URLs in site.xml banner tags not rendered by site plugin if host not resolved by "nslookup"

Absolute URL's in the banner tags of site.xml are translated to relative URLs by the maven-site-plugin when the hostname is not found by nslookup. In my case the hostname only exists in my hosts files on a the Windows machine running "mvn site".

In the example below, the generated URLs for bannerLeft will be absolute and the URL's for bannerRight will be relative. Adding "badhost.apache.org" to the hosts file will not change the outcome.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<project name="Maven">
<bannerLeft>
<name>Maven</name>
<src>http://maven.apache.org/images/apache-maven-project.png</src>
<href>http://maven.apache.org/</href>
</bannerLeft>
<bannerRight>
<name>Maven</name>
<src>http://badhost.apache.org/images/apache-maven-project.png</src>
<href>http://badhost.apache.org/</href>
</bannerRight>
</project>

It appears the plugin is validating the hostname. Is their a way of turning this validation off?