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Speaker 1: welcome to another episode of Thinking Sideways the podcast I
Speaker 1: Am Devin, joined this week by Joe and Steve, and
Speaker 1: we haven't had a creepy mystery for you. Halloween Halloween week,
Speaker 1: month month. It's not a week, it's a month. It's
Speaker 1: for us, it's a month. It's actually like two months
Speaker 1: for us, kind of because we like record a month
Speaker 1: ahead and then yeah, it's pretty great. Actually, I've been
Speaker 1: in the Halloween spirit for while. The candies out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, I'm gaining weight crazy. I've already eaten fifty
Speaker 1: pounds of it. We can tell um. So this week
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about a creepy Internet mystery actually,
Speaker 1: and we're calling this one. What the heck is hell
Speaker 1: dot com? Was? Was? Was um? And Bradford suggested this
Speaker 1: mystery a while ago, one of our first Internet mystery
Speaker 1: and was one of our first Internet mysteries to be suggested.
Speaker 1: And I guess we'll just want to hop right into it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not what the hell? Yeah yeah, that's gonna happen all
Speaker 1: night long, but I'm gonna miss it a lot. Yeah, So, actually,
Speaker 1: I guess that's fair. Hell. The word hell, I guess
Speaker 1: maybe is inappropriate for some people. It was when I
Speaker 1: was growing up, we weren't allowed to say fold, So
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's a thing for you to
Speaker 1: drop heck in frequently. Okay, So hell dot com Okay.
Speaker 1: From to two thousand nine, hell dot com was, I
Speaker 1: just guess. It was described as a quote private parallel web,
Speaker 1: unquote members only, invite only website. From to ninety eight,
Speaker 1: hell dot com averaged a million hits per month despite
Speaker 1: having no content, not being listed on any directory or
Speaker 1: nor having been linked anywhere. And interesting it is. And
Speaker 1: here's what I'll say. I'll remind our listeners who or
Speaker 1: maybe inform them. For those of you who don't know,
Speaker 1: Google wasn't really like a thing back then. You didn't
Speaker 1: like search as much. So the way you found cool
Speaker 1: interesting things is you put you just typed random U
Speaker 1: r L s in. Yes, search engines were not not
Speaker 1: really so people were just going head, let's see if
Speaker 1: say has a website. I mean, yeah, I mean, so
Speaker 1: that was probably a big reason why it got so
Speaker 1: many hits, not because people were saying, oh, have you
Speaker 1: heard about this hell dot com site, even though the
Speaker 1: people who owned it would like you to believe that
Speaker 1: it was because people are so and that's the reason
Speaker 1: that domains were so utterly valuable in the beginning. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I've I've ordered this book. I'm waiting forward
Speaker 1: to arrive. But have you guys heard the whole story
Speaker 1: behind sex dot com Because it, of course, you know,
Speaker 1: if somebody wants porn, like what am I going to
Speaker 1: look up, let's try sex dot com. And it was,
Speaker 1: you know, a portal to a whole bunch of other
Speaker 1: sites that were porn sites. And there's this huge, crazy
Speaker 1: legal battle that went around for I don't know, ten
Speaker 1: or fifteen years something like that around it. And wait
Speaker 1: for the book. I've heard the story. It's interesting. I
Speaker 1: want to get more details on it. But but that's
Speaker 1: why things like this, such simple u r l s
Speaker 1: were so valuable because they're what you couldn't just say
Speaker 1: I want to find fuzzy fuzzy puppies and then go
Speaker 1: to the dog Lover's portal r US. You had to
Speaker 1: tight you to go fuzzy puppy dot com. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what you would do. Yeah, puppy dot com. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because he was dot com. He was he was a
Speaker 1: bear dot com. Yeah. Even today, certain no man names
Speaker 1: are still kind of valuable. But yeah, sex dot com.
Speaker 1: I bet that was what did itself or eventually. Uh's
Speaker 1: that's a hard thing to answer because the legal battles.
Speaker 1: But when I get done to the book, I'll let
Speaker 1: you borrow it. It's perfect anyway, back to dot dot hell, yeah,
Speaker 1: back to hell. The site is best viewed through the
Speaker 1: way Back Machine, which we love, and if you don't
Speaker 1: know what it is, you can google it the Internet Archives.
Speaker 1: It is the Internet Archives. So basically what this is
Speaker 1: give them money, by the way. Yeah, we donate, you know,
Speaker 1: to the sources that we love. That's something that we
Speaker 1: don't really talk about a whole lot, but we do.
Speaker 1: And this like if anything you know, again, this is
Speaker 1: like totally unsolicited, but if you're going to pay for
Speaker 1: anything on the Internet, you should donate to Wikipedia, and
Speaker 1: you should donate to the Internet Archive. So the Internet
Speaker 1: Archive actually and also but the Internet Archive for those
Speaker 1: of you who don't know basically takes a snapshot and
Speaker 1: it doesn't do this independently. People have to tell it
Speaker 1: to do this. Um it's a crawler, but somebody has
Speaker 1: to say, hey, come crawl this site. But basically on
Speaker 1: the day and time that somebody says come crawl this site,
Speaker 1: they'll come do what's called crawl this site, which basically
Speaker 1: is I'm so sorry for those of you who know
Speaker 1: what this is. I'm trying to explain it in like
Speaker 1: the layman ist terms. It's they basically take like a
Speaker 1: snapshot at that moment of the site, but it remains interacted.
Speaker 1: It's a functional screen capture. Yeah, basically of what it
Speaker 1: looks like on that day as moment as best as can. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we we talked about this in um no, there
Speaker 1: was one another one that we did recently where had
Speaker 1: all the images? Oh that's the two thousand images were missing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't like see if I if it takes
Speaker 1: a snapshot of a web page and there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of thumbnails and I click on the thumbnails, that's not
Speaker 1: going to open up a bigger version of that picture. Right,
Speaker 1: It might it depends, may depends. Maybe maybe I don't
Speaker 1: understand why it captures some images and others. I think
Speaker 1: it probably it captures them if they're still hosted in
Speaker 1: the same place. Oh, that's a good point. So videos
Speaker 1: as well. No, no, because I know the octroy stuff
Speaker 1: was hosted on it. But this is this doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: But well it a little bit does in the context
Speaker 1: of this and that there's some content that you can
Speaker 1: still see in some content you can't see. And I
Speaker 1: think a lot of it is because it doesn't link
Speaker 1: to certain places anymore. But um, but you're right, that
Speaker 1: doesn't matter too terribly much. But so that's the like
Speaker 1: the dumbest down version I can say of what the
Speaker 1: way back machine does. We called the way back machine.
Speaker 1: It's the Internet archive. They call it the Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So if you do or if you you know, I
Speaker 1: want to go look at this site later, you can
Speaker 1: do it right now. You can just go to any
Speaker 1: browser and type in hell dot com and it will
Speaker 1: take you to a website that is like a it's
Speaker 1: just like a weird link to a bunch of different
Speaker 1: religious websites. Well I don't remember which one now that
Speaker 1: we're talking about it, of course I can't remember it.
Speaker 1: But it's an organization that has strong religious ties purchased
Speaker 1: it so that it couldn't be used for but it
Speaker 1: redirects to like a bunch of different if I remember correctly,
Speaker 1: because I don't. Frankly, I don't spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time on this one page because it's not really that
Speaker 1: interesting to me. But I think it had links to
Speaker 1: like Christianity websites and Buddhism websites and spirituality websites. But
Speaker 1: I could be totally mistaken. Yeah, I'm looking at it
Speaker 1: right now. It's funny is that somebody has bought the domain.
Speaker 1: They own it. They bought it for a decent amount
Speaker 1: of money. But I love the banner on the top
Speaker 1: this domain is we're going to talk about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it is all links to I thought it
Speaker 1: was only one religious Buddhism, Catholic christ Christianity church. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's religious terms and then the hot linked to other places.
Speaker 1: So you can. But like I said, if you want
Speaker 1: to actually so if you go to that, you'll you
Speaker 1: will find yourself saying well, what is so weird about
Speaker 1: this website? It's not that they sold it. It's gone
Speaker 1: to help. Yeah, So if you do decide to go
Speaker 1: and check it out, through the way back machine. I
Speaker 1: recommend making your first stop at February six, as long
Speaker 1: as flashing things don't bother you if you're an epileptic.
