Thinking Sideways: What the heck was hell.com?

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we haven't had a creepy mystery for you. Halloween Halloween week, month month. It's not a week, it's a month. It's for us, it's a month. It's actually like two months for us, kind of because we like record a month ahead and then yeah, it's pretty great. Actually, I've been in the Halloween spirit for while. The candies out. Yeah, I know, I'm gaining weight crazy. I've already eaten fifty pounds of it. We can tell um. So this week we're going to talk about a creepy Internet mystery actually,

and we're calling this one. What the heck is hell dot com? Was? Was? Was um? And Bradford suggested this mystery a while ago, one of our first Internet mystery and was one of our first Internet mysteries to be suggested. And I guess we'll just want to hop right into it. Yeah, not what the hell? Yeah yeah, that's gonna happen all night long, but I'm gonna miss it a lot. Yeah, So, actually, I guess that's fair. Hell. The word hell, I guess

maybe is inappropriate for some people. It was when I was growing up, we weren't allowed to say fold, So I don't know if that's a thing for you to drop heck in frequently. Okay, So hell dot com Okay. From to two thousand nine, hell dot com was, I just guess. It was described as a quote private parallel web, unquote members only, invite only website. From to ninety eight, hell dot com averaged a million hits per month despite having no content, not being listed on any directory or

nor having been linked anywhere. And interesting it is. And here's what I'll say. I'll remind our listeners who or maybe inform them. For those of you who don't know, Google wasn't really like a thing back then. You didn't like search as much. So the way you found cool interesting things is you put you just typed random U r L s in. Yes, search engines were not not really so people were just going head, let's see if

say has a website. I mean, yeah, I mean, so that was probably a big reason why it got so many hits, not because people were saying, oh, have you heard about this hell dot com site, even though the people who owned it would like you to believe that it was because people are so and that's the reason that domains were so utterly valuable in the beginning. I don't know, I've I've ordered this book. I'm waiting forward

to arrive. But have you guys heard the whole story behind sex dot com Because it, of course, you know, if somebody wants porn, like what am I going to look up, let's try sex dot com. And it was, you know, a portal to a whole bunch of other sites that were porn sites. And there's this huge, crazy legal battle that went around for I don't know, ten or fifteen years something like that around it. And wait for the book. I've heard the story. It's interesting. I

want to get more details on it. But but that's why things like this, such simple u r l s were so valuable because they're what you couldn't just say I want to find fuzzy fuzzy puppies and then go to the dog Lover's portal r US. You had to tight you to go fuzzy puppy dot com. I mean, that's exactly what you would do. Yeah, puppy dot com. Yeah, because he was dot com. He was he was a bear dot com. Yeah. Even today, certain no man names are still kind of valuable. But yeah, sex dot com.

I bet that was what did itself or eventually. Uh's that's a hard thing to answer because the legal battles. But when I get done to the book, I'll let you borrow it. It's perfect anyway, back to dot dot hell, yeah, back to hell. The site is best viewed through the way Back Machine, which we love, and if you don't know what it is, you can google it the Internet Archives. It is the Internet Archives. So basically what this is give them money, by the way. Yeah, we donate, you know,

to the sources that we love. That's something that we don't really talk about a whole lot, but we do. And this like if anything you know, again, this is like totally unsolicited, but if you're going to pay for anything on the Internet, you should donate to Wikipedia, and you should donate to the Internet Archive. So the Internet Archive actually and also but the Internet Archive for those of you who don't know basically takes a snapshot and

it doesn't do this independently. People have to tell it to do this. Um it's a crawler, but somebody has to say, hey, come crawl this site. But basically on the day and time that somebody says come crawl this site, they'll come do what's called crawl this site, which basically is I'm so sorry for those of you who know what this is. I'm trying to explain it in like the layman ist terms. It's they basically take like a snapshot at that moment of the site, but it remains interacted.

It's a functional screen capture. Yeah, basically of what it looks like on that day as moment as best as can. Yeah, because we we talked about this in um no, there was one another one that we did recently where had all the images? Oh that's the two thousand images were missing. Yeah, so it doesn't like see if I if it takes a snapshot of a web page and there's a bunch of thumbnails and I click on the thumbnails, that's not going to open up a bigger version of that picture. Right,

It might it depends, may depends. Maybe maybe I don't understand why it captures some images and others. I think it probably it captures them if they're still hosted in the same place. Oh, that's a good point. So videos as well. No, no, because I know the octroy stuff was hosted on it. But this is this doesn't matter, But well it a little bit does in the context of this and that there's some content that you can

still see in some content you can't see. And I think a lot of it is because it doesn't link to certain places anymore. But um, but you're right, that doesn't matter too terribly much. But so that's the like the dumbest down version I can say of what the way back machine does. We called the way back machine. It's the Internet archive. They call it the Yeah yeah. So if you do or if you you know, I want to go look at this site later, you can

do it right now. You can just go to any browser and type in hell dot com and it will take you to a website that is like a it's just like a weird link to a bunch of different religious websites. Well I don't remember which one now that we're talking about it, of course I can't remember it. But it's an organization that has strong religious ties purchased it so that it couldn't be used for but it redirects to like a bunch of different if I remember correctly,

because I don't. Frankly, I don't spend a lot of time on this one page because it's not really that interesting to me. But I think it had links to like Christianity websites and Buddhism websites and spirituality websites. But I could be totally mistaken. Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. It's funny is that somebody has bought the domain. They own it. They bought it for a decent amount of money. But I love the banner on the top

this domain is we're going to talk about that. Yeah, but yeah, it is all links to I thought it was only one religious Buddhism, Catholic christ Christianity church. Yeah, there's religious terms and then the hot linked to other places. So you can. But like I said, if you want to actually so if you go to that, you'll you will find yourself saying well, what is so weird about this website? It's not that they sold it. It's gone to help. Yeah, So if you do decide to go

