Pastebin
Type of online content hosting service where users can store plain text
title: "Pastebin" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["file-sharing", "file-sharing-services", "web-applications", "web-hosting", "text"] description: "Type of online content hosting service where users can store plain text" topic_path: "technology/web" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastebin" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Type of online content hosting service where users can store plain text ::
A pastebin or text storage site is a type of online content-hosting service where users can store plain text (e.g. source code snippets or error logs). The most well-known pastebin is the eponymous pastebin.com, created in 2002. Many sites with similar functionality now exist, and several open source pastebin applications are available for self-hosting.
Pastebins may provide additional features such as commenting, rendering markup (e.g. Markdown, ReStructuredText), or version control.
History
Pastebin was developed in the late 1990s to facilitate IRC chatrooms devoted to computing, where users naturally need to share large blocks of computer input or output in a line-oriented medium. In such chatrooms, sending messages containing large blocks of computer data can disrupt conversations, which can be closely interleaved. When users send such messages, they are often warned to instead use pastebins or risk being banned from the service. Contrarily, a reference to a pastebin entry is a one-line hyperlink.
A new class of IRC bot has evolved. In a chatroom that is largely oriented around a few pastebins, nothing more needs to be done after a post at its pastebin. The receiving party then awaits a bot announcing the expected posting by the known user.
After the use of the pastebin.pl pastebin for a data breach, Pastebin started monitoring the site for illegally pasted data and information, leading to a backlash from Anonymous. Hacktivists teamed up with an organization calling itself the People's Liberation Front, launching an alternative called AnonPaste.
References
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DO NOT INCLUDE A LIST OF PASTEBINS HERE! IT WILL BE REMOVED!! See WP:NOT#MIRROR!
See http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/User:ZacBowling/Pastebins for a list of victims -
References
- (3 April 2012). "Pastebin Hiring People to Proactively Remove 'Sensitive Information,' Says Owner". The Verge.
- (3 February 2012). "Somebody's watching: how a simple exploit lets strangers tap into private security cameras". The Verge.
- Cheok, Jacquelyn. (April 21, 2016). "First batch of personal data offenders slapped with fines, warnings". The Business Times.
- "Pastebin.com".
- "Forking and cloning gists".
- Brian, Matt. (4 June 2011). "Pastebin: How a popular code-sharing site became the ultimate hacker hangout". [[Financial Times]].
- Emil, Protalinski. (4 April 2012). "Pastebin to hunt for hacker pastes, Anonymous cries censorship". [[CBS Interactive]].
- Sidel, Robin. (7 January 2015). "Morgan Stanley Data Leak Not the First Headache for Pastebin". [[Dow Jones & Company]].
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