The registration info for hackernews.com says the domain was first registered on July 29, 1998. Ten years ago, today. wow. You know, long strange trip and all that. News wasn’t actually posted to the site until a month or so later but July 29th is as good day as any to celebrate. (or should that be commiserate?) HNN was only around for a little under two years but I like to think the site had a pretty big impact, not just on the hacker underground it reported on, but the security industry as a whole. Hell, at one point MSNBC claimed that HNN was “the voice of reason” amongst all the hype. When HNN started search engines were just starting to aggregate news, hell even Slashdot was new, by the end the ‘security portal’ was all the rage. The site existed during that formative stage of the security industry before which security was something seldom thought of and after which Venture Capitalist where throwing money at it.
For a walk down memory lane take a look at the first news day September 10, 1998 (Spelling mistakes and all, ahhh Spaceronics!) and the last day I posted the news June 16, 2000 (What is really amazing is that the links to CNN on the 1998 page STILL WORK! ten years later. Kudos to whoever built that site.)