and check it out, through the way back machine. I recommend making your first stop at February six, as long as flashing things don't bother you if you're an epileptic. In other words, yeah it could or just you don't even have to be epileptic, but sometimes you just get

you know, and it's red and black flashing. So site sure is, Yeah, we're going to do that thing that everybody loves that we do when we talk about Internet mysteries, and we're literally just going to sit in a room, the three of us, and talk about what things looked like at certain times. Well, the next thing is, if you research hell dot com, you will find multiple versions of this same list because it's I mean, it's really it's a pretty straightforward Yeah, yeah, it's the list. It's

what it looks like. It's not like there's a lot of editorial. I think to be done with a few things that Steve's gonna throw in because he found some interesting stuff. Because I'm obsessive, I can't help it. That's true. I think also, you don't actually work. I think you just get paid to go sit in a room and work on the podcast. He's got a job where I think it just you can slack all the time and work on podcast issues. I'm like you and me, shut it. Do not let my job know that I yeah, I

have spare time. Your boss listen to this or can we get his phone number? Okay? Hell? Yeah, alright, fine, it's a very thinly guarded secret. Okay, probably HR listens to it, though, So let's go ahead and get in to this. That's why they're always sending me new work. Yeah, I'm gonna start going through here. In hell dot com pretty much just displayed like it was just a warning landing page. It just said you're not invited here, go away. Then,

is that when it redirected you? It did, that's when the redirect was put into place, right, one of one of the many Okay, hell dot com displayed a black page with a single small link in the center. We're just gonna call links. We're gonna say that links were called a thing, right, and that just means that's what the text was for the link. Uh, And so this link was called that in the first kind of iteration

of this. This this page went through a lot of iterations. Yeah, it was constantly changing, which is why we can talk about it a little bit. But the first one just had a like an image on the index page and in um there was a logo later that we'll talk about when that appeared and what happened there. But if you hit the image, it took you to a page that had just three links. Link one was called no access if so you clicked on that link and it would take you to a page. No, it didn't call

you a loser. Yeah, access just said no access. UM. No, Actually that's not what it did. It would take you to black background page with with um what we're going to call the hell dot com like logo, which is probably the image that we're going to use for this thing. So you know, it's whatever your episode. A white circle with a white arrow that comes from the top of the circle, points downwards through the body of the circle, but doesn't penetrate the lower radius, so it's just it's

encapsulated in that circle. It's just the direction sign. Yeah, here's where you want to get that straight ahead, the thing that you see on road signs all the time. Rotate that are put a circle around it. There's your logo. Yeah, that's probably actually how they made it. Oh no, I know how they made it. It wasn't even so. If you clicked on the logo, it took you to a disclaimer page and um, there was a little bit of writing on that. It was in red text, and it said,

this is a parallel web. There is no public access. The waiting list is approximately eighteen to twenty two months. Below that, there were two links. One that was called apply and one that was called don't. If you clicked the apply one, you put in your email address to receive an email, and the emails that you got reportedly just asked for payment, and that was pretty It varied in the amounts. It sounded like zek did, and we'll talk about the amounts. It gets more specific in a

little bit. I couldn't remember. I knew on the page you did. I could remember if the emails themselves. I think the emails did as well. Yeah, that would make sense that one would rise in parallel with the other. If you hit the don't link, it just closed the window for you, which was I mean, that's not the most publicly available coding in nine. I mean, it's not you,

it's not crazy. They complicated. They can make a closed command. Yeah, but it's not like you know these days, people kind of know how to do like a lot of different things. It's more widely, uh wide, more widespread knowledge on how to do some coding stuff. This is like operate, that's true. Who they it was a web browser. I used to get my email all of my Internet access through them. To remember AOL. I liked net scout where you only logged onto the internet when it was going to send

your emails. Really yeah, I mean you could open up a browser, but their email writer it wouldn't even log you on. It would log. It would dial up it download all your emails and then get off the internet. And then you would you know, do all of your responding and you'd hit send a bunch of times, and you know, it would say okay. They'd say, okay, we're sending this. Of course we are. And then when you go like log off, it would log. It would dial back on and send all of your stuff and then

shut down. It's a good way to grow up, guys. It's a good way internet all right back to hell dot com. So you remember there were three links on that page with the image. So one of them was no access, one of them was redemption. If you hit redemption, it took you to a page that had some black some it was black background with red text. All of this is red text, your favorite kind of website. I like the white text even more, but yeah, it's close second, and this would give you a red text link that

was called Soul Redemption Program. This link sent you then to questions page, and the questions page was you can find videos of this online. It was kind of intense. Basically, it was just this little flash animation where it would be black and it would look like you were just on another black page, but it turned out it was actually flash animation and a bunch of questions would just do you ever remember like a flying toasters? Yeah, where

it just kind of fly past you. So it was just all these questions, questions like what they'd be like, um, do you want answers? Yeah? Or like is your soul prepared? Or what the hell is hell dot com? Yeah? I mean it was like it was these like intentionally mysteriously mystical kind of vague things. So it'd all it'd fly you through this field of questions and you could click on one of the any of them, so you could flick click on the flash animation. Is really what was

going on but that's neither here nor there. It basically like that would provide an answer, So the link would give you, um, it would just take you to a payment page, no matter what. No yeah, no matter what, no matter There was no answer. You just clicked on a link. You just click on a link, so we take you to a payment page. And this payment pages was set up similarly to the way that the email situation was. When they asked you for payment, there was a warning that said, no, this is real, we will

take your money. We really really are going to take your money, and the user could fill out a form to donate any amount from ranging from ten to ten thousand dollars. And I believe it was in increments that just added a zero every time, is my understanding of it. It wasn't like you can do do like dollars. It was like ten or a hundred, or a thousand or ten thousand. Well later they changed it to you could donate twenty two hundred or two thousand, but two hundred

dollars or two thousands, on and on and on. No, I think two thousand was the cap right. Well, but you the way you said it sounds like two d and it was clarifying it was twenty dollars or two hundred dollars or two thousand dollars. Oh yeah, sorry, you ran that together quite quickly. But I don't listen to myself talk just like everybody. But I would love to see what kind of donations they got. Yeah, and then

that third link, because remember there's three links. Um, the third one was search, and search was added a little bit later. The actual functionality of that page. It's my understanding that at first that link didn't really do very much like most of the links. Yeah, so you click on the search link was there, but it didn't. What was added was the part that actually did something useful. Yeah, and that was added in two thousand and six. But

Steve found something in two thousand five. So let's talk about that first and then we can talk about two six. Either go canonically, But do you think that it's better for me to just talk about what was add in two thousand and six. Finish the search and then let's talk about it. I think it's going to be confusing to break up search. Okay, search is a long one.