Speaker 1: In other words, yeah it could or just you don't
Speaker 1: even have to be epileptic, but sometimes you just get
Speaker 1: you know, and it's red and black flashing. So site
Speaker 1: sure is, Yeah, we're going to do that thing that
Speaker 1: everybody loves that we do when we talk about Internet mysteries,
Speaker 1: and we're literally just going to sit in a room,
Speaker 1: the three of us, and talk about what things looked
Speaker 1: like at certain times. Well, the next thing is, if
Speaker 1: you research hell dot com, you will find multiple versions
Speaker 1: of this same list because it's I mean, it's really
Speaker 1: it's a pretty straightforward Yeah, yeah, it's the list. It's
Speaker 1: what it looks like. It's not like there's a lot
Speaker 1: of editorial. I think to be done with a few
Speaker 1: things that Steve's gonna throw in because he found some
Speaker 1: interesting stuff. Because I'm obsessive, I can't help it. That's true.
Speaker 1: I think also, you don't actually work. I think you
Speaker 1: just get paid to go sit in a room and
Speaker 1: work on the podcast. He's got a job where I
Speaker 1: think it just you can slack all the time and
Speaker 1: work on podcast issues. I'm like you and me, shut it.
Speaker 1: Do not let my job know that I yeah, I
Speaker 1: have spare time. Your boss listen to this or can
Speaker 1: we get his phone number? Okay? Hell? Yeah, alright, fine,
Speaker 1: it's a very thinly guarded secret. Okay, probably HR listens
Speaker 1: to it, though, So let's go ahead and get in
Speaker 1: to this. That's why they're always sending me new work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start going through here. In hell dot com
Speaker 1: pretty much just displayed like it was just a warning
Speaker 1: landing page. It just said you're not invited here, go away. Then,
Speaker 1: is that when it redirected you? It did, that's when
Speaker 1: the redirect was put into place, right, one of one
Speaker 1: of the many Okay, hell dot com displayed a black
Speaker 1: page with a single small link in the center. We're
Speaker 1: just gonna call links. We're gonna say that links were
Speaker 1: called a thing, right, and that just means that's what
Speaker 1: the text was for the link. Uh, And so this
Speaker 1: link was called that in the first kind of iteration
Speaker 1: of this. This this page went through a lot of iterations. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was constantly changing, which is why we can talk
Speaker 1: about it a little bit. But the first one just
Speaker 1: had a like an image on the index page and
Speaker 1: in um there was a logo later that we'll talk
Speaker 1: about when that appeared and what happened there. But if
Speaker 1: you hit the image, it took you to a page
Speaker 1: that had just three links. Link one was called no
Speaker 1: access if so you clicked on that link and it
Speaker 1: would take you to a page. No, it didn't call
Speaker 1: you a loser. Yeah, access just said no access. UM. No,
Speaker 1: Actually that's not what it did. It would take you
Speaker 1: to black background page with with um what we're going
Speaker 1: to call the hell dot com like logo, which is
Speaker 1: probably the image that we're going to use for this thing.
Speaker 1: So you know, it's whatever your episode. A white circle
Speaker 1: with a white arrow that comes from the top of
Speaker 1: the circle, points downwards through the body of the circle,
Speaker 1: but doesn't penetrate the lower radius, so it's just it's
Speaker 1: encapsulated in that circle. It's just the direction sign. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's where you want to get that straight ahead, the
Speaker 1: thing that you see on road signs all the time.
Speaker 1: Rotate that are put a circle around it. There's your logo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's probably actually how they made it. Oh no, I
Speaker 1: know how they made it. It wasn't even so. If
Speaker 1: you clicked on the logo, it took you to a
Speaker 1: disclaimer page and um, there was a little bit of
Speaker 1: writing on that. It was in red text, and it said,
Speaker 1: this is a parallel web. There is no public access.
Speaker 1: The waiting list is approximately eighteen to twenty two months.
Speaker 1: Below that, there were two links. One that was called
Speaker 1: apply and one that was called don't. If you clicked
Speaker 1: the apply one, you put in your email address to
Speaker 1: receive an email, and the emails that you got reportedly
Speaker 1: just asked for payment, and that was pretty It varied
Speaker 1: in the amounts. It sounded like zek did, and we'll
Speaker 1: talk about the amounts. It gets more specific in a
Speaker 1: little bit. I couldn't remember. I knew on the page
Speaker 1: you did. I could remember if the emails themselves. I
Speaker 1: think the emails did as well. Yeah, that would make
Speaker 1: sense that one would rise in parallel with the other.
Speaker 1: If you hit the don't link, it just closed the
Speaker 1: window for you, which was I mean, that's not the
Speaker 1: most publicly available coding in nine. I mean, it's not you,
Speaker 1: it's not crazy. They complicated. They can make a closed command. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's not like you know these days, people kind
Speaker 1: of know how to do like a lot of different things.
Speaker 1: It's more widely, uh wide, more widespread knowledge on how
Speaker 1: to do some coding stuff. This is like operate, that's true.
Speaker 1: Who they it was a web browser. I used to
Speaker 1: get my email all of my Internet access through them.
Speaker 1: To remember AOL. I liked net scout where you only
Speaker 1: logged onto the internet when it was going to send
Speaker 1: your emails. Really yeah, I mean you could open up
Speaker 1: a browser, but their email writer it wouldn't even log
Speaker 1: you on. It would log. It would dial up it
Speaker 1: download all your emails and then get off the internet.
Speaker 1: And then you would you know, do all of your
Speaker 1: responding and you'd hit send a bunch of times, and
Speaker 1: you know, it would say okay. They'd say, okay, we're
Speaker 1: sending this. Of course we are. And then when you
Speaker 1: go like log off, it would log. It would dial
Speaker 1: back on and send all of your stuff and then
Speaker 1: shut down. It's a good way to grow up, guys.
Speaker 1: It's a good way internet all right back to hell
Speaker 1: dot com. So you remember there were three links on
Speaker 1: that page with the image. So one of them was
Speaker 1: no access, one of them was redemption. If you hit redemption,
Speaker 1: it took you to a page that had some black
Speaker 1: some it was black background with red text. All of
Speaker 1: this is red text, your favorite kind of website. I
Speaker 1: like the white text even more, but yeah, it's close second,
Speaker 1: and this would give you a red text link that
Speaker 1: was called Soul Redemption Program. This link sent you then
Speaker 1: to questions page, and the questions page was you can
Speaker 1: find videos of this online. It was kind of intense. Basically,
Speaker 1: it was just this little flash animation where it would
Speaker 1: be black and it would look like you were just
Speaker 1: on another black page, but it turned out it was
Speaker 1: actually flash animation and a bunch of questions would just
Speaker 1: do you ever remember like a flying toasters? Yeah, where
Speaker 1: it just kind of fly past you. So it was
Speaker 1: just all these questions, questions like what they'd be like, um,
Speaker 1: do you want answers? Yeah? Or like is your soul prepared?
Speaker 1: Or what the hell is hell dot com? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: mean it was like it was these like intentionally mysteriously
Speaker 1: mystical kind of vague things. So it'd all it'd fly
Speaker 1: you through this field of questions and you could click
Speaker 1: on one of the any of them, so you could
Speaker 1: flick click on the flash animation. Is really what was
Speaker 1: going on but that's neither here nor there. It basically
Speaker 1: like that would provide an answer, So the link would
Speaker 1: give you, um, it would just take you to a
Speaker 1: payment page, no matter what. No yeah, no matter what,
Speaker 1: no matter There was no answer. You just clicked on
Speaker 1: a link. You just click on a link, so we
Speaker 1: take you to a payment page. And this payment pages
Speaker 1: was set up similarly to the way that the email
Speaker 1: situation was. When they asked you for payment, there was
Speaker 1: a warning that said, no, this is real, we will
Speaker 1: take your money. We really really are going to take
Speaker 1: your money, and the user could fill out a form
Speaker 1: to donate any amount from ranging from ten to ten
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. And I believe it was in increments that
Speaker 1: just added a zero every time, is my understanding of it.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like you can do do like dollars. It
Speaker 1: was like ten or a hundred, or a thousand or
Speaker 1: ten thousand. Well later they changed it to you could
Speaker 1: donate twenty two hundred or two thousand, but two hundred
Speaker 1: dollars or two thousands, on and on and on. No,
Speaker 1: I think two thousand was the cap right. Well, but
Speaker 1: you the way you said it sounds like two d
Speaker 1: and it was clarifying it was twenty dollars or two
Speaker 1: hundred dollars or two thousand dollars. Oh yeah, sorry, you
Speaker 1: ran that together quite quickly. But I don't listen to
Speaker 1: myself talk just like everybody. But I would love to
Speaker 1: see what kind of donations they got. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: that third link, because remember there's three links. Um, the
Speaker 1: third one was search, and search was added a little
Speaker 1: bit later. The actual functionality of that page. It's my
Speaker 1: understanding that at first that link didn't really do very
Speaker 1: much like most of the links. Yeah, so you click
Speaker 1: on the search link was there, but it didn't. What
Speaker 1: was added was the part that actually did something useful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that was added in two thousand and six. But
Speaker 1: Steve found something in two thousand five. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about that first and then we can talk about two six.
