Pastebin

A pastebin is a type of web application where users can store plain text. They are most commonly used to share short source code snippets for code review via Internet Relay Chat. The first pastebin was located at pastebin.com, but other sites with the same functionality have appeared, and several open source pastebin scripts are available. Many pastebins allow commenting, where readers can post feedback directly on the page. GitHub Gists are a type of pastebin with version control.

History

Pastebins were first developed in the late 1990s to prevent the IRC flooding that sometimes happened on channels devoted to computer programming when a user pasted some program code directly into the channel. The code would be posted by their IRC client line by line, potentially disrupting the channel as the individual lines were sent, and possibly causing the paster to be kicked or banned for causing the flood.[1] By using a pastebin, the user could simply paste the web link. Some pastebins were accompanied by IRC bots that would announce the URLs of new pastes in their channel. Since pastebins are so easily and trivially implemented in most programming languages, many different implementations exist, including ones in Lisp, PHP, Perl and Python. Writing one is regarded as a good introductory exercise for new programmers or those learning a new language.[2]

Aside from sharing program code, pastebins are sometimes used to anonymously publish texts online.[3][4]

Pastebin.com

Although created in 2002, Pastebin.com only reached 1 million "Active" pastes (not spam or expired pastes) eight years later, in 2010.[5] In February 2010, Pastebin.com was sold by the original owner, Paul Dixon, to Jeroen Vader, a Dutch serial Internet entrepreneur. Only a few weeks after the transfer, Vader had launched a whole new version of the website which he branded V2.0. In early 2011, V3.0 was launched.[6]

By October 2011, the site's active pastes numbers exceeded 10 million.[5] Less than a year later, in July 2012, the owners of Pastebin.com tweeted that they had already surpassed the 20 million active pastes mark.[7]On June 9, 2015, they announced they had reached 65 million active pastes.[8]They also mentioned that around 75% of pastes are either unlisted or private.[9]

During the 2014 Venezuelan protests, Pastebin.com was blocked by the country's government as one of the sites where activists were sharing information.[10]

Pastebin.com is a popular source of dark web .onion links.[11]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "About lisppaste".
  2. ↑ "The Pastebin Client Exercise".
  3. ↑ "Pastebin to hunt for hacker pastes, Anonymous cries censorship".
  4. ↑ "Morgan Stanley Data Leak Not the First Headache for Pastebin".
  5. 1 2 "Pastebin.com Surpasses 10 Million "Active" Pastes". TechCrunch.com. 2011-10-26. Retrieved 2011-10-27.
  6. ↑ "Pastebin: How a popular code-sharing site became the ultimate hacker hangout". The Next Web. 2011-06-05. Retrieved 2013-03-30.
  7. ↑ "Twitter / pastebin: Time for cake!!! Pastebin.com now hosts more than 20 million active pastes! Stats -> pastebin.com/stats". Twitter.com. 2012-07-03. Retrieved 2014-08-20.
  8. ↑ https://www.facebook.com/pastebin/posts/1072434209437854
  9. ↑ https://twitter.com/pastebin/status/614326465551839232
  10. ↑ "Internet a crucial Venezuela battleground". Jamaica Observer (Kingston, Jamaica: Jamaica Observer). Associated Press. 2014-02-23. Retrieved 2014-08-20.
  11. ↑ Koebler, Jason (23 February 2015). "The Closest Thing to a Map of the Dark Net: Pastebin". Retrieved 14 July 2015.

External links

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