A Porn Company Bought, Promptly Incinerated a Website That Doxxed Performers

It's good news but a reminder that the internet is written in pencil.

Bricked Servers

On Thursday, porn production company Bang Bros purchased a website called PornWikiLeaks—and promptly shut it down permanently, scrubbing the website clean and literally incinerating the hard drives that stored its data.

Why? As Motherboard reports, PornWikiLeaks was responsible for doxing over 15,000 adult film entertainers, and people frequently used the personal information published there to harass others. Disarming those harassers will undeniably make the internet a safer and better place, but the sudden acquisition and deletion also serve as a reminder that chunks of the web can be immediately deleted at any point in time.

Purged

Anyone visiting PornWikiLeaks will see a statement from Bang Bros, Motherboard notes, in which the company describes its rationale for deleting the site. Mainly it contained stolen data that had been used to harass and endanger people.

"While shutting this site down doesn’t purge the internet of all possible ties to real names and what not [sic], it does make it one less place to harbor and find these things easily," the statement reads. "A forum that had 300,000 posts on it, most of them negative and hate-filled, has now disappeared."

The deletion serves as a reminder that the internet, ultimately, is written in pencil — it's an illustration of how transient the internet and all of the information stored on it can be. As worrisome as that fact is, occasionally — as in moments like this — it can also present itself as a massive, life-changing relief.

READ MORE: Bang Bros Bought a Huge Porn Doxing Forum and Set Fire to It [Motherboard]

More on internet transience: Microsoft is Closing an eBook Store, Deleting All Books You Bought