Speaker 1: Either go canonically, But do you think that it's better
Speaker 1: for me to just talk about what was add in
Speaker 1: two thousand and six. Finish the search and then let's
Speaker 1: talk about it. I think it's going to be confusing
Speaker 1: to break up search. Okay, search is a long one.
Speaker 1: Get ready. On February eight, two thousand and six, is
Speaker 1: when we are able to pinpoint this again through the
Speaker 1: way back when a capture it, it actually has a
Speaker 1: ton of captures kind of really starting in going forward.
Speaker 1: How often do you think every couple of weeks more
Speaker 1: than that, I would say there's a month between them,
Speaker 1: and sometimes there's it's two or three in a day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty intense. But so they were able to actually
Speaker 1: kind of pinpoint because this this was in a period
Speaker 1: where it was being taken a couple of times a day.
Speaker 1: So on February eighth, two thousand, sixteen, no two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, not sixteen. This the search link actually linked
Speaker 1: to a search page, which was kind of a new
Speaker 1: thing though. I mean I read some accounts from people
Speaker 1: who were talking about poking around hell dot com and
Speaker 1: they said this was the first time that they had
Speaker 1: seen because it was a Google search box, that they
Speaker 1: had seen a Google search box on a website. It
Speaker 1: seems ubiquitous now there's search function everywhere on every website.
Speaker 1: But that was kind of a new It was actually
Speaker 1: a novel concept at that point, and there was a
Speaker 1: lot of work. You had to add a plug in.
Speaker 1: It was like a ton of work to get this
Speaker 1: and it usually didn't work very well, but it did
Speaker 1: have this Google search box on the search page, or
Speaker 1: at least something that looked like it was literally powered
Speaker 1: by Google. It had the like when you you still
Speaker 1: can do it. You can go and hit search and
Speaker 1: it takes you to a Google site. So it will
Speaker 1: take you to a Google site that just has search.
Speaker 1: It just returns Google results for everything except for these
Speaker 1: certain keywords. And the keywords aren't always I don't think
Speaker 1: that we know all of them, frankly a couple of them.
Speaker 1: One of them, you could type in redemption and it
Speaker 1: would link you back to that questions page that we're
Speaker 1: talking about that had all the questions flying. You could
Speaker 1: search hell and you would be linked to the links page,
Speaker 1: which was just a page that had those three links
Speaker 1: on it. Again, oh that, or you could do answer
Speaker 1: and I wish the full disclosure. I was. I went
Speaker 1: through the way back machine and saw most of these
Speaker 1: pages for myself, but this one was broken for me,
Speaker 1: which was kind of a bummer. I was, yeah, and
Speaker 1: I even like I was going through the source code.
Speaker 1: I was like, God, it's gotta be somewhere it's linked
Speaker 1: to this video. I wanted to see what was happening here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so when you typed an answer, the link would well,
Speaker 1: you would hit answer and hit search and it would
Speaker 1: lead to a picture of a bald naked woman falling
Speaker 1: through darkness. And then, after I don't know how long,
Speaker 1: just a couple of seconds, I think, but you know,
Speaker 1: definitely not more than thirty seconds, you to be sent
Speaker 1: to this site called signa noir dot com. Hey, I'm
Speaker 1: not the only one who had problems with that word
Speaker 1: it week. I did it way better than you did, though.
Speaker 1: Um and here I will also pause to say, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: signa noir dot com whoever programmed that site did that
Speaker 1: thing that I find really really really heck and annoying,
Speaker 1: and that is they implemented no robots text in their
Speaker 1: page code, which means that the way back machine can't
Speaker 1: crawl it, which means I don't have a way to
Speaker 1: see what that page looked like at that time. This
Speaker 1: is the same thing that some websites do to keep
Speaker 1: their content private so that Google can't crawl them and
Speaker 1: return that stuff in results, at least in the beginning.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a it was a common tool then
Speaker 1: as well as now. We accidentally had that in the
Speaker 1: very beginning Wikipedia does it. Yeah, I think I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure that Wikipedia does it. You can't you have to
Speaker 1: go through their revision history. You can't say what did
Speaker 1: this I look like at that time, which makes sense
Speaker 1: because it's constantly evolving and that's fine. But yeah, there
Speaker 1: are some websites that have this like no robots crawler thing,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately they did implement that, um and clear for
Speaker 1: everybody that's that's the text. What you see has been
Speaker 1: distorted and it's all kinds of you know, is that
Speaker 1: what No, No, it cannot pull a copy of the website.
Speaker 1: The code tells the robot to go away, and being
Speaker 1: a little robot, it goes away. It doesn't take any pictures, Okay, right,
Speaker 1: So basically what will happen is you'll type the some
Speaker 1: U R L into the way back machine and it'll
Speaker 1: come up with a little thing. It'll like reload the
Speaker 1: page and it will say, um, we can't show you
Speaker 1: these results because of no robots dot htm or whatever
Speaker 1: to dot tst or whatever it is. So that's bummer.
Speaker 1: But I do understand from some people that apparently that
Speaker 1: site was basically the same format as hell dot com
Speaker 1: and and acted as a portfolio for a guy by
Speaker 1: the name of Kenneth Arnson, and don't worry, we will
Speaker 1: talk about ken Arnest Arniston. Arnist is the right way
Speaker 1: to say. We'll talk about dear Kenneth in a in
Speaker 1: a little he is that sounds like a bad seventies novel,
Speaker 1: Dear Kenneth. It sounds like a bad song. But apparently
Speaker 1: he's described as a conceptual artist who uses photography as
Speaker 1: parts of part of his process. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: read this whole thing. Yeah. According to Kenneth's personal site,
Speaker 1: which again we'll talk on a little bit, he is
Speaker 1: the CEO and founder of the Parallel Network and um,
Speaker 1: the Parallel Network of I can't say een kean Noir Yeah,
Speaker 1: and hell dot com, which is considered to be an
Speaker 1: enigma of the Web according to the Enigma of the Web,
Speaker 1: the you're right, the enigma. Excuse me, So that's what
Speaker 1: happened when you went to search. So now for real
Speaker 1: is we're going to talk about Steve wanted to bring
Speaker 1: something up, okay for the class. Well, I mean we
Speaker 1: talked about this offline. But one of the most annoying
Speaker 1: things about this website, even when you pull it through
Speaker 1: the Internet archive is it had a redirect built into it,
Speaker 1: and currently in the archive, it redirects you away from
Speaker 1: itself in twenty seconds. It used to do two minutes,
Speaker 1: right right, So why it's seconds. It's bleeping annoying to
Speaker 1: try and find anything. But I went through it and
Speaker 1: was just dinking around and I found a couple of things.
Speaker 1: There's a page in two thousand five that I got
Speaker 1: myself into, and it was the link was locations, and
Speaker 1: I didn't write down the date in two thousand and five. Unfortunately.
Speaker 1: I went back to try and find it. But of
Speaker 1: course it's just such a rabbit hole, especially when it's
Speaker 1: redirecting you every twenty second. But what it did is
Speaker 1: it popped. It threw up a pop up screen or
Speaker 1: pop up window, i should say, and before I closed it,
Speaker 1: because the content in the page was kind of nil,
Speaker 1: it wasn't even enough for me to note it. I
Speaker 1: think it's probably just the same stuff i'd seen before
Speaker 1: the logo. But what I did notice is the header
Speaker 1: in the window, you know where it'll say blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: whatever text they want there. It had written in it
Speaker 1: for one, the letter N zero one a space seven three,
Speaker 1: the letter W five two, and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: that sounds like a set of coordinates. So I went
Speaker 1: into Google Earth or Google Maps, I can't remember which
Speaker 1: one it was, and I happened to still have it
Speaker 1: was Google Earth because I happened to still have up
Speaker 1: Japan Tokyo from last week's episode, and I entered it
Speaker 1: and it returned a location in Tokyo, and I thought, well,
Speaker 1: what the deuce, that's really weird, and so I hit
Speaker 1: the you know, go to my home button and so
Speaker 1: it went back to my neighborhood and I typed in
Speaker 1: that location again and it found a location in Portland.
