Boybastos site still up but ‘muzzled’

While it is still online, controversial porn site Boybastos.com (www.boybastos.com) has finally been “muzzled," at least for now. As of 9 p.m. Saturday, a blank homepage greeted visitors to the site, which only earlier this week had been taunting Sen. Loren Legarda for trying to shut it down. No traces of the taunting messages, or the links to external porn sites, were found on the homepage, which had been blank since dawn Saturday. This developed less than 24 hours after the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) raided the house of the site’s owner and operator in Ayala Alabang. NBI operatives searched the house of suspected operator Mark Verzo, whom they believed earned some P2,600 a month from advertisements on his site. Verzo, invoking his right to “freedom of expression," denied violating any law. He was eventually allowed to go home, though the NBI seized his computer. The site was thrust into the limelight Wednesday after Sen. Loren Legarda asked authorities to shut it down because it offered free access to pornography. But the site operator taunted Legarda by “thanking" her for the free publicity and what he claimed was a spike in Internet traffic to the site. - GMANews.TV