(Roughly) Daily

CIRCL, Luxembourg’s computer security incident response team, has published a dataset of 37,500 .onion website screenshots, a subset of which have been categorized by topic (e.g., “drugs-narcotics”, “extremism”, “finance”) and/or purpose (e.g., “forum”, “file-sharing”, “scam”)

Via Jeremy Singer-Vine’s fascinating Data is Plural.

[For more background see “WTF is Dark Web?,” whence the image above]

* James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology

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As we grab our flashlights, we might recall that it was on this date in 1979 that CompuServe launched the first consumer-oriented online information service, which they called MicroNET (and marketed via Radio Shack)– the first time a consumer had access to services such as e-mail.

The service was not initially favored internally within the business-oriented CompuServe, but as the service became a hit, they renamed it CompuServe Information Service, or CIS.  By the mid-1980’s CompuServe was the largest consumer information service in the world and half their revenue came from CIS.

In 1989 CompuServe connected its proprietary e-mail system to the Internet e-mail system, making it one of the first commercial Internet services.  But CompuServe did not compete well with America On-Line or independent Internet Service Providers in the 1990’s and rapidly lost its dominant market position.

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