Goatse.cx (pronounced either ; sometimes the top level domain is left out and it is just called "Goatse") was an Internet shock site. The page featured a picture, hello.jpg, showing an undressed man stretching his butt to a large size with both hands, with the inside of his rectum clearly visible. Below his gaping anus, his dangling penis and scrotum were visible, as well as a ring on the ring finger of his left hand.

The image hello.jpg comes from a set of forty pictures from a file named gap.zip. In those images, the man used sex toys and butt plugs to stretch his anus. The images were located by Stile Project and are also available from the "Contrib" section of the goatse.cx website under the filename gap.zip. hello.jpg is the third file in the archive, gap3.jpg.

Site suspension 
On January 14, 2004, the domain goatse.cx was closed for a time. by Christmas Island Internet Administration for policy violations in response to a complaint, but many mirrors of the site are still available, and the picture is displayed on many websites.

In January 2007, Christmas Island Internet Administration put the domain goatse.cx back into the pool of available domains. The domain was then registered on January 16 through domain registrar Variomedia, and the current holder tried to auction off the right to use the domain.

The goatse.cx domain name was reported sold at an auction on April 30, 2007 to an unknown bidder.  According to seobidding.com, the first auction ended with fake bids so the auction was reactivated. This was again won by fake bidders, so Seobidding.com announced that the website would be sold for $500,000 and that legal action would be pursued against the fake bidders. On November 25, 2007, the site was for sale on seobidding; "goatse.cx  asking: $50200  minimum."

Control of the domain was moved to the another market, and was taken by domain squatters who were trying to sell the domain name for 10,000 euros.

Re-launch 
On July 4, 2008, the site was open again, with a picture of Bill O'Reilly and a legal notice. The file name and text remained the same as before.

As of September 28, 2008, the site was again put up for sale, and the picture changed once again because of a legal order from Fox Broadcasting Company ordering the owner to stop showing a picture of Bill O'Reilly.

Geographic location 
The site used the .cx country code, the top-level domain of the Australian territory of Christmas Island. The actual computer server of Goatse.cx was not on Christmas Island, but in the United States and was owned by Hick.org, a website about computer programming and bathroom humor. The Hick.org domain was registered by Matt Miller in Overland Park, Kansas. Both Goatse.cx and Hick.org originated from the same IP address; the server was in  Kansas City, Missouri, metro-region. Goat.cx, formerly a mirror of Goatse.cx, was in the Dallas, Texas, metro-region, while current mirror Goatse.ru is in Russia.

Goatse in popular culture 
Many Internet users have been tricked into looking at  the site at one time or another, it has become something of an Internet meme. As such, hello.jpg and the other images on the site are common subjects of parodies and tributes.

After Hurricane Charley in August 2004, an image purporting to show "the hands of God" in the cloud formations in the aftermath of the disaster circulated in email. The image was proven to be a false Goatse parody.

In June 2007, a parody of the 2012 Summer Olympics logo sent by "Sean Stayte" appeared on the BBC News website under the alternative Olympic Logo entries and was broadcast on their BBC News 24 channel. Two hands were pulling the 0 from 2012 apart. The image was later shown as part of a gallery of viewers logos on BBC London News and BBC News 24, and was subsequently removed from the website. The editor of the BBC News website stated the mistake in his blog, saying his team "simply didn’t spot it".

There are at least four songs about Goatse, and also a band named Goatse.

References 

Shock sites
1999 establishments
2004 disestablishments
2008 establishments