Get ready. On February eight, two thousand and six, is when we are able to pinpoint this again through the way back when a capture it, it actually has a ton of captures kind of really starting in going forward. How often do you think every couple of weeks more than that, I would say there's a month between them, and sometimes there's it's two or three in a day. Yeah,

it's pretty intense. But so they were able to actually kind of pinpoint because this this was in a period where it was being taken a couple of times a day. So on February eighth, two thousand, sixteen, no two thousand and six, not sixteen. This the search link actually linked to a search page, which was kind of a new

thing though. I mean I read some accounts from people who were talking about poking around hell dot com and they said this was the first time that they had seen because it was a Google search box, that they had seen a Google search box on a website. It seems ubiquitous now there's search function everywhere on every website. But that was kind of a new It was actually a novel concept at that point, and there was a lot of work. You had to add a plug in.

It was like a ton of work to get this and it usually didn't work very well, but it did have this Google search box on the search page, or at least something that looked like it was literally powered by Google. It had the like when you you still can do it. You can go and hit search and it takes you to a Google site. So it will take you to a Google site that just has search. It just returns Google results for everything except for these

certain keywords. And the keywords aren't always I don't think that we know all of them, frankly a couple of them. One of them, you could type in redemption and it would link you back to that questions page that we're talking about that had all the questions flying. You could search hell and you would be linked to the links page, which was just a page that had those three links on it. Again, oh that, or you could do answer

and I wish the full disclosure. I was. I went through the way back machine and saw most of these pages for myself, but this one was broken for me, which was kind of a bummer. I was, yeah, and I even like I was going through the source code. I was like, God, it's gotta be somewhere it's linked

to this video. I wanted to see what was happening here. Yeah, so when you typed an answer, the link would well, you would hit answer and hit search and it would lead to a picture of a bald naked woman falling through darkness. And then, after I don't know how long, just a couple of seconds, I think, but you know, definitely not more than thirty seconds, you to be sent to this site called signa noir dot com. Hey, I'm not the only one who had problems with that word

it week. I did it way better than you did, though. Um and here I will also pause to say, unfortunately, signa noir dot com whoever programmed that site did that thing that I find really really really heck and annoying, and that is they implemented no robots text in their page code, which means that the way back machine can't crawl it, which means I don't have a way to

see what that page looked like at that time. This is the same thing that some websites do to keep their content private so that Google can't crawl them and return that stuff in results, at least in the beginning. So it's it's a it was a common tool then as well as now. We accidentally had that in the very beginning Wikipedia does it. Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure that Wikipedia does it. You can't you have to

go through their revision history. You can't say what did this I look like at that time, which makes sense because it's constantly evolving and that's fine. But yeah, there are some websites that have this like no robots crawler thing, and unfortunately they did implement that, um and clear for everybody that's that's the text. What you see has been distorted and it's all kinds of you know, is that what No, No, it cannot pull a copy of the website. The code tells the robot to go away, and being

a little robot, it goes away. It doesn't take any pictures, Okay, right, So basically what will happen is you'll type the some U R L into the way back machine and it'll come up with a little thing. It'll like reload the page and it will say, um, we can't show you these results because of no robots dot htm or whatever to dot tst or whatever it is. So that's bummer.

But I do understand from some people that apparently that site was basically the same format as hell dot com and and acted as a portfolio for a guy by the name of Kenneth Arnson, and don't worry, we will talk about ken Arnest Arniston. Arnist is the right way to say. We'll talk about dear Kenneth in a in a little he is that sounds like a bad seventies novel, Dear Kenneth. It sounds like a bad song. But apparently he's described as a conceptual artist who uses photography as

parts of part of his process. I'm not going to read this whole thing. Yeah. According to Kenneth's personal site, which again we'll talk on a little bit, he is the CEO and founder of the Parallel Network and um, the Parallel Network of I can't say een kean Noir Yeah, and hell dot com, which is considered to be an enigma of the Web according to the Enigma of the Web, the you're right, the enigma. Excuse me, So that's what

happened when you went to search. So now for real is we're going to talk about Steve wanted to bring something up, okay for the class. Well, I mean we talked about this offline. But one of the most annoying things about this website, even when you pull it through the Internet archive is it had a redirect built into it, and currently in the archive, it redirects you away from itself in twenty seconds. It used to do two minutes, right right, So why it's seconds. It's bleeping annoying to

try and find anything. But I went through it and was just dinking around and I found a couple of things. There's a page in two thousand five that I got myself into, and it was the link was locations, and I didn't write down the date in two thousand and five. Unfortunately. I went back to try and find it. But of course it's just such a rabbit hole, especially when it's redirecting you every twenty second. But what it did is

it popped. It threw up a pop up screen or pop up window, i should say, and before I closed it, because the content in the page was kind of nil, it wasn't even enough for me to note it. I think it's probably just the same stuff i'd seen before the logo. But what I did notice is the header in the window, you know where it'll say blah blah blah, whatever text they want there. It had written in it for one, the letter N zero one a space seven three, the letter W five two, and I was like, well,

that sounds like a set of coordinates. So I went into Google Earth or Google Maps, I can't remember which one it was, and I happened to still have it was Google Earth because I happened to still have up Japan Tokyo from last week's episode, and I entered it and it returned a location in Tokyo, and I thought, well, what the deuce, that's really weird, and so I hit the you know, go to my home button and so it went back to my neighborhood and I typed in

that location again and it found a location in Portland. And then I'm going, well this is this is So I was like, okay, what's a major city that people wouldn't think of it. I just typed a New Delhi with the New Delhi, India put in those coordinates once I was in New Delhi and it found a site.

