and the like - and then "university jobs new zealand" and "social work new zealand", which took him to the recruitment pages of four New Zealand universities and, creepily, www.cyf.govt.nz. Someone might want to have a look into that. (A reader has pointed out that the string of access to very, very dodgy images may have been for legitimate research purposes, and that did occur to me, but I'm not sure that even a researcher needs to spend that much time looking at actual child porn. At the least, some questions would need to be asked for purposes of clarification.)

What's the bet though that sacking the people responsible for such a monumentally stupid act won't do much to restore people's confidence in AOL?

Update Computerworld NZ story here.