An “Internet
Rabbit Hole” is often something you just fall into without meaning to.
You’ll start with something completely innocent and after clicking endless
amounts of related links you’ll end up on the strange or scary end of the
internet. The best though is when you stumble on something you really didn’t
expect to.
Here’s a couple
“Rabbit Holes” some Reddit users found online. Hopefully you’ll find
them as interesting as we did.
1. Ksmathers
I once had my home
Linux server hacked while I was away on winter holiday. Logging in remotely
from my grandparents house I noticed that the server was behaving oddly, took a
look at the log files and found them truncated, so sent a shutdown command so I
could do forensics when I got home.
What I ended up finding really did feel like
swallowing the red pill. Someone had hacked the server using a recent sendmail
exploit and resold it to someone who was using it to host an ‘eggdrop’ IRC bot.
I logged into the IRC channel that it had been holding open and found a bunch
of people sending short messages like ‘CCs’, or ‘Root’.
About five minutes in a longer message comes along.
Some guy is annoyed with a trade he has made, someone gave him a bad set of
data and he wants to make his own data worthless in return before the buyer can
get full use of it.
So on my screen there is suddenly a splat of
information about some guy who lives in Texas, credit card, phone number,
street address, and the first guy is urging everyone to buy stuff as quickly as
possible before the credit limit is hit.
Feeling I was
fucked, I disconnected ASAP, left an anonymous phone message on said Texas
individual’s answering machine advising them to check their Visa charges, and
hoped that my lack of foresight in not setting up an IP proxy or anything to
hide my own identity wouldn’t have either the FBI or organized crime breathing
down my neck in a few days.
2. Mallio
https://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/
It’s a blog about
playing as homeless characters in the Sims. It’s long, and gets pretty weird at
times, and I periodically almost spit out my beverage while reading it.
3. Itsfish20
I found out I had a
stalker from high school when I was in community college and decided to Google
my name for some dumb reason. I don’t have a very common last name but there
are still a few other people out there with my first and last name.
I was like 10 pages deep in Google, place many do
not ever go to and I found an old Tripod site that had my name in the url
followed by one of my old AIM screen names. So I clicked it and was taken to a
very basic page that had a ton of pictures stolen from my Myspace and others
that had to have been taken without me knowing, thinks like me out working on
my car or on the trampoline with my siblings in our yard…
It was really weird
and I had no clue who it was until I scrolled all the way down and realized it
was the girl I dated for a few months in Spring of our Sophomore year…she had
a screen shot of a AIM conversation where I said I liked you way more than
others or something on it and she took that and ran with it…
4. Nixamus
The goddamned
Rock-a-Fire Explosion.
For those of you old enough to remember this,
before there was Chuck. E. Cheese… There was Showbiz Pizza.
Some mad “genius” in Tampa started “perfecting”
animatronics and creating characters for the birthday party celebrations…
Only to see his precious creations get bought out, stripped down and repurposed.
There are some people out there who spend
everything they make acquiring and maintaining these ancient monstrosities…
Going to far as to program them to play their favorite songs by hand.
Here they are doing Nine Inch Nails.
This is just the
tip of the iceberg. I’m sorry, everyone.
5. Imferguson
Early in the 90’s I reached a site on
the eastern coast of Newfoundland that simply read “You have reached the
end of the internet, turn around and go back.”
6. Giddeshan
The
Missing Germans. I read this all in one marathon session well into the wee hours.
Essentially it’s about a German family of four that were vacationing in the US
and disappeared in Death Valley. A search-and-rescue guy hears about it and
decides to try to solve the mystery.
7. Sexual–Predditor
This forum which is
dedicated to ‘baiting’ the Nigerian prince email scammers:
http://www.419eater.com/
8. Donutsareagirlsbff
Oh man, Number Stations are
incredibly creepy to me. Fascinating but creepy as hell.
