Pastebin.com

Last updated

Pastebin
Pastebin.com logo.png
Pastebin.com screenshot.png
Type of site
Web application
Created byPaul Dixon
URL pastebin.com
IPv6 supportYes
RegistrationOptional (required for creating private pastes.)
Users 17 million (2019) [1]
LaunchedSeptember 3, 2002;21 years ago (2002-09-03) [2]
Current statusActive
Written in PHP

Pastebin.com is a text storage site. It was created on September 3, 2002 by Paul Dixon, and reached 1 million active pastes (excluding spam and expired pastes) eight years later, in 2010. [3]

Contents

It features syntax highlighting for a variety of programming and markup languages, as well as view counters for pastes and user profiles. Users can submit pastes as guests without registration, but an account allows managing pastes.

History

By October 2011, the site's active pastes numbers exceeded 10 million. [3]

During the 2014 Venezuelan protests, Pastebin.com was blocked by the country's government as one of the sites used by activists sharing information pertaining to the protests. [8]

In April 2020, Pastebin.com removed their built-in search feature and restricted their web scraping API, including for paid lifetime subscribers of Pastebin Pro. As an additional spam prevention measure, pastes from users not logged in are hidden from the list of recent pastes, visible in the site's side bar. [9]

In September 2020, two new features were added to the site. Users became able to password-protect pastes from viewing and request the paste be deleted immediately once viewed. [10] [11]

On October 14, 2020, the terms of service were updated and the mention that contributions were CC BY-SA was removed. [12]

Pastebin.com is a popular source of .onion links that lead to the dark web. [13]

See also

Related Research Articles

Spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yahoo! Mail</span> American email service

Yahoo! Mail is an email service offered by the American company Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously available with the Yahoo! Small Business brand, before it transitioned to Verizon Small Business Essentials in early 2022. Launched on October 8, 1997, as of January 2020, Yahoo! Mail has 225 million users.

Fotolog.com was a social network for sharing primarily photos. The site claimed that its vision was to build a "good" social network which prioritizes the well-being of users. The site only allowed all members of the community to post once per day, which, according to the site, was aimed to end the overuse of social networking today and the meaningless consumption of content.

A pastebin or text storage site is a type of online content-hosting service where users can store plain text. The most famous pastebin is the eponymous pastebin.com. Other sites with the same functionality have appeared, and several open source pastebin scripts are available. Pastebins may allow commenting where readers can post feedback directly on the page. GitHub Gists are a type of pastebin with version control.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LinkedIn</span> Professional network website

LinkedIn is a business and employment-focused social media platform that works through websites and mobile apps. It was launched on May 5, 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly. Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. The platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows jobseekers to post their CVs and employers to post jobs. From 2015, most of the company's revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals. LinkedIn has more than 1 billion registered members from over 200 countries and territories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Myspace</span> Social networking website

Myspace is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it was the first social network to reach a global audience and had a significant influence on technology, pop culture and music. It also played a critical role in the early growth of companies like YouTube and created a developer platform that launched the successes of Zynga, RockYou and Photobucket, among others. From 2005 to 2009, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world.

Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.

Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis.

WHOIS is a query and response protocol that is used for querying databases that store an Internet resource's registered users or assignees. These resources include domain names, IP address blocks and autonomous systems, but it is also used for a wider range of other information. The protocol stores and delivers database content in a human-readable format. The current iteration of the WHOIS protocol was drafted by the Internet Society, and is documented in RFC 3912.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AboutUs.com</span> Wiki Internet domain directory

AboutUs.com is an inactive internet domain directory wiki. It lists websites along with information about their content. As a wiki, AboutUs allows Internet users to add entries or modify information. AboutUs.com has since become a wiki for more than just websites. The site allows pages to be created for people, places, and almost anything else.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Weebly</span> Web hosting service

Weebly is an American web hosting and web development company headquartered in San Francisco, California, and is a subsidiary of Block, Inc. It was founded in 2006 by Chief Executive Officer David Rusenko, Chief Technology Officer Chris Fanini, and the former Chief Product Officer Dan Veltri.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tagged (website)</span> Social discovery website

Tagged is a social discovery website based in San Francisco, California, founded in 2004. It allows members to browse the profiles of any other members, and share tags and virtual gifts. Tagged claims it has 300 million members as of 2014. As of September 2011, Quantcast estimates Tagged monthly unique users at 5.9 million in the United States, and 18.6 million globally. Michael Arrington wrote in April 2011 that Tagged is most notable for the ability to grow profitably during the era of Facebook.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outlook.com</span> Microsoft webmail service

Outlook.com, formerly Hotmail, is a free personal email service offered by Microsoft. This includes a webmail interface featuring mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks services. Outlook can also be accessed via email clients using the IMAP or POP protocols.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GitHub</span> Hosting service for software projects

GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.

