Pastebin, everyone’s favorite bin in which to paste, just surpassed 8 million active pastes. The service, started in 2002, has held far more than that number over the past decade or so, but this a new record for simultaneous, active pastes for the site.
The admins state that “this number includes private pastes which are hidden from the public and search engines and that about 1/3th of all pastes created are private ones.”
Pastebin is interesting because they’ve become a locus for IRC and, as a result, Anonymous and Lulzsec activity. Many of the Lulzsec announcements, for example, appeared on Pastebin and because of the tenuous nature of Pastebin content, it has become a sort of an anonymous digital graffiti wall.
While the vast majority of the pastes consist of code and chat transcripts, it’s interesting to see how Pastebin has become a clearing-house for public, anonymous announcements. The site also has some great code highlighting features making it useful for militant, anonymous hackers who will bring down the old world order through the steady erosion of dark secrets and sub rosa state craft and, as a special bonus, those who are programming in Perl.