Pastebin, an Outlet of Choice for Digital Outlaws
BY Nick Judd | Monday, October 10 2011
On the occasion of its coming into regular use by Occupy Wall Street protesters, Pastebin, the site for uploading snippets of code or protest manifestos, got attention Sunday from the New York Times.
From the Times' Noam Cohen, interviewing Pastebin owner Jeroen Vader:
“The future is looking pretty bright as more and more people start using the site every day,” Mr. Vader wrote in an e-mail, which also said he preferred to communicate via e-mail since he has 10 other businesses to run. “Traffic has gone up about 400 percent since I bought the site.”
He said the site made its money from banner ads — a search for Occupy Wall Street, for example, comes with Google ads for various affiliated groups — and by selling “pro accounts” that offer special features.
Mr. Vader described himself as an entrepreneur who loved to create and improve Web sites. He has a very tolerant view of what can appear on Pastebin. He is quick to say that with thousands of news “pastes” in a day, he cannot be expected to check what goes up, but he says he responds if people ask for personal information about themselves — d0x, tech-speak for “documents” — to be taken down.
Mr. Vader says his instinct is to be inclusionary. “Usually we always remove DOX items, but this one got a lot of exposure and we usually don’t remove very popular items unless we get a direct removal request from the authorities, which hasn’t happened with the item in question,” he wrote in an e-mail.
As Cohen notes, Pastebin is a platform of choice for digital outlaws like members of Anonymous or groups that roam the Internet, breaking into — or just breaking — websites in search of lulz. Pastebin and its contemporaries are unique in how they create a platform for direct conversation with these types of people. How else, for example, could a hacker attacking one of the core means of secure communication on the Internet engage in an ongoing back-and-forth with his critics and commentators?