Speaker 1: And then I'm going, well this is this is So
Speaker 1: I was like, okay, what's a major city that people
Speaker 1: wouldn't think of it. I just typed a New Delhi
Speaker 1: with the New Delhi, India put in those coordinates once
Speaker 1: I was in New Delhi and it found a site.
Speaker 1: It's really really crazy. As long as you you spaced
Speaker 1: it so that it was the two digits, the alpha
Speaker 1: character and then two digits and then a physical space
Speaker 1: between that and the next set of numbers and the letter,
Speaker 1: it always takes you somewhere. So it's like, maybe perhaps
Speaker 1: the not to degrees, but just the minutes and seconds
Speaker 1: maybe I don't know. I mean, it's it's really it
Speaker 1: was very strange, and I was I kept playing with it,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't find a rhyme or reason for what
Speaker 1: the hell it was doing. It's interesting. Yeah, so this,
Speaker 1: this is this was one of the few things where
Speaker 1: I was like, I found something. Damn, I don't know
Speaker 1: what it is in this story. Yeah, but it's super
Speaker 1: interesting and we will definitely talk about that in theories
Speaker 1: a little bit. Man, I'm gonna have to go out
Speaker 1: and look on Google maps so I can find Yeah,
Speaker 1: you are okay, well, continuing on, In two thousand and ten,
Speaker 1: hell dot com featured that original logo once again, which
Speaker 1: did lead to that kind of star field effect. Um.
Speaker 1: They describe it as like a holographic logo basically, so
Speaker 1: like an updated logo. Huh Is that that where it
Speaker 1: seems to shift in space and change colors? Is that
Speaker 1: That's why I'm doing this, just going yeah, like this
Speaker 1: it had and it apparently had it that starfield behind it.
Speaker 1: I'm doing a lot of gesticulating toward yeah, and no
Speaker 1: it didn't. It wasn't. With the questions this time, It
Speaker 1: was red dots that apparently would um if you put
Speaker 1: your mouth over it, like covered one with your little cursor,
Speaker 1: it would play a sound, a tone, a tone if
Speaker 1: you could almost make varying musical tones by going over
Speaker 1: bunches of them. There's a lot of websites like that now.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I bet if you played this specific tune
Speaker 1: might take you somewhere like kind of cool. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: that's how you got into the special secret site. Well
Speaker 1: there was at the bottom of that page there was
Speaker 1: a log in feature, so probably that log in feature
Speaker 1: is how you got into this. Hey call me crazy.
Speaker 1: The idea that the special the special Illuminati level for
Speaker 1: the extra level, y, yeah, they probably could use that
Speaker 1: play a little tune. I found a series this similar
Speaker 1: set of dots in two thousand five or six as well, interesting,
Speaker 1: which was another flash movie. And it was six dots
Speaker 1: and they were set up in a circle and then
Speaker 1: a circle was actually drawn on top of them, and
Speaker 1: they would fade out and it would all get smaller
Speaker 1: and smaller and disappear into space. So it was like
Speaker 1: two or I think it was three or four times.
Speaker 1: It was large. It was again in a pop up window.
Speaker 1: It love pop up windows and and it would it
Speaker 1: would drop, drop, drop, and then repeat to the I
Speaker 1: didn't size, I didn't experience that. I only found it
Speaker 1: once and I happen to find it today when I
Speaker 1: was looking for That's interesting. I didn't know that there
Speaker 1: were some common themes, very simple geometric themes. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think there were. So if you went to the log
Speaker 1: in feature at the bottom of the page, basically, if
Speaker 1: you put incorrect information in, or if you even just
Speaker 1: waited too long, because that was apparently a thing. I
Speaker 1: don't know. This website seems to have a big obsession
Speaker 1: with time, like if you don't if you you know,
Speaker 1: if you're just chilling there, like it's going to redirect you.
Speaker 1: So if it took you too long to log in,
Speaker 1: or you put incorrect information, and it would take you
Speaker 1: to back to that search page where it was just
Speaker 1: the search and then Steve found something else in two
Speaker 1: thousand ten. Is that true? Yeah, So if you go
Speaker 1: to March and again, it pops up a window and
Speaker 1: I don't remember which link I clicked on because there's
Speaker 1: three of them, so of course I can't remember it.
Speaker 1: Would it brought up a pop up and this time
Speaker 1: in that header in the top of your browser, you
Speaker 1: know the bar on your keyboards, or there's the forward slash,
Speaker 1: and then if you hold shift, it's got the very
Speaker 1: vertical bar. Okay, so that bar is in that area,
Speaker 1: but it's again set there's it's there's two bars and
Speaker 1: a space and then five bars in a space, three
Speaker 1: bars of space, four bars of space at a single bar.
Speaker 1: So I just simply converted that to numbers and dropped
Speaker 1: them into the search field, because it comes out to
Speaker 1: five one. If if you type that into the search
Speaker 1: field that's available, it takes you to a new page
Speaker 1: which has a kind which has got this humongous thing
Speaker 1: written about hell dot com. I copy and pasted the
Speaker 1: text because I could not read it in black and white,
Speaker 1: and I dropped it into word and it didn't have
Speaker 1: any carriage returns between the paragraphs anymore. And it was
Speaker 1: twenty five pages long. Wow, did you read it all? No?
Speaker 1: I read like the first paragraph for two and then went, wait,
Speaker 1: how long is this? Oh god, no, I give up.
Speaker 1: What did the first couple of paragraphs talk about? It
Speaker 1: was all about what hell dot com was, and I
Speaker 1: don't know it was. It was weird, It was hard
Speaker 1: to follow. What did it say? It was several days ago.
Speaker 1: I don't remember exactly what it said. It was really
Speaker 1: hard for me. It's just like, I don't get it.
Speaker 1: It was to a degree it almost felt like it
Speaker 1: was some existential text about hell and blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: And I think it might have been right after the
Speaker 1: purchase date. I think that's when that might have gone in. Okay,
Speaker 1: excusally when people are more excited about their websites. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: Well that again is like this super weird and interesting.
Speaker 1: I know there are lots of things like that. I
Speaker 1: mean to be you know, to be honest with you,
Speaker 1: Like I said, I tried to go through and look
Speaker 1: at at least one capture on every day, but I
Speaker 1: frankly didn't get a chance to go through and look
Speaker 1: at like the source code of every single day, or
Speaker 1: even every post every or every crawl every day. So
Speaker 1: I'm certain that I missed stuff. I know, it's crazy,
Speaker 1: right that in the whole twenty second redirect that kind
Speaker 1: of amazingly, I was, honestly, So, I mean, you guys
Speaker 1: know this that my fiance has been like doing coding
Speaker 1: stuff recently, and so I was sitting on the couch
Speaker 1: on my computer, and I was like, I had the
Speaker 1: source code window up and I was just like sitting
Speaker 1: there and it kept redirecting me, and I was like duh,
Speaker 1: and he was like what And I was like, I'm
Speaker 1: just looking at cold stuff and it's just messing with me.
Speaker 1: And he was like, oh, let me take a look
Speaker 1: at it. And it took him one redirect and he
Speaker 1: was like, I'm not looking at this sea. That's about right.
Speaker 1: What was written in just regular there was there was nothing.
Speaker 1: There's some jobs script on there too. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: it wasn't anything outlandish or typical of the time. It
Speaker 1: was just standard. Yeah. So in two thousand eleven, the
Speaker 1: main Hell dot com was disabled as far as we
Speaker 1: can tell. It just had a blank white screen that showed.
Speaker 1: And then in later in two thousand eleven is when
Speaker 1: we got to see this um the first redirect the website.
Speaker 1: You would do Hell dot com and it would just
Speaker 1: automatically redirect you to the Gospel Media Network, which is
Speaker 1: a Christian religious site, which is probably why you thought
Speaker 1: that's what it redirected to. Currently it's not. It doesn't
Speaker 1: do that anymore, but there you have it. So that's
Speaker 1: the description of I don't know when, Frankly, to be
Speaker 1: honest with you, I don't know when. After that it
Speaker 1: became the site that it is today because it's interesting anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the magic was gone, gone, totally gone. So nothing none
Speaker 1: of the I mean, it's weird, but none of this
Speaker 1: is really creepy yet, right the hell out of me?
