Torrentz, a ‘meta-search engine’ for torrents, shuts down

No more illegal movie downloads for you! At least, you won’t be able to find them anymore on Torrentz, one of the world’s most expansive torrent search sites.Farewell to you, Torrentz.Screenshot by Samantha Rhodes/CNETThe site mysteriously disabled its search function on Thursday without warning, according to copyright news site TorrentFreak. All you see right now when you visit the site is a single line: “Torrentz will always love you. Farewell.”The demise of Torrentz marks the second shut down of a well-known torrent site in the last three weeks. In July, US authorities seized popular torrent site Kickass Torrents and arrested alleged owner Artem Vaulin.

The world’s first website went online 25 years ago

On this day 25 years ago the world’s first website went live to the public. The site, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was a basic text page with hyperlinked words that connected to other pages.Berners-Lee used the public launch to outline his plan for the service, whoch would come to dominate life in the twenty-first century.

“The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system,” said Berners-Lee on the world’s first public website. ”

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone.”

Berners-Lee wanted the World Wide Web to be a place where people could share information across the world through documents and links navigated with a simple search function.

The first step to making that a reality occurred on August 6, 1991, and was hailed with little fanfare when Berners Lee launched the first web page from his NeXT computer at CERN’s headquarters in Geneva.

At the time, he was working as a computer programmer at CERN’s European Organisation for Nuclear Research, where he’d seen countless amounts of data lost because of high staff turnover and poor communication. And he’d looked on as researchers wasted weeks solving problems only to find out it had been tackled years earlier.