Today I’ll tell an interesting tale about a mysterious website on the internet, which appeared in the vastness of the web in 1997 and still keeps many users up at night today.
We’re talking about the site mortis.com
The wider public only learned about this site in the 2010s. It was discovered by users of foreign image boards like 4chan.
The site’s homepage was a black background with a window prompting for a login and password. Quite mysterious and intriguing, especially considering it had been up on the internet since ‘97.
mortis is a Latin word meaning death.
Mystery
Naturally, such a mystery could not leave fans of reptilians and other conspiracy theories with programming skills indifferent. So one skilled user analyzed the site and determined that the resource contained extremely large files. The size of one of them was about 39 gigabytes. The total volume of data on the site presumably reached several terabytes. Mind you, this was the year 1997. For those times, that’s simply a cosmic number.
As an example, the volume of data held by Walmart at the time was only 8 terabytes. And in 1998, it was big news when Yahoo upgraded its processing server from 7.5 TB to 24 TB.
It’s also worth noting that a detailed study of mortis.com determined that some of the site’s files were linked to Usenet, the oldest computer network, created in 1980, even before the appearance of the www and the internet.
Author Shafin_Protic
Nobody tried to hack it, huh?
Any attempts to hack the site ended in failure. And this got armchair investigators even more riled up. Why, since 1997, has a site with only a login and password field and unknown, heavyweight content inside remained publicly accessible?
The amateur investigation continued, and the only thing enthusiasts managed to find out was that the site was registered by a person named Thomas Ling, who also owned 24 other sites besides mortis.com.
One of the domains was cthulhu.net, hello to fans of Howard Lovecraft. That domain was probably worth no small amount of money, and the site’s content was an image of a chess piece, along with the caption “dead, but sleeping.” Obviously, this is yet another reference to the works of the aforementioned author.
Here’s a list of some other domains:
- karenling.com
- joshualing.org
- lingsborough.com
- eternalknight.com
- dentalfillins.ne
After this story started to gain popularity, in 2011-2013, someone deleted all of this owner’s sites, also requesting a corresponding cleanup on web archives. That’s why it’s practically impossible to find anything other than old posts on those same image boards. To pull off something like that in today’s world, you need truly impressive capabilities. After all, deleting something from the internet today… well, you understand.
The main theory of mortis.com’s existence?
The main and most popular theory about mortis.com’s purpose is that the site served as a kind of P2P storage site for exchanging pirated content, including movies and photos, especially given the connection to Usenet. This conclusion was drawn after analyzing data obtained while studying the site’s code. It became known that some of the video file names resembled the titles of movies popular in the 90s.
Latest news
According to the latest news, although the mortis.com website is not working, the domain’s registration was supposed to expire in 2020. But before that point, it was re-registered under the name of the same owner — Thomas Ling. This registration is valid until 2025. It’s not certain that Thomas Ling, who registered the domain in 2020, is the same person who registered it originally, since many website hosting providers follow a policy of trust and don’t verify the data provided by users. All of this raises even more questions.
If this Thomas Ling really didn’t want information about his resources to be publicly available — since a global cleanup of them from the network was carried out, which is a very difficult task — why does he keep renewing the domain’s registration, thereby sustaining enthusiasts’ interest in his sites? Unclear, but very interesting 😉
Thanks for reading.
By the way, for those who want more, you can watch interesting videos on this topic:
In Russian:
Video from the channel BTD
In English (can be watched in Yandex Browser with translation)
Video from the channel Chill Fuel
Sources:
- Mysterious Websites On Internet
- Internet Mysteries: What was Mortis.com?
- A video blogger talked about one of the most mysterious sites on the internet
- Usenet — Wikipedia
Other interesting articles:
- The world’s most expensive and long-lived malware – MyDoom
- Recommendation: video on the timeline of the Cold War between the USA and the USSR
- Recommendation: video about traveling in Norway
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