Internet Mysteries: What was Mortis.com?
Those of you who follow internet mysteries may be familiar with a strange site called Mortis.com. Originally registered in 1997, its landing page had nothing but the name mortis.com, along with username and password fields. No archives of the site exist today, not even on the Wayback Machine, but some looking into the mystery recreated the image of the login page:
According to some coders who attempted to crack the login, it was extremely difficult to get through, and it is not publicly known if any were able to figure out the username and/or password. The mystery is described in more detail on this Reddit post on r/UnresolvedMysteries:
So awhile back I stumbled across this internet mystery while researching lakecityquietpills.com and came across and equally intriguing internet mystery related to a mysterious website called mortis.com. Apparently this website when it was active, it was created in 1997, as it has long since been shut down, Came up with a login and password screen that according to some experts was extremely hard to hack into. with some resorting to using brute force applications and having little to no luck in getting past the login screen. It got a lot weirder the more people started looking into it, because more and more weird connections and Links started being made with this website.
Apparently, according to the post, large Usenet files were linked back to the website, including one that was 39GB in size, which only added to people's curiosity about what was behind it. Contrary to popular belief, Usenet is still around today, even though larger forums and social media networks have surpassed it in popularity.
Adding to the mysterious nature of Mortis is that almost all references to it have been removed from the internet at present, including an archive on the Wayback Machine. Obviously, this has only fueled internet investigators' interest in the site.
Some of those looking into the mystery traced the site's ownership back to an individual named Thomas Ling, who also owned several other domains registered in the late '90s and early '00s, such as:
These are no longer online, though they can be found on the Wayback Machine. Most just have a picture of a black chess piece on a black background, and nothing more. It appears as though the chess piece image was just a placeholder, and the creator of the site intended to update it later on.
Oddly enough, at present, there is a new site called mortis.cc, which looks very similar to the original: black background with a login field asking for a username and password. It is not publicly known if the new site has any relation to the original, or is just a clone made by someone interested in the mystery.
It would be interesting to see if anyone can crack the login for the new site as well, though if it is affiliated with the original, that may also be difficult. One theory that people have had about Mortis.com is that it was some kind of P2P filesharing site, especially considering the Usenet connection. Given that other such sites have been shut down by lawsuits, this would be an unsurprising answer.
So, then, what do you think mortis.com was for? Is the new site related to it in any way, or is it merely a “fan site” made by someone interested in the mystery?