It's really really crazy. As long as you you spaced it so that it was the two digits, the alpha character and then two digits and then a physical space between that and the next set of numbers and the letter, it always takes you somewhere. So it's like, maybe perhaps the not to degrees, but just the minutes and seconds maybe I don't know. I mean, it's it's really it was very strange, and I was I kept playing with it, but I couldn't find a rhyme or reason for what

the hell it was doing. It's interesting. Yeah, so this, this is this was one of the few things where I was like, I found something. Damn, I don't know what it is in this story. Yeah, but it's super interesting and we will definitely talk about that in theories a little bit. Man, I'm gonna have to go out and look on Google maps so I can find Yeah, you are okay, well, continuing on, In two thousand and ten, hell dot com featured that original logo once again, which

did lead to that kind of star field effect. Um. They describe it as like a holographic logo basically, so like an updated logo. Huh Is that that where it seems to shift in space and change colors? Is that That's why I'm doing this, just going yeah, like this it had and it apparently had it that starfield behind it. I'm doing a lot of gesticulating toward yeah, and no

it didn't. It wasn't. With the questions this time, It was red dots that apparently would um if you put your mouth over it, like covered one with your little cursor, it would play a sound, a tone, a tone if you could almost make varying musical tones by going over bunches of them. There's a lot of websites like that now. But yeah, I bet if you played this specific tune might take you somewhere like kind of cool. Yeah, maybe

that's how you got into the special secret site. Well there was at the bottom of that page there was a log in feature, so probably that log in feature is how you got into this. Hey call me crazy. The idea that the special the special Illuminati level for the extra level, y, yeah, they probably could use that play a little tune. I found a series this similar set of dots in two thousand five or six as well, interesting,

which was another flash movie. And it was six dots and they were set up in a circle and then a circle was actually drawn on top of them, and they would fade out and it would all get smaller and smaller and disappear into space. So it was like two or I think it was three or four times. It was large. It was again in a pop up window. It love pop up windows and and it would it would drop, drop, drop, and then repeat to the I

didn't size, I didn't experience that. I only found it once and I happen to find it today when I was looking for That's interesting. I didn't know that there were some common themes, very simple geometric themes. Yeah, I think there were. So if you went to the log in feature at the bottom of the page, basically, if you put incorrect information in, or if you even just waited too long, because that was apparently a thing. I

don't know. This website seems to have a big obsession with time, like if you don't if you you know, if you're just chilling there, like it's going to redirect you. So if it took you too long to log in, or you put incorrect information, and it would take you to back to that search page where it was just the search and then Steve found something else in two

thousand ten. Is that true? Yeah, So if you go to March and again, it pops up a window and I don't remember which link I clicked on because there's three of them, so of course I can't remember it. Would it brought up a pop up and this time in that header in the top of your browser, you know the bar on your keyboards, or there's the forward slash, and then if you hold shift, it's got the very

vertical bar. Okay, so that bar is in that area, but it's again set there's it's there's two bars and a space and then five bars in a space, three bars of space, four bars of space at a single bar. So I just simply converted that to numbers and dropped them into the search field, because it comes out to five one. If if you type that into the search field that's available, it takes you to a new page which has a kind which has got this humongous thing

written about hell dot com. I copy and pasted the text because I could not read it in black and white, and I dropped it into word and it didn't have any carriage returns between the paragraphs anymore. And it was twenty five pages long. Wow, did you read it all? No? I read like the first paragraph for two and then went, wait, how long is this? Oh god, no, I give up. What did the first couple of paragraphs talk about? It was all about what hell dot com was, and I

don't know it was. It was weird, It was hard to follow. What did it say? It was several days ago. I don't remember exactly what it said. It was really hard for me. It's just like, I don't get it. It was to a degree it almost felt like it was some existential text about hell and blah blah blah. And I think it might have been right after the purchase date. I think that's when that might have gone in. Okay,

excusally when people are more excited about their websites. Yeah, okay, Well that again is like this super weird and interesting. I know there are lots of things like that. I mean to be you know, to be honest with you, Like I said, I tried to go through and look at at least one capture on every day, but I frankly didn't get a chance to go through and look at like the source code of every single day, or even every post every or every crawl every day. So

I'm certain that I missed stuff. I know, it's crazy, right that in the whole twenty second redirect that kind of amazingly, I was, honestly, So, I mean, you guys know this that my fiance has been like doing coding stuff recently, and so I was sitting on the couch on my computer, and I was like, I had the source code window up and I was just like sitting there and it kept redirecting me, and I was like duh, and he was like what And I was like, I'm

just looking at cold stuff and it's just messing with me. And he was like, oh, let me take a look at it. And it took him one redirect and he was like, I'm not looking at this sea. That's about right. What was written in just regular there was there was nothing. There's some jobs script on there too. Yeah. I mean it wasn't anything outlandish or typical of the time. It was just standard. Yeah. So in two thousand eleven, the main Hell dot com was disabled as far as we

can tell. It just had a blank white screen that showed. And then in later in two thousand eleven is when we got to see this um the first redirect the website. You would do Hell dot com and it would just automatically redirect you to the Gospel Media Network, which is a Christian religious site, which is probably why you thought that's what it redirected to. Currently it's not. It doesn't do that anymore, but there you have it. So that's the description of I don't know when, Frankly, to be

honest with you, I don't know when. After that it became the site that it is today because it's interesting anymore. Yeah, the magic was gone, gone, totally gone. So nothing none of the I mean, it's weird, but none of this is really creepy yet, right the hell out of me? Is it? No? Not really? You better? You better? You better amp this up? Right? It amp it up? Are you guys? Right? So the creepy factor comes from Reddit user named I'm going to say viln X. Yeah, that's

how I want to say it too. When this person wrote um an account of their experience trying to gain access to the kind of inner workings of hell dot com, because if I wasn't clear enough, there was a member's only log in portion of this website supposedly, and according to xylen X, there was. And I want to talk about this experience because it's this firsthand account of like what happened when um he tried to access it nefariously.

