GeoCities: Rest In Peace

Yahoo finally shut off life support to the "should have been dead by now" site GeoCities.com. GeoCities had a noted time in history, serving to provide a free means for all those folks who felt they needed needed to jump onto the Internet bandwagon and have a personal website to express themselves. In this age of blogs, social networking, and instant messaging, GeoCities is both a technological and sociological relic.

GeoCities has always had some seedy areas, but lately it seems it mostly served the dark side of the Internet, being a favored platform of spammers, botnets, and malware writers. Sophos mentioned that GeoCities and Blogger require very little identification in order to set up a site...which is why they see a lot of malicious content on those to internet properties. Sites like malwaredomainlist.com show a fair amount of known malware URLs hosted on GeoCities. Google Safe Browsing reports over 700 encountered pieces of malware, worms, and Trojans on GeoCities pages in the last 90 days.

Next on the "do not resuscitate" list is AngelFire.com, owned by Lycos. Google Safe Browsing reports it as having about half the amount of malware as GeoCities. But, to be fair, Google reports that Blogspot.com contains about four times more malicious content than both GeoCities and AngelFire combined. So it's all relative. Closing GeoCities will help remove some malware breeding grounds off the Internet, but it is only a dent in the grand scheme of things.

But hey, every little bit helps, right?

Until next time,
- Jeff