Ogrish.com was a shock site

Shock site

A shock site is a website that is intended to be offensive, disgusting and/or disturbing to its viewers, containing materials of high shock value which is also considered distasteful and crude, and is generally of a pornographic, scatological, extremely violent, insulting, painful, profane, or...

 which presented uncensored news coverage and multimedia material based for the most part on war, accidents and executions.

Much of the material depicted was graphic, uncensored, gory

Graphic violence

Graphic violence is the depiction of especially vivid, brutal and realistic acts of violence in visual media such as literature, film, television, and video games...

 videos and images. The content was depicted as a means to challenge the viewer, with its catch line being 'Can you handle life', but later changed to 'Uncover Reality' after the site received a major design overhaul with aims of becoming more open to the general public and become a respected 'alternative news service'.

Since beginning of November 2006 Ogrish.com redirects to LiveLeak.com

Liveleak

LiveLeak is a video sharing website that lets users post and share videos. Liveleak places emphasis on current events, politics and reality-based footage such as war scenes from various parts of the world.The site went live on October 31, 2006...

 which was registered in October 2006, featuring mostly user submitted videos and allowing the embedding of media on other sites.

History of Ogrish.com

The site hosted many graphic videos of violent events, without the permission of the families of the people shown. This has led to heated arguments concerning the rights of the people pictured and the nature of the pictures and videos on the site. For example, in 2002, graphic pictures and videos of the jumpers of the September 11, 2001 attacks were displayed on the site. The site was targeted for hacking attacks from Koreans after Ogrish uploaded the execution video of Kim Sun-il

Kim Sun-il

Kim Sun-il was a South Korean translator and Christian missionary who was kidnapped and beheaded in Iraq.- Kidnapping :...

 during the summer of 2004.

In August 2005, German official internet watchdog group Jugendschutz.net contacted the local branch of telecommunications company Level 3

Level 3 Communications

Level 3 Communications is a telecommunications and Internet service provider headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado.It operates a Tier 1 network. The company provides core transport, IP, voice, video and content delivery for most of the medium to large Internet carriers in North America and Europe...

 about Ogrish, whose IP address was then blocked in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. Since several ISP

Internet service provider

An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...

s connect through the blocked Level 3 connection in Frankfurt, many other countries outside of Germany were also affected by this block, including the Netherlands, France, Poland, Italy and Switzerland. The Youth Protection group had found that the provider violated German legislation that requires websites to verify the age of its visitors before granting access to adult content.

In early 2006 Ogrish.com changed its design to a much faster-loading, cleaner layout. Its previous layout was very "dark" and graphic-intensive. On January 27, 2006 the "Flame/Lame/Hate" section was replaced with The Ogrish Zoo, a more politically correct

Politically Correct

Politically Correct may refer to:*Political correctness, language, ideas, policies, or behaviour seeking to minimize offence to groups of people-See also:*Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, book by James Finn Garner, published in 1994...

 version that forbade racial slurs. This change lasted barely a day, and after some consideration was finally replaced with "The Underground", a private and hidden member group accessible only at the request of an established member to an administrator. On April 21 Ogrish closed this section, finally making the transition from a "Gore" website to an "Uncensored News" website. In April 2006, Ogrish.com introduced a Podcast

Podcast

A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...

 service (DJed by Shawn Wasson, who's also responsible for Shawnwasson.com and BareKnucklePolitics.com 2 websites that are no longer available) and added a new forum section called Underground Media—members have the choice to join this section to see more images and videos.

The website's name derives from the archaic word "ogrish" according to the site's FAQ, "ogrish" or "ogreish", i.e. "like an ogre

Ogre

An ogre is a large, cruel, monstrous, and hideous humanoid monster, featured in mythology, folklore, and fiction. Ogres are often depicted in fairy tales and folklore as feeding on human beings, and have appeared in many classic works of literature...

", as defined in older dictionaries in a figurative sense; that is being like a person who is felt to be particularly cruel, brutish or hideous.