Disqus is an American blog comment hosting service for websites and online communities that use a networked platform. The company's platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. It was founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan as a Y Combinator startup.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google+</span> Defunct social network by Google

Google+ was a social network that was owned and operated by Google until it ceased operations in 2019. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google products like Google Drive, Blogger and YouTube. The service, Google's fourth foray into social networking, experienced strong growth in its initial years, although usage statistics varied, depending on how the service was defined. Three Google executives oversaw the service, which underwent substantial changes that led to a redesign in November 2015.

ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. According to a 2014 study by Nature and a 2016 article in Times Higher Education, it is the largest academic social network in terms of active users, although other services have more registered users, and a 2015–2016 survey suggests that almost as many academics have Google Scholar profiles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">YouTube Creator Awards</span> Media awards

YouTube Creator Awards, commonly known as YouTube Play Buttons or YouTube Plaques, are a series of awards from the American video platform YouTube that aim to recognize its most popular channels. They are based on a channel's subscriber count but are offered at the sole discretion of YouTube. Each channel is reviewed before an award is issued, to ensure that the channel follows the YouTube community guidelines. YouTube reserves the right to refuse to hand out a Creator Award, which it has done for channels featuring horror or extremist political content.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Have I Been Pwned?</span> Consumer security website and email alert system

Have I Been Pwned? is a website that allows Internet users to check whether their personal data has been compromised by data breaches. The service collects and analyzes hundreds of database dumps and pastes containing information about billions of leaked accounts, and allows users to search for their own information by entering their username or email address. Users can also sign up to be notified if their email address appears in future dumps. The site has been widely touted as a valuable resource for Internet users wishing to protect their own security and privacy. Have I Been Pwned? was created by security expert Troy Hunt on 4 December 2013.

MyAnimeList, often abbreviated as MAL, is an anime and manga social networking and social cataloging application website run by volunteers. The site provides its users with a list-like system to organize and score anime and manga. It facilitates finding users who share similar tastes and provides a large database on anime and manga. As of March 2024, the site reported having approximately 26,417 anime and 68,308 manga entries. In 2015, the site received 120 million visitors per month.

References

  1. "What is Pastebin and Why Do Hackers Love It?". www.echosec.net. Echosec Systems. Archived from the original on March 4, 2021. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
  2. "PasteBin.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools". WHOIS . Archived from the original on November 13, 2020. Retrieved December 3, 2016.
  3. 1 2 "Pastebin.com Surpasses 10 Million "Active" Pastes". TechCrunch.com. October 26, 2011. Archived from the original on October 27, 2011. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  4. Pastebin [@pastebin] (July 4, 2012). "Time for cake!!! Pastebin.com now hosts more than 20 million active pastes! Stats -> pastebin.com/stats" (Tweet) via Twitter.
  5. "Pastebin on Facebook: "Pastebin reached another big milestone yesterday..."". Facebook . Archived from the original on August 30, 2023. Retrieved December 3, 2016.
  6. Pastebin [@pastebin] (June 26, 2015). "Fun fact, over 75% of all pastes created on Pastebin these days are unlisted or private" (Tweet) via Twitter.
  7. Biggs, John (December 16, 2015). "Pastebin, The Text Sharing Website, Updates With An Emphasis On Code". Archived from the original on September 23, 2020. Retrieved September 7, 2017.
  8. "Internet a crucial Venezuela battleground". Jamaica Observer. Kingston, Jamaica. Associated Press. February 23, 2014. Archived from the original on November 13, 2020. Retrieved August 20, 2014.
  9. "Pastebin Made It Harder To Scrape Its Site And Researchers Are Pissed Off". www.vice.com. Archived from the original on February 27, 2021. Retrieved September 30, 2020.
  10. September 2020, Anthony Spadafora 28 (September 28, 2020). "Pastebin may have just doomed us all". TechRadar. Archived from the original on September 29, 2020. Retrieved September 30, 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  11. online, heise. "Pastebin.com: Zwei neue Features könnten Malware-Machern in die Hände spielen". Security (in German). Archived from the original on September 30, 2020. Retrieved September 30, 2020.
  12. "Pastebin.com Terms of Service UPDATED". Archived from the original on October 14, 2020.
  13. Koebler, Jason (February 23, 2015). "The Closest Thing to a Map of the Dark Net: Pastebin". Motherboard . Archived from the original on November 8, 2020. Retrieved July 14, 2015.