The 50 most significant moments of Internet history

By Nate Lanxon on 25 September 2008, 4:02pm

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The history of the Internet is chock-full of stories of piracy, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and viruses. Most of them are interesting, lots of them are hilarious, some are unthinkably frustating. Our selection of five reflects some of the more recent examples.

Just 15 years old, Mike 'MafiaBoy' Calce launched a crippling DDoS attack in 2000, hitting 11 super-massive Web companies, including CNN, Dell, eBay, Amazon and Yahoo, collectively costing them, according to analyst estimates, close to a billion pounds as a result. Armed with an Internet connection, even a teenage script kiddie can inflict cataclysmic devastation.

In our favourite case of the RIAA being a blood-sucking leech on the jugular vein of the music community, it was reported that the organisation filed a lawsuit against 83-year-old computer-hating Gertrude Walton, accusing her of sharing 700 songs on the Internet. That would be sleazy enough on its own, but matters were made worse when it came to light that dear old Mrs Walton -- who didn't even own a computer, according to her daughter -- had died the previous year. Tactfully, the RIAA dropped the case.

Imprisoned for a decade for allegedly divulging state secrets, Chinese journalist Shi Tao was arrested after Yahoo co-operated with the Chinese authorities by handing over personal information that linked him to the crime. The text he was convicted for sending to foreign Web sites reported the authorities' concerns surrounding the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

In 2006, Swedish police raided PRQ -- host of the enormous Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker -- confiscating its servers, resulting in mass protests. Only a few servers contained Pirate Bay files, leading to ten affected sites suing the Swedish government. Over 100 sites were wrongfully forced offline and the Bay was relocated, restored from backups and back online after three days, with huge numbers of new users thanks to all the media coverage.

digg's enormous and usually devoted users revolted en masse on May Day 2007. The site's staff tried to take the reigns of the community-driven news site, by taking down digg submissions that were linking to a hexadecimal code used for circumventing copy protection on HD DVDs -- and banning its users -- in response to a cease-and-desist demand from the MPAA. Users bombarded the site with duplicate posts in protest, utterly dominating the site's home page, and digg eventually gave in.