Say Goodbye to GeoCities

GeoCities has been the longtime home for website noobs for over a decade. Long before web surfers were using eye bleach to the cleanse the vision of bad MySpace pages, people were being blinded by the awful cluttered sites on GeoCities.

It seemed like a cool idea at the time-  organizing user homepages based on virtual homesteads to reflect common interests such as the arts, science, politics and others.  Yahoo bought the company for almost 3 Billion dollars at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.  Now they are announcing that they plan on shutting the site down this year and are no longer accepting new user accounts.  Full details over at TechCrunch here.

From a cyber security perspective, however, I have to sadly say good riddance to bad rubbish.  Like MySpace, nothing of value exists on the internet on the GeoCities domain, and in fact, there is quite a lot that can harm a network.  In the past few years phishers, hackers, malware authors and other cyber criminals have seeded free website pages with bad code and drive-by trojan horse downloads.  Most reputable businesses block this domain to prevent their users from getting infected-  its kinda like locking your car doors when you take the wrong exit from the highway and wind up in the ghetto where all of  the denizens hold their guns sideways.

Given that webpages are a cheap commodity and Yahoo has been facing liability issues for hosting pages associated with criminal activity, it is probably a good idea to scrap the whole free hosting site.  But I’m sure they wish they could get their money back.