A pastebin or text storage site is a type of online content-hosting service where users can store plain text (e.g. source code snippets for

code review Code review (sometimes referred to as peer review) is a software quality assurance activity in which one or several people check a program mainly by viewing and reading parts of its source code, and they do so after implementation or as an interru ...

via Internet Relay Chat (IRC)). The first pastebin was the eponymous

pastebin.com Pastebin.com is a Pastebin, text storage site. It was created on September 3, 2002 by Paul Dixon, and reached 1 million active pastes (excluding spam and expired pastes) eight years later, in 2010. It features syntax highlighting for a variety ...

. Other sites with the same functionality have appeared, and several

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

pastebin scripts are available. Pastebins may allow commenting where readers can post feedback directly on the page. GitHub Gists are a type of pastebin with version control.

History

Pastebins developed in the late 1990s to facilitate IRC chatrooms devoted to computing, where users naturally needed to share large blocks of computer input or output in a line-oriented medium. On such IRC channels, where the formatting clues are subtle and several conversations can be closely interleaved, blocks of computer data flood the queue, disrupting the intricate flow. A reference to a pastebin entry, however, is a one-line hyperlink. Users are often warned to instead use pastebins, or risk being banned from the service in the event of disruption. A new class of IRC bot has evolved. In a chatroom that is largely oriented around a few pastebins, nothing more needs to be done after a post at its pastebin. The receiving party then awaits a

bot Bot may refer to: Sciences Computing and technology * Chatbot, a computer program that converses in natural language * Internet bot, a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet **a Spambot, an internet bot des ...

to announce the expected posting by the known user. After the use of the pastebin.pl pastebin for a

data breach A data breach is a security violation, in which sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an individual unauthorized to do so. Other terms are unintentional information disclosure, data leak, info ...

, Pastebin started monitoring the site for illegally pasted data and information, leading to a backlash from

Anonymous Anonymous may refer to: * Anonymity, the state of an individual's identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown ** Anonymous work, a work of art or literature that has an unnamed or unknown creator or author * Anonym ...

. Hacktivists teamed up with an organization calling itself the People's Liberation Front, launching an alternative called AnonPaste.

References

File sharing File sharing services Web applications Web hosting Text

History

See also

References