In 1996, the Internet Archive began archiving the web for a service called the Wayback Machine. They’ve now archived 55 billion web pages. That’s enough web pages that if you were to print them all out using your roommate’s printer while he was at class and tape them end-to-end, you could reach the moon and back 28 trillion times.
I decided to peruse the Wayback Machine’s earliest archives to see what the internet looked like in 1996, when I was 14 and evidently had much less free time than I do now. Much to my chagrin, few websites from these early years have been successfully archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet. They viewed the medium as a chance for inexpensive advertising and invested dozens upon dozens of dollars into it. The results are tremendously humiliating.
A 19-year-old hacker who published provocative photos of teen queen Miley Cyrus earlier this year was raided by the FBI Monday morning in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
The hacker, Josh Holly, repeatedly bragged online about breaking into the Disney star’s e-mail account and stealing her photos. He also gave interviews to bloggers and others and boasted that authorities would never find him because he moved so often. [Last month, Holly contacted Threat Level seeking to have an article written about him here.]
But this morning the FBI did find him and, after talking with him for more than an hour about his exploits, served him with a search warrant and a list of items to be seized (which was posted at the hacking site digitalgangster.com after Holly showed it to a friend).
Inside-AOL was started in 1998.
Another website that was hosted by “Russell Handorf” aka Satanklawz.
Satanklawz hosts all the servers, and does mostly all the technical stuff.
| Title: | Chief of Security |
| Joined Badmotherfucker: | 7/26/00 |
| Sex: | A Man |
| Age: | 2/19/80 |
| Hometown: | Memphis, TN |