So the story basically starts out describing the website in like way less detail than we just liked it for the last forty minutes basically said that it had a flashy front end but really very little to it, which is accurate. Um. And then viln X says that he decided to poke around for like who knows why in the root source code, and that's when things started to get a bit crazy through a series of kind of

techno babble and back doors. I'm not going to bother to describe why he apparently got access to the member part of the site. And I'm gonna have Joe read some excerpts from this um, this, this um kind of rehashing. Yes, please, here's ziln X. We'll be put on my xylin x voice here. Most of the pages seem to be strange avant garde art presentations, some were videos, and others were

rather well designed web pages. Looking back, some of the pages looked a lot like what we now call web two point oh In two thousand five, it looked almost futuristic as I watched a slide show set to industrial techno, where each slide showed a different children's book that have been photoshop to have a perverted title. Some examples would be good Night, Boob and everybody. So I switched windows

to look at the source code unquote. So he was able to find a link that looked familiar from like his original pokings around, but when he clicked it, he it took him back to the same page that he had just been on. So he basically what happens is he figures, okay, well my website isn't working properly, and we've all experienced this before. You have to reload a

page because it's just not quite working particularly all. But he reset his whole set up and then loaded up this thing called a brute Force application, which is basically a program that we'll just try thousands and thousands of user name and password combinations until it gets in. It's brute Force. It's very dumb, it's very slow, but it's very effective because eventually it is going to find it. It's gonna find something. Make it take a thousand years,

but eventually that's true. Usually we can with the password, password, and the ord. I mean, you would be surprised how often that happens, unfortunately, But so basically basically what happens is he does is um he does gain access to the members only site again through this brute Force application.

After I think he said it took a couple hours, but he said that he found some more information about this collective of artists, some of whom are pretty famous today, who were reportedly just working on kind of high concept programs. But after just like a couple of minutes of poking around, his log in credentials that he had been basically that he had spoofed got banned. So he was kicked out of the members only part it is. So he kind of continues on to start describing what I would say.

Where we get pretty creepy, Joe, do you want to read some stuff? Yeah? Sure, Now this is where it gets odd. Out of nowhere, my browser history, download history, book marks, and several other common features of my browser had been completely wiped. Moreover, in my roommate was shouting from the other room because his computer had suffered the same faith I assumed it was a text savvy siss op that hacked me to make a point or something.

So he grabs his laptop and goes down to the local coffee shop to use their WiFi because it seems like the systems operator, which is what sissop is, had fled to his IP. Basically, you can ban an IP from a website and say, if this anybody logging on from this, I p cannot gain up that work the nanny programs do. So he worked on getting back in and actually did get back in. But apparently this time when he threw that brute force application again got back

into the members only site, it actually looked different. Joe. The page I landed I was nothing more than a flash video in the center of a black background. The video that followed was gruesome on the level I had not yet seen. I scoff at the Pain series and most and most shock sites are boring to me. I can't even boast that by this point Screamers didn't even make me jump unlist all these gruesome images and video clips of what can only be described as horrific crimes

against humanity, some red text slowly came into focus. Quote those who see kale are desk and to find it unquote. I closed my laptop and headed home. It was getting late, and I figured I could take another crack at it in the morning. On the way back, I walked past the church signists said quote those who seek hell are destined to find it unquote. When I got home, I

hopped on my desktop and logged into a game. As I ran around, killing mythical creatures and chatting with other players at GM noted for typing and red text typed quote those who seek hell are destined to find it unquote. I asked the GM if he hadn't spend any time on hell dot com recently, and within a few minutes, I was bammed from the game for using an appropriate language.

With little else to entertain myself, I want to sleep. Well, that's a that's a weird series of coincidental encounters there. Huh yeah, that's pretty creepy to me. That would make me go lock my doors. I agree. So apparently the next morning, are in trepid hackers awoke into a knock at the door and apparently the system operator for hell dot com had reported the I P for unlawful access to Hell dot com. So xyln X continues. Basically, he said it was a like a fed. He thought, I

don't really know. UM apparently confiscated the desktop, which is what the original hack had been done on. And apparently as this guy walked out the door, he turned around and said, careful kids, those who go looking for hell tend to find it. This course freaks him out. It freaked me out, frankly if this happened. So he grabbed his laptop and Google's those who go looking for help find it, uh, those who see Keller destined to find it, and claims that he wasn't able to find any results

on Google. And he can see that. You know, like on any given time, any given date, any any time that you google this, there should be a ton of results, thousands and thousands and thus maybe millions of results. But apparently he says that didn't happen in this instance, which is kind of bummer. So he basically was like, you know what, I'm done. I'm walking away from this whole thing. Did you ever get his desktop back from the feed?

