A year in the box

This article is a look at what we've been through over the past 12 months, since the idea and first line of HTML code was
written. It was the 10th of January 2000, when I suppose the first words and thoughts on starting up a website first came
about. It would have been 2 days later before a single line of HTML code was written and I went about looking for hosting
as well as a domain name. I really can't remember how I came up with the name but I know it did have something to do
with the fact that the site would be about hacking - thus the word hack, but "in the box"... hmmmz, I can't for the life of me
recall how it came about - but eitherways, I guess it must have sounded cool at the time, so the name stuck. I still
remember sitting in my room on a Sunday morning doing the daily news updates for the site, and my girl friend pop's
her head in and says something to the effect of "Hey! Stop messing with that and come have breakfast -- besides, it's
not like anyone's going to go there!". Hmmmz... funny how things end up turning out eh? Up to this day though, she
still denies it vehemently, saying that it wasn't what she meant, and she actually meant in the period of time that
it would take me to sit down and have breakfast, nobody would visit the site. I still think she meant the site would be
a failure. Well I guess just taking a look at the site now, with the number of visits and sign ups we've received should
be indication that we haven't failed - and YES, believe it or not, people DO visit our site, to see what we have to say.

So how far has hackinthebox come in approximately 365 since we started? Pretty damned far is what I'd say. I was digging
around my directory the other day looking for the old image files and HTML that I used on the site, but couldn't find
anything particularly useful. There was however a bookmark that I had -
http://leetdawg.tripod.com so I fired it up, took a look around, and amazingly managed to find stuff from as far
back as Febuary 2000. Here's a screenshot of our very first image we had for the entrance page to the site.

-- pretty crappy lens flare effect eh? Well I thought it was
pretty good back then, until a graphic artist friend of mine said it sucked nads and volunteered to make one for me -- he created
two images. One of which is a derivative of the banner we use now, and the other one is this.

So how bad did we suck back in Feb? Pretty bad - here's a screen shot of what the site looked like :

and here's one of what we looked like in June.

From a technical perspective, lets take a look at where
we have come from all the way since January.

Our first hosting was over at tripod.com and I can still remember when OB-1
volunteered to help out with the site, we spent many many hours trying to kill the bloody annoying pop-up ad -
most times we succeeded - but sometimes we didn't. Quite annoying. Talking about OB-1, I have no idea
why he actually came along and said he'd help out with the site, but I must say, that without him, I don't think
hackinthebox.org could have come this far. I think he popped up around the time when HNN had posted news about
Telstra losing money to phone phreakers ripping them off with a drinking straw - OB-1 was the guy who actually e-mailed me
with information on how it was done... which pretty much led to
Hacking payphones Telstra Style.

In March we launched the mobile zine which was and still is
the mobile version of our e-zine for Palm Pilots and Windows CE devices. Things went about smoothly till we decided that
we were tired of having www.thelimit.net/hitb and wanted a full fledged domain -
which pretty much meant the purchase of hackinthebox.org. Why .org? Well interestingly enough, .com has already been taken,
and .net just didn't seem to fit (back then anyhow). As such, we decided that since the site's motto was "Keeping Knowledge Free",
it would make sense for use to get a .org domain name since in general, .org is reserved for non-profit organizations - the
perfect fit for what was and still is a non-charging, non-profit making website! The first hosting company we had was a
total mad house since they seemed to suffer from constant downtimes and associated headaches, so we had to look around for
alternatives. Around the same time, OB-1 had run into a chap at a 2600 meeting who mentioned that he'd be interested in
helping us out with our hosting problem - this person turned out to be HunterRose. Well we looked into that hosting situation
but because HITB wanted to move from a HTML only backend to a more dynamic content based system, we needed a hosting company
that would allow us to install slashcode - the backend system used by
slashdot. Well slashcode turned out to be a real bitch to install and Hunter's hosting company wouldn't allow it. So,
this pretty much meant we were back at square one. Eitherways, around the same time, although I can't remember how I was
introduced to him and such, this guy came along (szern) and said he'd throw a box onto his line that we could use. This pretty
much meant we would have complete control over the machine so we could do whatever we wanted. Great! Only problem was,
I had a devil of a time getting slashcode installed, and when it finally did work, the machine just couldn't handle it - it was just too heavy
a workload for the box. Eitherways, while sitting in #slashdot asking around for help with getting slashcode installed, someone
by the name of codesyne mentioned that there was this excellent web publishing backend system called ThatWare
which was pretty similar to slashcode but a whole lot easier to install, not to mention less heavy a workload on the server
since it runs on PHP. So we went about installing Thatware on the machine and this is the same backend code (more or less)
that you see running on the site today. Around the same time, I had the problem of moving about 7 months worth of news and
articles over to the new machine and onto the database. Turkeys, who I'd met up with before, came along and said she'd help me out with it, and
in about a week or so, we managed to get everything onto the new machine and things were looking good.

Well time passed without much ado and things were going well for us... We launched
wap.hackinthebox.org to enable users to get the latest news and headlines on their handphones and a few weeks later,
we launched wap-nmap the mobile equivelant of nmap
for handphones. The tool generated quite a fair bit of traffic for us, and amazingly, a handful of people actually found the
tool useful and liked it! I personally coded it cause I'd been talking about getting something similar up and running
months before. The source code for wap-nmap as well as the wap version of hackinthebox.org have been incorporated into
ThatWare's code and now actually ships as a plugin for the system. So anyway, the site was running fine, we were attracting
more and more visits each day -- in short, life was good, however the machine that we were running on was getting overloaded
and would die out once in a while from the increasing traffic that kept hitting the box. We had plans to
upgrade the machine to beefier hardware, but unfortunately, didn't have the funds to buy the new stuff. A course mate of mine
in my uni (this would be biathc0), said he'd be willing to sponsor us some hardware for the new machine... well quite some time
passed before we actually managed to get ourselves the new hardware and scrounge around for RAM and a disk drive. But early
this year, we actually completed the upgrade to the machine, and the new server is what hackinthebox.org is running now -
certainly a big boost in performance from the old box, but I must say that I do owe a lot of thanks to szern for actually
letting use the previous box for so long - it served us well.

Well since I'm sure you're already getting pretty bored with this story, and I can't really recall anything else, I guess I'll just end off here. I'm sure I've left out quite a fair bit, but
the overall picture is the same... I do hope you've enjoyed this little walk through memory lane - sorry if it was
boring. I think I should say though, that without the culminative efforts of everyone mentioned (as well as those I've forgotten to mention),
hackinthebox.org wouldn't be what it is today... and it is you the reader and visitor, that makes this all worthwhile. It's
been a year - and from the looks of it, we'll be around for many many more.

Peace.
L33tdawg.

1.) Little-Known DOS Commands That Have Saved My Ass - madirish
2.) Rampact Piracy on the Sea of Information - xearthed
3.) Physics utilizing comp technology or computer tech utilizing Physics (Part 2) - josette
4.) State of the Hack Awards #2 - madsaxon
5.) Games Industry Syndicate of the web? - OZONE
6.) A brief look at Quantum Mechanics - josette
7.) HardAttack: Review of Voodoo5 5500 - biatch0
8.) A year in the box - L33tdawg