I know, I know. Technically, it's only a fail pet if a web site uses a nice little creature on an error page announcing unplanned down-time of the service.

That makes this ASCII cow from Craigslist not really a fail pet, but I find it a nice enough idea to blog it anyway:

This little fellow shows up on the 404 error page (i.e., any page that does not exist on craigslist.org, such as this one). While it is just taken from a well-known UNIX command, I like it a lot because it goes very well with the simplicity of craigslist itself, which is intentionally so much different than all the shiny "Web 2.0" applications.

Thanks for the hint, Jabba!

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When my girlfriend recently tried to access Craigslist on her French dorm's internet, she got this instead:

According to the current security policy, the URL you have requested is blocked. Host : 'www.craigslist.org' URL : '/...' Categorie : 'Pornography and Sexually-explicit Content'

Weird.

Maybe somebody should have told them that regex-matching agains three-letter words is not exactly the best method of keeping your students from surfing around on "dirty" websites?

The page she wanted to see was a harmless "best of craigslist" story after all -- I doubt it would survive long on Craigslist otherwise.

Everybody stand back: I know regular expressions.

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