Speaker 1: Is it? No? Not really? You better? You better? You
Speaker 1: better amp this up? Right? It amp it up? Are
Speaker 1: you guys? Right? So the creepy factor comes from Reddit
Speaker 1: user named I'm going to say viln X. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: how I want to say it too. When this person
Speaker 1: wrote um an account of their experience trying to gain
Speaker 1: access to the kind of inner workings of hell dot com,
Speaker 1: because if I wasn't clear enough, there was a member's
Speaker 1: only log in portion of this website supposedly, and according
Speaker 1: to xylen X, there was. And I want to talk
Speaker 1: about this experience because it's this firsthand account of like
Speaker 1: what happened when um he tried to access it nefariously.
Speaker 1: So the story basically starts out describing the website in
Speaker 1: like way less detail than we just liked it for
Speaker 1: the last forty minutes basically said that it had a
Speaker 1: flashy front end but really very little to it, which
Speaker 1: is accurate. Um. And then viln X says that he
Speaker 1: decided to poke around for like who knows why in
Speaker 1: the root source code, and that's when things started to
Speaker 1: get a bit crazy through a series of kind of
Speaker 1: techno babble and back doors. I'm not going to bother
Speaker 1: to describe why he apparently got access to the member
Speaker 1: part of the site. And I'm gonna have Joe read
Speaker 1: some excerpts from this um, this, this um kind of rehashing. Yes, please,
Speaker 1: here's ziln X. We'll be put on my xylin x
Speaker 1: voice here. Most of the pages seem to be strange
Speaker 1: avant garde art presentations, some were videos, and others were
Speaker 1: rather well designed web pages. Looking back, some of the
Speaker 1: pages looked a lot like what we now call web
Speaker 1: two point oh In two thousand five, it looked almost
Speaker 1: futuristic as I watched a slide show set to industrial techno,
Speaker 1: where each slide showed a different children's book that have
Speaker 1: been photoshop to have a perverted title. Some examples would
Speaker 1: be good Night, Boob and everybody. So I switched windows
Speaker 1: to look at the source code unquote. So he was
Speaker 1: able to find a link that looked familiar from like
Speaker 1: his original pokings around, but when he clicked it, he
Speaker 1: it took him back to the same page that he
Speaker 1: had just been on. So he basically what happens is
Speaker 1: he figures, okay, well my website isn't working properly, and
Speaker 1: we've all experienced this before. You have to reload a
Speaker 1: page because it's just not quite working particularly all. But
Speaker 1: he reset his whole set up and then loaded up
Speaker 1: this thing called a brute Force application, which is basically
Speaker 1: a program that we'll just try thousands and thousands of
Speaker 1: user name and password combinations until it gets in. It's
Speaker 1: brute Force. It's very dumb, it's very slow, but it's
Speaker 1: very effective because eventually it is going to find it.
Speaker 1: It's gonna find something. Make it take a thousand years,
Speaker 1: but eventually that's true. Usually we can with the password, password,
Speaker 1: and the ord. I mean, you would be surprised how
Speaker 1: often that happens, unfortunately, But so basically basically what happens
Speaker 1: is he does is um he does gain access to
Speaker 1: the members only site again through this brute Force application.
Speaker 1: After I think he said it took a couple hours,
Speaker 1: but he said that he found some more information about
Speaker 1: this collective of artists, some of whom are pretty famous today,
Speaker 1: who were reportedly just working on kind of high concept programs.
Speaker 1: But after just like a couple of minutes of poking around,
Speaker 1: his log in credentials that he had been basically that
Speaker 1: he had spoofed got banned. So he was kicked out
Speaker 1: of the members only part it is. So he kind
Speaker 1: of continues on to start describing what I would say.
Speaker 1: Where we get pretty creepy, Joe, do you want to
Speaker 1: read some stuff? Yeah? Sure, Now this is where it
Speaker 1: gets odd. Out of nowhere, my browser history, download history,
Speaker 1: book marks, and several other common features of my browser
Speaker 1: had been completely wiped. Moreover, in my roommate was shouting
Speaker 1: from the other room because his computer had suffered the
Speaker 1: same faith I assumed it was a text savvy siss
Speaker 1: op that hacked me to make a point or something.
Speaker 1: So he grabs his laptop and goes down to the
Speaker 1: local coffee shop to use their WiFi because it seems
Speaker 1: like the systems operator, which is what sissop is, had
Speaker 1: fled to his IP. Basically, you can ban an IP
Speaker 1: from a website and say, if this anybody logging on
Speaker 1: from this, I p cannot gain up that work the
Speaker 1: nanny programs do. So he worked on getting back in
Speaker 1: and actually did get back in. But apparently this time
Speaker 1: when he threw that brute force application again got back
Speaker 1: into the members only site, it actually looked different. Joe.
Speaker 1: The page I landed I was nothing more than a
Speaker 1: flash video in the center of a black background. The
Speaker 1: video that followed was gruesome on the level I had
Speaker 1: not yet seen. I scoff at the Pain series and
Speaker 1: most and most shock sites are boring to me. I
Speaker 1: can't even boast that by this point Screamers didn't even
Speaker 1: make me jump unlist all these gruesome images and video
Speaker 1: clips of what can only be described as horrific crimes
Speaker 1: against humanity, some red text slowly came into focus. Quote
Speaker 1: those who see kale are desk and to find it unquote.
Speaker 1: I closed my laptop and headed home. It was getting late,
Speaker 1: and I figured I could take another crack at it
Speaker 1: in the morning. On the way back, I walked past
Speaker 1: the church signists said quote those who seek hell are
Speaker 1: destined to find it unquote. When I got home, I
Speaker 1: hopped on my desktop and logged into a game. As
Speaker 1: I ran around, killing mythical creatures and chatting with other
Speaker 1: players at GM noted for typing and red text typed
Speaker 1: quote those who seek hell are destined to find it unquote.
Speaker 1: I asked the GM if he hadn't spend any time
Speaker 1: on hell dot com recently, and within a few minutes,
Speaker 1: I was bammed from the game for using an appropriate language.
Speaker 1: With little else to entertain myself, I want to sleep. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a weird series of coincidental encounters there.
Speaker 1: Huh yeah, that's pretty creepy to me. That would make
Speaker 1: me go lock my doors. I agree. So apparently the
Speaker 1: next morning, are in trepid hackers awoke into a knock
Speaker 1: at the door and apparently the system operator for hell
Speaker 1: dot com had reported the I P for unlawful access
Speaker 1: to Hell dot com. So xyln X continues. Basically, he
Speaker 1: said it was a like a fed. He thought, I
Speaker 1: don't really know. UM apparently confiscated the desktop, which is
Speaker 1: what the original hack had been done on. And apparently
Speaker 1: as this guy walked out the door, he turned around
Speaker 1: and said, careful kids, those who go looking for hell
Speaker 1: tend to find it. This course freaks him out. It
Speaker 1: freaked me out, frankly if this happened. So he grabbed
Speaker 1: his laptop and Google's those who go looking for help
Speaker 1: find it, uh, those who see Keller destined to find it,
Speaker 1: and claims that he wasn't able to find any results
Speaker 1: on Google. And he can see that. You know, like
Speaker 1: on any given time, any given date, any any time
Speaker 1: that you google this, there should be a ton of results,
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands and thus maybe millions of results. But
Speaker 1: apparently he says that didn't happen in this instance, which
Speaker 1: is kind of bummer. So he basically was like, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'm done. I'm walking away from this whole thing.
Speaker 1: Did you ever get his desktop back from the feed?
Speaker 1: I don't think so. No. But reportedly after a couple
Speaker 1: of years he moved a couple of times, and in
Speaker 1: the morning of the writing of this post, which is
Speaker 1: kind of what spurred a lot of people to think
Speaker 1: this website was like extra creepy, he got a certified
Speaker 1: letter via the ups two from an address in Nevada.
Speaker 1: Inside this certified letter was a letter with a single
Speaker 1: phrase written in red. I bet you can guess what
Speaker 1: it is. I like red ink. Really this page left
Speaker 1: intentionally blank? Okay, no, no, no, wait wait I misread that. Okay,
Speaker 1: those who see kel are destined to find it. He
Speaker 1: claims he has moved six times to between the hack
Speaker 1: and getting this package. So there you go. That's pretty
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. And on the bottom
Speaker 1: of the letter it was signed LCF Was that Lucifer? Probably? Yeah, probably,
Speaker 1: and said psc you soon do do do do do do?