I don't think so. No. But reportedly after a couple of years he moved a couple of times, and in the morning of the writing of this post, which is kind of what spurred a lot of people to think this website was like extra creepy, he got a certified letter via the ups two from an address in Nevada. Inside this certified letter was a letter with a single phrase written in red. I bet you can guess what it is. I like red ink. Really this page left

intentionally blank? Okay, no, no, no, wait wait I misread that. Okay, those who see kel are destined to find it. He claims he has moved six times to between the hack and getting this package. So there you go. That's pretty Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. And on the bottom of the letter it was signed LCF Was that Lucifer? Probably? Yeah, probably, and said psc you soon do do do do do do? No creepy Okay, I think it's creepy. Well, it's still alive,

he is. I spoke with him. Yeah. Actually, that's a great segue, um, because we're going to talk about theories in a minute, but first, let's take a break. It's white and fluffy and drifts about so freely. It's red and sticky and flow so freely. A little bit of this cold substance gets people's attention. A little bit of this hot substance gets people's attention. Small amount of this crystalline material is quaint. Large amounts are deadly. Small amounts

of this HEBA glowin based fluid is an annoyance. Large amounts are deadly. What does this have to do with this week's sponsor? What is this all about, Well, if you haven't guessed it by now, it's about snow and blood, two things that you're guaranteed to see in the movie The Snowman, based on the worldwide best seller by Joe Nesbo, The Snowman tells the story of two detectives investigating a sociopath who strikes his victims during the first snowfall of winter.

The Snowman in theaters starting October two thousand seventeen. Go say it and get scared, and we're back. Let's talk about theories. Yeah, so, our first theory is that hell dot com was actually hiding a secret shadow organization that I don't know, maybe it was like Satan worshippers or

Illuminati or I don't really know. I've never really seen this like totally flushed out a whole lot as to like who it might be, just that it might be hiding something people like on Reddit that are like, you know, saying this, or there are people like all over the play saying this job really okay? Well, and I mean even in its own description and I'm looking for the sentence right now, it called itself a private parallel web.

I mean, whoever created hell dot com was saying, I've got something else going on, and you don't get in unless you apply for membership and pay me a boatload of money and your own parallel web and everything I can. Yeah, of course you know were there. I mean maybe we don't know. I mean nobody has ever said I was a member of the Private Parallel Web the p p P. That's not technically not true, but we'll talk about that in a little bit part of another theory. Um, I

was wondering about the private Parallel Web. Does that mean that you and your many of the members all owned servers and so it's like totally separate servers from the rest of the web, even or its own regular service that are part of the regular web. Also, it would be its own a dedicated server or server set, much like you know at one point we had our own server when we overbought at one point, UM, so we

that server was us, nobody else was on it. So that's what they would have, is all of their stuff would be contained in that one box or a series of boxes that nobody else's info was housed on. That's it wouldn't be it wouldn't be like what's the one with the ghost Rat that you did devon What is that? Um? Remember that one? I do, But I don't remember what you're talking about ghost Rat. But they the farious program

that got a system. But but it was talked about how it was on all these separate servers and its spidered out or spider webbed out. That would be different than this. This sounds like it would have been all contained a very well, I mean maybe, But the point is it was a private one and you had to be able to have the key to get in. Yeah. What was the name of that stupid story? You're killing me here? It was ghost Rat? It was ghost right, Okay,

of the virus or something? Okay. For some reason, I thought the name of the story was not I had totally forgotten about that one. Have a weird memory for these stories. I can't remember what I need to do tomorrow, which is why I have to do list, but I can remember. I also love that you hate these stories but you still remember all of them. It's my favorite that yea. So I will say, um, there was actually a member only part of this. Nobody has come out and said yes and this is what was on it.

We'll totally come out the really the big question is is do you believe the creator of hell dot com or do you think that the creator was hiding something else. So we'll talk about this, but first I do want to mention that they're there. Genuinely was amazed in the root directory, and that was intentionally designed, and apparently it was unpleasant. Like we've said, we were trying to view the source code and it was just like, nope, your

twenty seconds is up, get out. So amazed, you mean, it's like just a huge maze of subdirectories and sub sub subdirector loop back on it themselves. Like remember the October or whatever two thousand eleven one, It had a couple of those pages that if you paid attention to

where it was directing you, you were just going. There was pages with with one, two and three or something like that, and you would type three, and it would bring you back to three page two, and then three page three, and then three page four, and there's an easier way to one, and it would just keep looping you around. There's an easier way to describe that, and that's that like literally, if you type the wrong thing into the search box, it would just take you back

to the landing page. Like that's a search that it was the wrong thing, so that would be frustrating. It sounds like some voicemail trees have been in Yeah right, yeah, um it is. But it is, like I said, it's my understanding that the creator of the site did that on purpose to deter people like xylan x, to have, you know, keep them from hacking site, which makes sense to me. The next theory, which we're just going to talk about. So what was the name of that theory

that we just finished. It's a shadow organization. We're just preparing people, I think, because really we're going to talk about what I probably is and then at the end of this will loop back around like a maze of a root directory and um, we'll just say, like we have to. Then you just have to decide if you believe that this is what it was or not. Okay, So what's theery Number two? The reality just kidding the blue pill Um, it was just art. That's all it was.

That's that's all the river was. It was just an art project. And the whole thing wasn't an art project. It was I guess to gain mystique around it. But the private server, the parallel web was just a place for net web net netweb net art net artists. This is the word. It was a whatever. Uh No, it was like for modern artists who were trying to explore the capabilities of doing web based art. So it was a modern deviant art. Yeah, well like an old deviant art.

