If you were regularly using th... (ещё) If you were regularly using the internet in around 2006, there was a brief moment in time, where making one simple typo, would crash your computer, beyond repair. This typo was “Goggle.” The word had gone relatively under the radar for a couple of years, going unnoticed by most users just passing by, but as the world wide web continued to grow exponentially and more people started familiarizing themselves with a more respected website “Google”, more people started to notice it and saw just how devastating it really was. Such a simple word “Goggle” was basically the internet’s basilisk, instantly killing the computers of any user who simply type in the word. This wasn’t just annoying pop ups, this was something that actually did you harm, at least that was the word that was getting around. You see, “Goggle” was widely talked about during its day, a subject that got so popular it led to the creation of an antivirus commercial and a court case, but now, pretty much no information on it has survived. Similar to YouAreAnIdiot.org, there’s a couple articles and forums about it, but that’s about it. Everything else, has seemingly been lost to history. Even the WayBack Machine has blacklisted it from being archived on their database. It’s almost like the internet does not want you to know about Goggle, just because of how truly dangerous it was. These circumstances have instead just left the internet with mostly ambiguity, some recalling the website being very dangerous, others passing it off as an internet hoax, at least the media depicting it. Consequently, Goggle has since become an internet urban legend, frozen in the era it was conceived. Was the story of Goggle.com just a victim of its time, where online record keeping wasn’t much of a priority? Or was it something much darker?
In order to really understand the mysterious and devastating nature behind Goggle.com, we first need to focus on the website’s purpose, how it functioned, and how both these things worked together to lead to its prominence. To really get into comprehensive detail, we need to trace back to the website’s origins. As you could imagine, this will be quite difficult with the limited information out there. But there really is only a few missing pieces of the puzzle. There’s no definitive answers, but we can infer on when it was most likely created. The actual domain for goggle.com appears to have been registered on Valentine’s Day of 1998. This is actually a pretty interesting detail that I will get into in a minute. The identity of the creator is unknown. The website appeared to have been dormant for around 6 years until it reportedly became malicious in 2004, according to very few sources. What’s interesting is that there is no evidence of this website ever existing prior to 2006, and all internet archive sites either have the website blocked or simply didn’t keep record of it prior to this date. For all we know, goggle.com could have been some GeoCities website prior to 2004, and whether it was bought out by some malicious company or started off that way, is a mystery. (меньше)

In 2004, a website known as yo... (ещё) In 2004, a website known as youareanidiot(dot)org rose to prominence across the internet, where it was home to what is now recognized as the You Are An Idiot computer virus (mostly known as "YouAreAnIdiot" or "Offiz"). However, many people first visiting the site had no idea what they were getting themselves into, and the story goes even deeper than that.

The YouAreAnIdiot trojan horse, also known by its official name “Offiz” infected as many as 100,000 people, and it was now making its way around the internet as a topic of heated discussion. A subject people immediately regretted becoming acquainted with, its presence just continuing to grow. It wasn’t long until people were claiming that their entire hard drives were being permanently erased and damaged beyond repair. What exactly was going on? How did the story of YouAreAnIdiot go from exhausting tech support threads within online forums into becoming an internet legend?

Well, properly answering that question requires a bit of historical context. We need to go all the way back to the year 2002. The internet is still in its fledgling phase, with the vestiges of the 90s, but it is growing at an alarming rate, as well as getting smarter and more sophisticated every day. This goes for both the technological aspects of the internet, as well as human behavior. The internet is becoming more because people are demanding more, for better and for worse. Not only was it improving on user convenience, it was learning to solve problems users had been yearning to get fixed for years, as well as solving problems users didn’t even know that they had. But this came at the expense of creating new problems, some of which were previously almost unheard of. Malicious programs were becoming smarter and more difficult to combat, as malware developers were learning from their past mistakes, and YouAreAnIdiot was a symptom of that.

But to really see how and why this was the case requires going into detail on how the virus rose to prominence and how it actually worked. The earliest form of the program showed up in early 2002, originally known by its more official name “Offiz” and it first appeared on a website. The earliest confirmed website it showed up on was known as youdontknowwhoiam(dot)org. So what did the virus actually do?

Well, it wasn’t technically a virus at all. It didn’t use your computer to spread to other ones. It was a trojan horse, a program that pretends to look nice and innocent, but causes harm to your computer once you activate it, but of course the vernacular for layman computer users is to call anything malicious a virus, so people just stuck with that. We mentioned that this virus was one of many components which formed from the early internet’s ongoing evolution, and that’s because it took advantage of a relatively new technology that was only becoming more complex by the year. This technology is called JavaScript. This wasn’t just writing code. This was the closest thing you could get to making something that was alive. Something that could almost think for itself. With JavaScript, you were playing God on the internet, so why not use it to cause mayhem as well? But this virus didn’t just take advantage of that. It also had another somewhat new and growing technology under its sleeve: the flash player. Combine these two forces and you are virtually unstoppable. Any user curious enough to click on the website’s window would be greeted with the famous animation we’ve all grown to recognize. Thanks to the JavaScript, any further attempt to exit the page, whether it be by refreshing or clicking the x button, will spawn six more smaller windows displaying the same animation, all playing at once. You’re not getting off that easy though. The script has programmed the windows to bounce around the page, so good luck exiting out, and even if you do get rid of one, six more will pop up once again. You now 11 windows on your computer calling you an idiot, and your speakers are just getting louder. You try using some hotkeys to forcefully shut down your browser, but now you just have text windows calling you an idiot. Before you know it, the windows have multiplied exponentially, and your computer’s resources are being used up. Your system is so slow you can barely even move the mouse anymore. You can’t even open task manager it’s so slow. Now you have no choice but to take the last resort and shut down your computer through physically pushing the power button.

Video contains:

- Bright flashing lights


Viewer discretion is advised. (меньше)

Меморис - это программа о моём... (ещё) Меморис - это программа о моём детстве, которое прошло в уникальном времени и оставило после себя множество незабываемых моментов.
В этом выпуске, впервые на канале, мы вспомним не 90-е, а 2000-е. Поскольку речь пойдёт про появление в моей жизни первого персонального компьютера, а произошло это в 2003 году. (меньше)

Очень долго делал этот ролик, ... (ещё) Очень долго делал этот ролик, видеоряд подбирать было отдельной проблемой, но всё готово! Ролик, который будет актуален абсолютно для всех моих одногодок, потому что речь пойдёт о кино и музыке на VHS и аудиокассетах, а также о самой эпохе. Приятного просмотра! (меньше)

Очень долго делал этот ролик, ... (ещё) Очень долго делал этот ролик, видеоряд подбирать было отдельной проблемой, но всё готово! Ролик, который будет актуален абсолютно для всех моих одногодок, потому что речь пойдёт о кино и музыке на VHS и аудиокассетах, а также о самой эпохе. Приятного просмотра! (меньше)