The Most Mysterious Website - Mortis.com

Thank you all for the great support on this video! If you'd like to see more like it I have a playlist of internet mysteries on the channel

Fun fact : mortis (μόρτης) in greek, was a person who had immunity to plague, and helped bury the dead by plague.

I'd like to give a compliment to the editing style. The black background with simple logos/icons and text make it extremely easy on the eyes at night. Something that really bothers me when watching this sort of content at night is when there's no balance of light coming from the screen. I might be watching a black background for a couple of seconds that is immediately followed by a white document page that violently blinds me. This video has an almost perfect editing style which is surprising considering how relatively small your channel is compared to the others. Keep up the good work!

"mortis," doesn't just refer to death. It's also a term in woodworking (mortis and tenon joint), and lock components. Kinda surprised that those desperate to solve this weren't willing to acknowledge the alternate meanings. Especially the lock components. That might've been helpful.

How exactly would one deduce that the site was hosting terabytes of data from inspecting the client side code in the landing/login page? As a programmer of 20+ years I'm skeptical.

Re-uping the server* while taking everything down seems weird at first, but if he lets the server* expire, anyone could buy it and draw out the mystery or - at worst - exploit the interest in the website by placing malware. This way he knows for sure the investigation has hit a dead end. *half a dozen pedants made comments nitpicking that I originally used "website" interchangeably with "domain". Changed it to an even less correct term to piss them off.

This channel is terribly underrated and underappreciated.

Seriously? Dude has wedding and family videos and photos on his PC (obviously a techy), wants to access things online (before cloud storage was around), doesn't need to upload anything, installs web server on pc, points domain to internet router, port forwards 80 to machine, has logins for him to access to view stuff. He is obviously technically capable, probably a developer, probably built websites for a few businesses ie dentist etc, setup all of them under his name and charges them a small fee, started getting attention from hackers maybe got attacked, PC taken down, cracks it and removes all traces of the site.

As a developer I dont understand how anyone managed to figure out that there are terabytes of data, without being able to access it? Was it encrypted or something? Also if the figured out IP is from Philadelphia, why not visit the site and ask around, who owns it?

I love the slightly different take on this mysterious domain. Barely's video felt like an historical introduction piece, whilst Chill's video continues, bringing just a bit more information and context.

it's terabytes of never gonna give you up on repeat

My theory is that the site hosted thousands of shitty vlogs by a guy named Mort. Videos titled like "Mort is... Golfing!" etc. Mort is doing things. I wish you would've shared your adventures with the world, Mort

So I grew up in Sydney and I knew a guy called Thomas Ling, It was the late 90's and we lived in a suburb called Mortdale (I remember figuring out that the name translates to Death Valley and I mentioned it to him and other people)... He knew many abandoned houses and factories (there was an abandoned factory "the quill paper factory" in Oatley which was near Mortdale and he set the place up for skating with ramps and lights with generators)... The name Thomas Ling isn't rare but I can't help but wonder if it was him. edit* Oh and he was a computer wizard and that wasn't extremely common at the time

I have no idea how page source would reveal the size of files that aren't directly linked in the source or in files referenced by the source such as JavaScript. The terabyte thing doesn't seem like it would be true because of this and the fact that it was before 2000. The original Google was hosted on a drive of less than 30gb when it was at Stanford...

Please keep up this video style. Its impeccable. Especially that I'm not being blinded at 1 a.m. like with every other channel

I am not clear on how the discoverer of the site determined it was hosting large files. That is a question I had from Barely Sociable's video as well.

1 terrabyte for a single user wasn't impossible. In 97 I worked in the Sun Life graphic design department and we had a 1 terrabyte server to which files were backed up. The IT guys secretly hosted their personal sites on there as, back then, they were the only ones who understood how it worked. Conceivably one lone geek in charge of a corporate server could easily hide personal stuff in there. These days there are all kinds of security preventing that but things were primitive back then. Data breaches were everyday occurrences.

Also for the re-registering part, i'd say this domain is cheap to register for the original guy who registered it, and it's value is growing all the time. The domain is just a "text version" of an IP address it leads to. I would not be interested about the domain, but the contents of the server it leads to. Safest way to host something you don't want public awareness to, is not to buy a domain name at all, but to use the server IP as your address, because you only need to have domain name if you want easier access to your server.

It was a spamming site - There was a huge Spammer bot site that was shutdown in Philadelphia in 2011, and it ran from 1997 until that time. I believe you check find information about that being shutdown. The guy doing it had numerous sites setup for it. I only know because i used to get for multiple of hundreds of spams in any given day. I am sure it was hosting other illegal stuff, but yeah...I am pretty sure this is connected to that spammer.

I'm positive the domain is kept registered to prevent somebody else buying it then 'recreating' it.