But like with real Sorry I do not need to offend anyone, but with real artists, I find a lot of good stuff, and there's some really good stuff on there. Yeah, but there is definitely there is the full spectrum. So um, I'm just gonna go ahead and like burst everyone's bubble here. I spoke was island x on Reddit as previously mentioned um. For full disclosure, it is on the subreddit no Sleep, which is um fiction. It can be fiction. It's not a requirement that it be, but it's scary stories. It's

scary stories, so it can be true. It can be fiction. Man. I think grinning Man was let's not meet okay, but he's also on no Sleep. But it doesn't really matter anyway. Um. I did speak with island x uh and he he said that eight percent of that story is fiction. He wasn't willing to concede. I said, I think it's and he was like eighty percent, and I was like, all right, fine, yeah,

I could tell that was at least mostly fiction. When when he says that he does all this and the very next morning a FED shows up at his door, It's like, I'm sorry, you know, the Feds don't move that fast, dude. I I we cut out this part because I didn't want to like totally give it away immediately. But when he like grabbed his laptop, he says, he grabbed his laptop out of the false bottom of his desk, and I was like, no, you didn't you This is

this is that's not real. But maybe it is. I don't know, maybe you have your weird I don't know, but he did just totally was like happy to admit, yes, percent of it is fiction and worth the read. It's really well written. It's fun. What I'm curious about, though, did so he got into it, noodled around, did he actually did the part where the sissop deleted his browser history and all that stuff that that actually happened. That didn't correct me if I'm wrong, But he didn't actually

say is it he or she? By the way, I confirmed that's fine. He didn't actually say which parts were fictions specifically to you, did he No, he did not, but he kind of basically said yes, I you know, got into their member only site. It was pretty lame. So this is what a story jazz it up a little bit, which is totally fair. It's super interesting. Okay, So with all of that creepy out of the way, we're just left with the website, which is still kind

of a weird website. Yeah, that's all it's got forward at that point. Yeah, so we mentioned this guy named Kenneth Aaronsons and then he was the owner and creator of hell dot com. I will say he tried to sell the domain a number of times. Uh, never with less than a one million minimum on the auctions. Yes, true. One time, one of the last times before he finally did sell it, he tried to auction it off for eight million dollars. That did not go well for him.

Didn't nobody, nobody was willing to give him that amount of money. Um. I think there they call them reserve bids, So they're this like secret amount of money that it's like when you when you sell something on eBay. And actually haven't done this a long time, but I know in the past, there was your reserve limit. You know, you wanted to sell this thing for a hundred dollars. So when some bozo came in and bid one dollar, it automatically told him somebody's outbid you and two dollars,

and it would keep going like that. You put in your dollar thing and it just says reserve not met. Most of the sites I've been on are just they've don't. I've seen it both ways. I just bought something on eBay and they now they just do like, this is the minimum bid. Yeah, well yeah, they made it simpler because it transparent. Yeah, the reserve thing actually annoys the crap out of me. You got to go in there and actually, you know, bid for a while till you

find out what it is. That's irritating, which is why they don't do that anymore. But you can still go in and say like, here's my maximum bid, and it will still only bid you at the minimum bid until somebody up bids you. So that's nice at least. But um, like I said, he did try to sell it for a lot of money, so he was aware that he was building up hype to build up hits, to build up wealth. So describe this dude, because this guy drives

me batty. Why this guy is the kind of designer and artists that gives all other designers and artists a bad name because he strings together a series of smart sounding words to make himself sound grand. And yet he has, apparently from everything he shows, not a whole lot but

himself to offer. Okay, let's talk about him. Um. So, like we said, if you go to hell dot com right now, there's this like really beautiful lime green bar at the top of the stop that it says this premium domain maybe for sale, and I have seen screen captures previously it said legendary and that that is an important distinction that was made because legendary is actually a term that Kenneth Aaronson uses. He claims to create legendary brands.

This is all sourced from his own personal website, and the logo that he has for his legendary brands is almost identical to the hell dot com logo. It's just an L with an L. But you know what I figured out is the comic sands l. It is it's that comics sands L where the top of the vertical bar run is into the top of the circle. So it's not that great of a design. It's literally just like the hell dot com thing, except for in an arrow with an l designs and actually work as a

as an artist. I don't really know if he went to his linked In profile, Oh he does work. I looked at his my Space page, but it was private. You think I'm joking. I'm not joking. Active page. So I found our interviews with him, but I also found his LinkedIn page, and he seems to be a high

level consultant, like somebody. I love the way they described him, like I don't know that he's actually much of a creative because they're like, he's great at keeping an eye on the balance sheet, but still understanding the drive of the project or something that. Let me read some sheet. I was like, this guy is a project manager himself as a design Let me read you some stuff about from his websites plural he If you go to his website, like I said, you will kind of see what I'm

talking about here. His brand is full of those like edgy sentences, you know, where it's like kind of like somebody just threw a bunch of words at something and came up with a sentence um. One of them, for instance, is shadow is my partner, and we sell nothing. Nothing links to nothing in the box dot com, which is a website that he owns where you get a nice black background with gray text, which is even more annoying

than white text. And what's really annoying is like is like kind of pale gray text against a slightly darker gray background that this is that pale gray exceptorts on black so um. And this text says we live in society that has been sold the concept that happiness is conditional. In order to be happy and fulfilled, you need nothing. When everyone has nothing, there will no longer be crime, wars or aggression. Stop rampant commercialism, global corporate domain greed,

and be in conscious consumptions, conspicuous consumption by nothing. Every dollar spent on nothing is one last dollar spent on something that you don't need. This guy is high a lot. God, I hate him, but I just hate him. This is the kind of designer that a guy who you're mad

you can't even know. No, it really there's there's words that I want to use that it It irritates the crap out of me because other people see this and think well, this is the way that designers are supposed to speak and artists are supposed to speak, and then they spout stuff and they have no idea what they're saying. It's like so many gag movies where you see the

artists running around just saying that's so high minded and intelligent. Dude, Yeah, for so long with then, Yeah, that's what's ironic about this guy, as he was trying to sell the site for a million bucks and he's all it sounds like most of what he was trying to make himself had to be like liquid his website Liquid. There's all kinds of stuff like that on there, but liquid spell liquid for our listeners. Oh it's l y q y No, there's just the one it l y q i d Yeah.

