The Dead Internet Almanac Dispatch: Week of May 11

This Week

📋 The Day Bethesda Pulled the Plug on Its Own Launcher When a massive game publisher tried to bypass Steam, and the empty shell that remained.

💻 The Day a $10.69 Domain Name Stopped a Global Cyberattack How the WannaCry ransomware worm was halted by a single domain registration.

🌐 The Social Network That Invented Everything — and Vanished SixDegrees predicted the entire future of social media in 1997, and nobody remembers it. 🎧 Listen: Podcast episode

🐈 The Internet's Most Famous Scowl Went Quiet The cultural end of an era when a grumpy cat ruled the viral web.

🎮 Unplugged: When 77 Million PlayStation Accounts Went Dark The 23-day outage that erased an entire online ecosystem in 2011.

From the Cache

• In May 2017, the WannaCry ransomware attack was accidentally halted by a 22-year-old researcher who registered a hardcoded $10.69 domain name found in the worm's code.
• In May 2014, the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection was permanently shut down, breaking online play for the Wii and DS following the collapse of the GameSpy matchmaking service.

On the Desk

Next week on the desk: The original browser war fought in federal courtrooms with leaked executive emails. The day a computer company decided it could run a mall store. Plus, a 1973 memo at Xerox PARC that laid the physical foundation for every connected device on Earth.

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