Speaker 1: No creepy Okay, I think it's creepy. Well, it's still alive,
Speaker 1: he is. I spoke with him. Yeah. Actually, that's a
Speaker 1: great segue, um, because we're going to talk about theories
Speaker 1: in a minute, but first, let's take a break. It's
Speaker 1: white and fluffy and drifts about so freely. It's red
Speaker 1: and sticky and flow so freely. A little bit of
Speaker 1: this cold substance gets people's attention. A little bit of
Speaker 1: this hot substance gets people's attention. Small amount of this
Speaker 1: crystalline material is quaint. Large amounts are deadly. Small amounts
Speaker 1: of this HEBA glowin based fluid is an annoyance. Large
Speaker 1: amounts are deadly. What does this have to do with
Speaker 1: this week's sponsor? What is this all about, Well, if
Speaker 1: you haven't guessed it by now, it's about snow and blood,
Speaker 1: two things that you're guaranteed to see in the movie
Speaker 1: The Snowman, based on the worldwide best seller by Joe Nesbo,
Speaker 1: The Snowman tells the story of two detectives investigating a
Speaker 1: sociopath who strikes his victims during the first snowfall of winter.
Speaker 1: The Snowman in theaters starting October two thousand seventeen. Go
Speaker 1: say it and get scared, and we're back. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about theories. Yeah, so, our first theory is that hell
Speaker 1: dot com was actually hiding a secret shadow organization that
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe it was like Satan worshippers or
Speaker 1: Illuminati or I don't really know. I've never really seen
Speaker 1: this like totally flushed out a whole lot as to
Speaker 1: like who it might be, just that it might be
Speaker 1: hiding something people like on Reddit that are like, you know,
Speaker 1: saying this, or there are people like all over the
Speaker 1: play saying this job really okay? Well, and I mean
Speaker 1: even in its own description and I'm looking for the
Speaker 1: sentence right now, it called itself a private parallel web.
Speaker 1: I mean, whoever created hell dot com was saying, I've
Speaker 1: got something else going on, and you don't get in
Speaker 1: unless you apply for membership and pay me a boatload
Speaker 1: of money and your own parallel web and everything I can. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course you know were there. I mean maybe we
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean nobody has ever said I was
Speaker 1: a member of the Private Parallel Web the p p P.
Speaker 1: That's not technically not true, but we'll talk about that
Speaker 1: in a little bit part of another theory. Um, I
Speaker 1: was wondering about the private Parallel Web. Does that mean
Speaker 1: that you and your many of the members all owned
Speaker 1: servers and so it's like totally separate servers from the
Speaker 1: rest of the web, even or its own regular service
Speaker 1: that are part of the regular web. Also, it would
Speaker 1: be its own a dedicated server or server set, much
Speaker 1: like you know at one point we had our own
Speaker 1: server when we overbought at one point, UM, so we
Speaker 1: that server was us, nobody else was on it. So
Speaker 1: that's what they would have, is all of their stuff
Speaker 1: would be contained in that one box or a series
Speaker 1: of boxes that nobody else's info was housed on. That's
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be it wouldn't be like what's the one
Speaker 1: with the ghost Rat that you did devon What is that? Um?
Speaker 1: Remember that one? I do, But I don't remember what
Speaker 1: you're talking about ghost Rat. But they the farious program
Speaker 1: that got a system. But but it was talked about
Speaker 1: how it was on all these separate servers and its
Speaker 1: spidered out or spider webbed out. That would be different
Speaker 1: than this. This sounds like it would have been all
Speaker 1: contained a very well, I mean maybe, But the point
Speaker 1: is it was a private one and you had to
Speaker 1: be able to have the key to get in. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What was the name of that stupid story? You're killing
Speaker 1: me here? It was ghost Rat? It was ghost right, Okay,
Speaker 1: of the virus or something? Okay. For some reason, I
Speaker 1: thought the name of the story was not I had
Speaker 1: totally forgotten about that one. Have a weird memory for
Speaker 1: these stories. I can't remember what I need to do tomorrow,
Speaker 1: which is why I have to do list, but I
Speaker 1: can remember. I also love that you hate these stories
Speaker 1: but you still remember all of them. It's my favorite
Speaker 1: that yea. So I will say, um, there was actually
Speaker 1: a member only part of this. Nobody has come out
Speaker 1: and said yes and this is what was on it.
Speaker 1: We'll totally come out the really the big question is
Speaker 1: is do you believe the creator of hell dot com
Speaker 1: or do you think that the creator was hiding something else.
Speaker 1: So we'll talk about this, but first I do want
Speaker 1: to mention that they're there. Genuinely was amazed in the
Speaker 1: root directory, and that was intentionally designed, and apparently it
Speaker 1: was unpleasant. Like we've said, we were trying to view
Speaker 1: the source code and it was just like, nope, your
Speaker 1: twenty seconds is up, get out. So amazed, you mean,
Speaker 1: it's like just a huge maze of subdirectories and sub
Speaker 1: sub subdirector loop back on it themselves. Like remember the
Speaker 1: October or whatever two thousand eleven one, It had a
Speaker 1: couple of those pages that if you paid attention to
Speaker 1: where it was directing you, you were just going. There
Speaker 1: was pages with with one, two and three or something
Speaker 1: like that, and you would type three, and it would
Speaker 1: bring you back to three page two, and then three
Speaker 1: page three, and then three page four, and there's an
Speaker 1: easier way to one, and it would just keep looping
Speaker 1: you around. There's an easier way to describe that, and
Speaker 1: that's that like literally, if you type the wrong thing
Speaker 1: into the search box, it would just take you back
Speaker 1: to the landing page. Like that's a search that it
Speaker 1: was the wrong thing, so that would be frustrating. It
Speaker 1: sounds like some voicemail trees have been in Yeah right, yeah,
Speaker 1: um it is. But it is, like I said, it's
Speaker 1: my understanding that the creator of the site did that
Speaker 1: on purpose to deter people like xylan x, to have,
Speaker 1: you know, keep them from hacking site, which makes sense
Speaker 1: to me. The next theory, which we're just going to
Speaker 1: talk about. So what was the name of that theory
Speaker 1: that we just finished. It's a shadow organization. We're just
Speaker 1: preparing people, I think, because really we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about what I probably is and then at the end
Speaker 1: of this will loop back around like a maze of
Speaker 1: a root directory and um, we'll just say, like we
Speaker 1: have to. Then you just have to decide if you
Speaker 1: believe that this is what it was or not. Okay,
Speaker 1: So what's theery Number two? The reality just kidding the
Speaker 1: blue pill Um, it was just art. That's all it was.
Speaker 1: That's that's all the river was. It was just an
Speaker 1: art project. And the whole thing wasn't an art project.
Speaker 1: It was I guess to gain mystique around it. But
Speaker 1: the private server, the parallel web was just a place
Speaker 1: for net web net netweb net art net artists. This
Speaker 1: is the word. It was a whatever. Uh No, it
Speaker 1: was like for modern artists who were trying to explore
Speaker 1: the capabilities of doing web based art. So it was
Speaker 1: a modern deviant art. Yeah, well like an old deviant art.
Speaker 1: But like with real Sorry I do not need to
Speaker 1: offend anyone, but with real artists, I find a lot
Speaker 1: of good stuff, and there's some really good stuff on there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there is definitely there is the full spectrum. So um,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna go ahead and like burst everyone's bubble here.
Speaker 1: I spoke was island x on Reddit as previously mentioned um.
Speaker 1: For full disclosure, it is on the subreddit no Sleep,
Speaker 1: which is um fiction. It can be fiction. It's not
Speaker 1: a requirement that it be, but it's scary stories. It's
Speaker 1: scary stories, so it can be true. It can be fiction. Man.
Speaker 1: I think grinning Man was let's not meet okay, but
Speaker 1: he's also on no Sleep. But it doesn't really matter anyway. Um.
Speaker 1: I did speak with island x uh and he he
Speaker 1: said that eight percent of that story is fiction. He
Speaker 1: wasn't willing to concede. I said, I think it's and
Speaker 1: he was like eighty percent, and I was like, all right, fine, yeah,
Speaker 1: I could tell that was at least mostly fiction. When
Speaker 1: when he says that he does all this and the
Speaker 1: very next morning a FED shows up at his door,
Speaker 1: It's like, I'm sorry, you know, the Feds don't move
Speaker 1: that fast, dude. I I we cut out this part
Speaker 1: because I didn't want to like totally give it away immediately.