Well he's also got he had no Such, No dash such dot com, which is now actually a design site that's in French, so he obviously sold it, and it had at one point when I found it, I think it's from two thousand. I winned the archive the way back machine and went to No Such and guess what I found on it? Hell dot com in a mirror image of hell dot com. On that side, he has

a lot of those sites. So from what I understand from like actual interviews with this guy, well, no, the members only portion of it was it was meant to be this like safe space for edgy artists who were trying to create art in a kind of contained atmosphere. They wanted to create web art, right art for the Internet community, but they wanted to be doing this kind of experimentation phase in a safe space where you're collaborating

with other artists, which I don't know. They just didn't want us to the public to see their crap while it was still kind of like you know that big stage. Yeah, that's true. Um, there was a hack done of the site by a website called like one zero zero one zero zeries or one dot org and they basically like mirrored the whole thing and that was I would say it was like two thousand, I think nine ish is when this happened, and so it kind of I think

facilitated the downfall of the hell dot com. It was just random, just random good night boobe, you know, I mean, um, so, I guess the real mystery here is then, is do we believe that that was really what was behind that members only log in or is there something else, because it also doesn't really totally and I know what I know exactly what he was going to say, but I'm say this anyways, it doesn't really account for all of

the weird front end stuff. Steve now is going to say, well, Devon, yeah, it does because it's just somebody trying to be edgy, Devin. It does because it is somebody trying to hide the portal to their crappy friends website. Fair enough, okay, yeah, but it's the best way to hide something is to surrounded by other innocuous looking garbage, and people just go the heck of a lot of garbage. It could be so sort of like a virtual clearinghouse for al Quata operatives,

you know, to exchange messages. I mean, frankly that but that's more inconspicuous. You are l problem. But that is the point, right, is that, like we don't really know because it could have been that that member's only portal was just a top layer for something else. Do I think that's true? No, hell no, I think that's dumb.

But that is some thing that we can't say that there wasn't and there weren't more layers to this because as we can see even on what we think is the surface layer, there are more layers underneath that, between the surface layer and the members only layer, So who knows what is like even deeper than that. Again, I don't think so. I think it's just this guy trying to be like edgy and like on a lot of

drugs and like that's fine. But if there was more there, I'm pretty damn sure that that hack that mirrored it in two thousand nine or whatever it was, we would have seen that stuff, because don't you get in And I will say the trick with that is that that hack was carried out by other net artists who may or may not have been associated and friends with some of the artists that were members of hell dot com.

So it's this is a fake hack. Yeah, no, No, the one zero zero one hack could have been a way to drum up more support or interest or whatever. It sounds way too organized for this. I don't know that it is. I mean, a guy considering it very easily just make a couple of HTML pages a week and build this slowly convoluted website. But then to I mean, to to facilitate a fake hack on yourself and to be able to show it in such a way that

people would believe it. I think that takes a lot of technical savvy that I don't see in the It was just a mirror. It was just a mirror of the site which he had been doing all over the place. It was just a mirror of the stuff without log in, right. Well, but they had gone through the log And that's what I mean is that it just I don't know it. It just seems above the ability of what I've seen here for him to have I guess all I'm saying is that really all that happened was this group said

I understand. No, they just said they literally just said we got this because we hacked them. Um. They didn't say like, here's how we hacked into this, here's how we got this stuff. They were just like, well, we broke in and got it here it is. So it would have been really easy for him to just mirror that, remember the members only pages or whatever, and then have them say you know, and then you say, okay, now you guys say, well we hacked it, and that's all

it is. I mean, she had been French connection and decided they do it on the internet. Well, I mean, he'd been experimenting with mirroring sites. We've proof of that, So I don't know. I think a typical hack, it would be kind of proud of, like telling us all this techniques. Yeah, usually, but no, So I don't know. I think I think that hell dot Com is a silly mystery, and I don't know why we covered it, but there you go. You're missing a theory. What could

it be? Satan only if Choppy helped. I'm sure Chippy's in the mix somewhere. But yeah, I mean that might explain the really bad coding. True. Yeah, I think you would think the Satan would have a web page, don't you think? I think it's Satan dot Com. It's Microsoft, but just kidding Microsoft, something like that, probably, yeah, century link dot Com, Yeah, Axfinity dot Com. Yeah, yeah, No, I I don't know. I think it's That's how I feel. I don't know how you guys feel about this mystery,

but I don't I think it's kind of a non mystery. Yeah, I was about to say, I don't think it's actually a mystery. I think that it's a tale. But here's what I will say is that I only came to the conclusion of it not being a mystery by doing a ton of research about it, you know what I mean? Mystery? So we really need to cancel this and do another mystery. Okay, so hold on, everybody will be right back. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of thank You. That would be

a miserable. What else you got? That's it? Alright? Do you guys have any input and that stuff? I'm just gonna say hell a few more times. Hell No, I got nothing more? Great? What the hell have we been doing the whole time? Uh? So, if you want to see that logo and for whatever reason, it's not pulling into your feed, If you want to see some of the links that we have that we did research on um if you want to buy merch if you want to download the episodes, you can head to our website.

That website is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. You can find us on social media. We've got the Facebook page and the group, so like the page, join the group. Uh. We have a Twitter which is Thinking Sideways, and we also have a subaudit which is Thinking Sideways Easy not as dead as it has been. We got almost fifty comments on the last post, so look at that it's

pretty good. Um, you can you probably know where you're finding us, where you're streaming us, but you can find us on iTunes, you can find us on Stitcher, you can find Steve's nodding. You find us pretty much anywhere. If you can find us, and you, um, don't forget to subscribe, don't get to leave a comment and a rating as well. That really helps people find us, which is really helpful to us. That's a good idea. Yes, yes, please.

And if you want to talk to us about our explicit use of the word hell in this episode hell would they want to do that? I don't know, man um or if you have any suggestions, comments, concerns, anything, you can send us an email. The email addresses Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. We will respond to every email, almost every email. Eventually. It's been taking us about a week, but how can I do it? A hell of a long time backed up right now, we're

catching up. All of that having been said, I think we're going to get on out of here, get the hell out of here. Oh yeah, yeah, we'll see you in hell hell yeah. Hack