‘A numbers station is a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of
formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed to intelligence officers
operating in foreign countries’ – Source
Edit: Meatcalculator posted a comment as
someone who worked on a numbers station, thought I’d add it in here.
person_from_nowherealso shared a
story their dad told them about hearing a numbers station from the USSR when he
was in the military.
Farlandan shared a
story told to him by his CIA father who ran a numbers station.
SoupPlox, is part of a
group that tracks active number stations! You can find out more info on their
website!
Turnersharkbitten, shared how
they stumbled onto a numbers station while stationed in Miami and his commander
pulled him aside the next day.
9. TheAndex24
For some reason, I find the Poles of
Inaccessibility super fascinating.
“A pole of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to
reach owing to its remoteness from geographical features that could provide
access”
For example, Point Nemo (the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility) is so remote that
if you were there and the International Space Station flew over you in orbit,
you would be closer to it than to any land on Earth.
edit: I realize that the ISS’s orbit is only ~205-270 miles above Earth. My
main point was that it’s still pretty crazy to me that if you were here, you’d
potentially be closer to an astronaut than to anyone on land. To put it in
another perspective, you’d be a little more than 1 Pluto away from the nearest
land. (Pluto’s diameter is 1,475 miles, the nearest land from Point Nemo is
1,670 miles)
10. NeverSmartEnough
Back in the late 90s Compaq was
shipping PCs with netbios sharing completely open. I learned that I can get
into people’s PCs by finding their IP while using Kazaa and Napster to look at
their MP3s.I found this one guy in San Diego and as usual I’m going through his
files, and I found a directory of child porno videos.A fucking collection. I
called the FBI and gave them his IP address. I never went searching in people’s
PCs again
11. Aragacalledpat
Wikipedia’s page on uncontacted tribes.
It’s fascinating to read about first encounters, how everyone reacts, the
ultimate outcome. Every linked page about specific tribes is like it’s own
mini-drama.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
12. FancyIsFancy
There’s this well known playlist on
youtube called “important videos”, it has about 300 videos that are
mostly short and stupidly funny
13. Former-Bishop
I was an active
Mormon and researching something for a meeting. I came across a website that
had great historical information and didn’t at first appear to be an
“anti-Mormon” site. I read that the Restoration of the Priesthood
doesn’t have an actual date and immediately I thought that was BS because since
I was a child I had read in Church publications all about the Restoration. I
could recite dates, names, places and what these great religious leaders were
thinking at the time. Yeah, about that…
This website showed strong evidence that it was all a lie, but I was sure they
were wrong so I set out to prove they had the wrong facts. I stared with the
Church’s publications, but dug deeper. I searched for source material on
college websites. I found journals and other writings on archive.org. I found
websites that pulled together information from a dozen sources and assembled it
in a way that was terrifying to read.
In 2-weeks of near constant searching I went from a faithful member to feeling
sick, crying and wanting to tear my own eyes out. Then came anger and that
feeling of betrayal. I spent a couple hours nearly every day for the next year
doing my best to prove everything wrong. I prayed, studied, fasted and in the
end I had to be spiritually honest — I had been lied to.
EDIT: I finally understand the statement “RIP Inbox”
I have been responded to dozens of comments – I am doing my best while
pretending to work. 🙂
EDIT 2: My marriage ended after we both found out the truth. After reflection,
we were not a good match. In the Mormon faith you don’t have sex prior to
marriage so you end up with 22 year olds that date, but don’t have sex. This
leads to getting married so you can have sex because having sex before marriage
keeps you out of the temple – where you are saved. So, your salvation is based
upon getting to the temple.
Without the fear of losing our eternal salvation and family – the marriage
crumbled.
14. Munninnu
The Editing Room. They adjust
movies’ scripts highlithing plotholes and bad acting. How they break down and
mock the stories is especially interesting if you have already seen the movie,
they usually notice much more than a casual moviegoers sees.
EDIT: since the site appears to have been hugged to death by reddit, you can
check the google cache by searching “The Editing Room + your
movie”: here The Phantom
Menace