Speaker 1: But when he like grabbed his laptop, he says, he
Speaker 1: grabbed his laptop out of the false bottom of his desk,
Speaker 1: and I was like, no, you didn't you This is
Speaker 1: this is that's not real. But maybe it is. I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe you have your weird I don't know,
Speaker 1: but he did just totally was like happy to admit, yes,
Speaker 1: percent of it is fiction and worth the read. It's
Speaker 1: really well written. It's fun. What I'm curious about, though,
Speaker 1: did so he got into it, noodled around, did he
Speaker 1: actually did the part where the sissop deleted his browser
Speaker 1: history and all that stuff that that actually happened. That
Speaker 1: didn't correct me if I'm wrong, But he didn't actually
Speaker 1: say is it he or she? By the way, I
Speaker 1: confirmed that's fine. He didn't actually say which parts were
Speaker 1: fictions specifically to you, did he No, he did not,
Speaker 1: but he kind of basically said yes, I you know,
Speaker 1: got into their member only site. It was pretty lame.
Speaker 1: So this is what a story jazz it up a
Speaker 1: little bit, which is totally fair. It's super interesting. Okay,
Speaker 1: So with all of that creepy out of the way,
Speaker 1: we're just left with the website, which is still kind
Speaker 1: of a weird website. Yeah, that's all it's got forward
Speaker 1: at that point. Yeah, so we mentioned this guy named
Speaker 1: Kenneth Aaronsons and then he was the owner and creator
Speaker 1: of hell dot com. I will say he tried to
Speaker 1: sell the domain a number of times. Uh, never with
Speaker 1: less than a one million minimum on the auctions. Yes, true.
Speaker 1: One time, one of the last times before he finally
Speaker 1: did sell it, he tried to auction it off for
Speaker 1: eight million dollars. That did not go well for him.
Speaker 1: Didn't nobody, nobody was willing to give him that amount
Speaker 1: of money. Um. I think there they call them reserve bids,
Speaker 1: So they're this like secret amount of money that it's
Speaker 1: like when you when you sell something on eBay. And
Speaker 1: actually haven't done this a long time, but I know
Speaker 1: in the past, there was your reserve limit. You know,
Speaker 1: you wanted to sell this thing for a hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: So when some bozo came in and bid one dollar,
Speaker 1: it automatically told him somebody's outbid you and two dollars,
Speaker 1: and it would keep going like that. You put in
Speaker 1: your dollar thing and it just says reserve not met.
Speaker 1: Most of the sites I've been on are just they've don't.
Speaker 1: I've seen it both ways. I just bought something on
Speaker 1: eBay and they now they just do like, this is
Speaker 1: the minimum bid. Yeah, well yeah, they made it simpler
Speaker 1: because it transparent. Yeah, the reserve thing actually annoys the
Speaker 1: crap out of me. You got to go in there
Speaker 1: and actually, you know, bid for a while till you
Speaker 1: find out what it is. That's irritating, which is why
Speaker 1: they don't do that anymore. But you can still go
Speaker 1: in and say like, here's my maximum bid, and it
Speaker 1: will still only bid you at the minimum bid until
Speaker 1: somebody up bids you. So that's nice at least. But um,
Speaker 1: like I said, he did try to sell it for
Speaker 1: a lot of money, so he was aware that he
Speaker 1: was building up hype to build up hits, to build
Speaker 1: up wealth. So describe this dude, because this guy drives
Speaker 1: me batty. Why this guy is the kind of designer
Speaker 1: and artists that gives all other designers and artists a
Speaker 1: bad name because he strings together a series of smart
Speaker 1: sounding words to make himself sound grand. And yet he has,
Speaker 1: apparently from everything he shows, not a whole lot but
Speaker 1: himself to offer. Okay, let's talk about him. Um. So,
Speaker 1: like we said, if you go to hell dot com
Speaker 1: right now, there's this like really beautiful lime green bar
Speaker 1: at the top of the stop that it says this
Speaker 1: premium domain maybe for sale, and I have seen screen
Speaker 1: captures previously it said legendary and that that is an
Speaker 1: important distinction that was made because legendary is actually a
Speaker 1: term that Kenneth Aaronson uses. He claims to create legendary brands.
Speaker 1: This is all sourced from his own personal website, and
Speaker 1: the logo that he has for his legendary brands is
Speaker 1: almost identical to the hell dot com logo. It's just
Speaker 1: an L with an L. But you know what I
Speaker 1: figured out is the comic sands l. It is it's
Speaker 1: that comics sands L where the top of the vertical
Speaker 1: bar run is into the top of the circle. So
Speaker 1: it's not that great of a design. It's literally just
Speaker 1: like the hell dot com thing, except for in an
Speaker 1: arrow with an l designs and actually work as a
Speaker 1: as an artist. I don't really know if he went
Speaker 1: to his linked In profile, Oh he does work. I
Speaker 1: looked at his my Space page, but it was private.
Speaker 1: You think I'm joking. I'm not joking. Active page. So
Speaker 1: I found our interviews with him, but I also found
Speaker 1: his LinkedIn page, and he seems to be a high
Speaker 1: level consultant, like somebody. I love the way they described him,
Speaker 1: like I don't know that he's actually much of a
Speaker 1: creative because they're like, he's great at keeping an eye
Speaker 1: on the balance sheet, but still understanding the drive of
Speaker 1: the project or something that. Let me read some sheet.
Speaker 1: I was like, this guy is a project manager himself
Speaker 1: as a design Let me read you some stuff about
Speaker 1: from his websites plural he If you go to his website,
Speaker 1: like I said, you will kind of see what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about here. His brand is full of those like
Speaker 1: edgy sentences, you know, where it's like kind of like
Speaker 1: somebody just threw a bunch of words at something and
Speaker 1: came up with a sentence um. One of them, for instance,
Speaker 1: is shadow is my partner, and we sell nothing. Nothing
Speaker 1: links to nothing in the box dot com, which is
Speaker 1: a website that he owns where you get a nice
Speaker 1: black background with gray text, which is even more annoying
Speaker 1: than white text. And what's really annoying is like is
Speaker 1: like kind of pale gray text against a slightly darker
Speaker 1: gray background that this is that pale gray exceptorts on
Speaker 1: black so um. And this text says we live in
Speaker 1: society that has been sold the concept that happiness is conditional.
Speaker 1: In order to be happy and fulfilled, you need nothing.
Speaker 1: When everyone has nothing, there will no longer be crime,
Speaker 1: wars or aggression. Stop rampant commercialism, global corporate domain greed,
Speaker 1: and be in conscious consumptions, conspicuous consumption by nothing. Every
Speaker 1: dollar spent on nothing is one last dollar spent on
Speaker 1: something that you don't need. This guy is high a lot. God,
Speaker 1: I hate him, but I just hate him. This is
Speaker 1: the kind of designer that a guy who you're mad
Speaker 1: you can't even know. No, it really there's there's words
Speaker 1: that I want to use that it It irritates the
Speaker 1: crap out of me because other people see this and
Speaker 1: think well, this is the way that designers are supposed
Speaker 1: to speak and artists are supposed to speak, and then
Speaker 1: they spout stuff and they have no idea what they're saying.
Speaker 1: It's like so many gag movies where you see the
Speaker 1: artists running around just saying that's so high minded and intelligent. Dude, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for so long with then, Yeah, that's what's ironic about
Speaker 1: this guy, as he was trying to sell the site
Speaker 1: for a million bucks and he's all it sounds like
Speaker 1: most of what he was trying to make himself had
Speaker 1: to be like liquid his website Liquid. There's all kinds
Speaker 1: of stuff like that on there, but liquid spell liquid
Speaker 1: for our listeners. Oh it's l y q y No,
Speaker 1: there's just the one it l y q i d Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well he's also got he had no Such, No dash
Speaker 1: such dot com, which is now actually a design site
Speaker 1: that's in French, so he obviously sold it, and it
Speaker 1: had at one point when I found it, I think
Speaker 1: it's from two thousand. I winned the archive the way
Speaker 1: back machine and went to No Such and guess what
Speaker 1: I found on it? Hell dot com in a mirror
Speaker 1: image of hell dot com. On that side, he has
Speaker 1: a lot of those sites. So from what I understand
Speaker 1: from like actual interviews with this guy, well, no, the
Speaker 1: members only portion of it was it was meant to
Speaker 1: be this like safe space for edgy artists who were
Speaker 1: trying to create art in a kind of contained atmosphere.
Speaker 1: They wanted to create web art, right art for the
Speaker 1: Internet community, but they wanted to be doing this kind
Speaker 1: of experimentation phase in a safe space where you're collaborating
Speaker 1: with other artists, which I don't know. They just didn't
Speaker 1: want us to the public to see their crap while
Speaker 1: it was still kind of like you know that big stage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. Um, there was a hack done of the
Speaker 1: site by a website called like one zero zero one
Speaker 1: zero zeries or one dot org and they basically like
Speaker 1: mirrored the whole thing and that was I would say
Speaker 1: it was like two thousand, I think nine ish is
Speaker 1: when this happened, and so it kind of I think
Speaker 1: facilitated the downfall of the hell dot com. It was
Speaker 1: just random, just random good night boobe, you know, I mean, um, so,
Speaker 1: I guess the real mystery here is then, is do
Speaker 1: we believe that that was really what was behind that
Speaker 1: members only log in or is there something else, because
Speaker 1: it also doesn't really totally and I know what I
Speaker 1: know exactly what he was going to say, but I'm
Speaker 1: say this anyways, it doesn't really account for all of
Speaker 1: the weird front end stuff. Steve now is going to say, well, Devon, yeah,
Speaker 1: it does because it's just somebody trying to be edgy, Devin.
Speaker 1: It does because it is somebody trying to hide the
Speaker 1: portal to their crappy friends website. Fair enough, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's the best way to hide something is to
Speaker 1: surrounded by other innocuous looking garbage, and people just go
Speaker 1: the heck of a lot of garbage. It could be
Speaker 1: so sort of like a virtual clearinghouse for al Quata operatives,
Speaker 1: you know, to exchange messages. I mean, frankly that but
Speaker 1: that's more inconspicuous. You are l problem. But that is
Speaker 1: the point, right, is that, like we don't really know
Speaker 1: because it could have been that that member's only portal
Speaker 1: was just a top layer for something else. Do I
Speaker 1: think that's true? No, hell no, I think that's dumb.
Speaker 1: But that is some thing that we can't say that
Speaker 1: there wasn't and there weren't more layers to this because
Speaker 1: as we can see even on what we think is
Speaker 1: the surface layer, there are more layers underneath that, between
Speaker 1: the surface layer and the members only layer, So who
Speaker 1: knows what is like even deeper than that. Again, I
Speaker 1: don't think so. I think it's just this guy trying
Speaker 1: to be like edgy and like on a lot of
Speaker 1: drugs and like that's fine. But if there was more there,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty damn sure that that hack that mirrored it
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine or whatever it was, we would
Speaker 1: have seen that stuff, because don't you get in And
Speaker 1: I will say the trick with that is that that
Speaker 1: hack was carried out by other net artists who may
Speaker 1: or may not have been associated and friends with some
Speaker 1: of the artists that were members of hell dot com.
Speaker 1: So it's this is a fake hack. Yeah, no, No,
Speaker 1: the one zero zero one hack could have been a
Speaker 1: way to drum up more support or interest or whatever.
Speaker 1: It sounds way too organized for this. I don't know
Speaker 1: that it is. I mean, a guy considering it very
Speaker 1: easily just make a couple of HTML pages a week
Speaker 1: and build this slowly convoluted website. But then to I mean,
Speaker 1: to to facilitate a fake hack on yourself and to
Speaker 1: be able to show it in such a way that
Speaker 1: people would believe it. I think that takes a lot
Speaker 1: of technical savvy that I don't see in the It
Speaker 1: was just a mirror. It was just a mirror of
Speaker 1: the site which he had been doing all over the place.
Speaker 1: It was just a mirror of the stuff without log in, right. Well,
Speaker 1: but they had gone through the log And that's what
Speaker 1: I mean is that it just I don't know it.
Speaker 1: It just seems above the ability of what I've seen
Speaker 1: here for him to have I guess all I'm saying
Speaker 1: is that really all that happened was this group said
Speaker 1: I understand. No, they just said they literally just said
Speaker 1: we got this because we hacked them. Um. They didn't
Speaker 1: say like, here's how we hacked into this, here's how
Speaker 1: we got this stuff. They were just like, well, we
Speaker 1: broke in and got it here it is. So it
Speaker 1: would have been really easy for him to just mirror that,
Speaker 1: remember the members only pages or whatever, and then have
Speaker 1: them say you know, and then you say, okay, now
Speaker 1: you guys say, well we hacked it, and that's all
Speaker 1: it is. I mean, she had been French connection and
Speaker 1: decided they do it on the internet. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: he'd been experimenting with mirroring sites. We've proof of that,
Speaker 1: So I don't know. I think a typical hack, it
Speaker 1: would be kind of proud of, like telling us all
Speaker 1: this techniques. Yeah, usually, but no, So I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think I think that hell dot Com is a
Speaker 1: silly mystery, and I don't know why we covered it,
Speaker 1: but there you go. You're missing a theory. What could
Speaker 1: it be? Satan only if Choppy helped. I'm sure Chippy's
Speaker 1: in the mix somewhere. But yeah, I mean that might
Speaker 1: explain the really bad coding. True. Yeah, I think you
Speaker 1: would think the Satan would have a web page, don't
Speaker 1: you think? I think it's Satan dot Com. It's Microsoft,
Speaker 1: but just kidding Microsoft, something like that, probably, yeah, century
Speaker 1: link dot Com, Yeah, Axfinity dot Com. Yeah, yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I I don't know. I think it's That's how I feel.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you guys feel about this mystery,
Speaker 1: but I don't I think it's kind of a non mystery. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was about to say, I don't think it's actually
Speaker 1: a mystery. I think that it's a tale. But here's
Speaker 1: what I will say is that I only came to
Speaker 1: the conclusion of it not being a mystery by doing
Speaker 1: a ton of research about it, you know what I mean? Mystery?
Speaker 1: So we really need to cancel this and do another mystery. Okay,
Speaker 1: so hold on, everybody will be right back. Hey guys,
Speaker 1: welcome to another episode of thank You. That would be
Speaker 1: a miserable. What else you got? That's it? Alright? Do
Speaker 1: you guys have any input and that stuff? I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna say hell a few more times. Hell No, I
Speaker 1: got nothing more? Great? What the hell have we been
Speaker 1: doing the whole time? Uh? So, if you want to
Speaker 1: see that logo and for whatever reason, it's not pulling
Speaker 1: into your feed, If you want to see some of
Speaker 1: the links that we have that we did research on
Speaker 1: um if you want to buy merch if you want
Speaker 1: to download the episodes, you can head to our website.
Speaker 1: That website is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. You can
Speaker 1: find us on social media. We've got the Facebook page
Speaker 1: and the group, so like the page, join the group. Uh.
Speaker 1: We have a Twitter which is Thinking Sideways, and we
Speaker 1: also have a subaudit which is Thinking Sideways Easy not
Speaker 1: as dead as it has been. We got almost fifty
Speaker 1: comments on the last post, so look at that it's
Speaker 1: pretty good. Um, you can you probably know where you're
Speaker 1: finding us, where you're streaming us, but you can find
Speaker 1: us on iTunes, you can find us on Stitcher, you
Speaker 1: can find Steve's nodding. You find us pretty much anywhere.
Speaker 1: If you can find us, and you, um, don't forget
Speaker 1: to subscribe, don't get to leave a comment and a
Speaker 1: rating as well. That really helps people find us, which
Speaker 1: is really helpful to us. That's a good idea. Yes, yes, please.
Speaker 1: And if you want to talk to us about our
Speaker 1: explicit use of the word hell in this episode hell
Speaker 1: would they want to do that? I don't know, man
Speaker 1: um or if you have any suggestions, comments, concerns, anything,
Speaker 1: you can send us an email. The email addresses Thinking
Speaker 1: Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. We will respond to
Speaker 1: every email, almost every email. Eventually. It's been taking us
Speaker 1: about a week, but how can I do it? A
Speaker 1: hell of a long time backed up right now, we're
Speaker 1: catching up. All of that having been said, I think
Speaker 1: we're going to get on out of here, get the
Speaker 1: hell out of here. Oh yeah, yeah, we'll see you
Speaker 1: in hell hell yeah. Hack