One marketer I know made his fortune (as in tens of millions) buying up dead sites, often for dissolved companies / organizations / etc., kept the design somewhat relevant to said entities, but filled the site with ads and referral links to gambling sites / credit cards / etc.
And as seen with Groklaw, it still works. Whenever I see some old semi-popular website call it quits, it just takes a couple of months until it becomes a landing or referral page for something crypto.
It's what happened with Adventure Gamers, for example. Decades worth of adventure game reviews and interviews still available -- now with a slight thematic shift where new articles are all about "reviewing" online casinos.
Every website eventually becomes a funnel for ad-based shadow companies.
Here is the new Groklaw mission statement:
Our Mission
Our mission is simple: to guide you toward safe, rewarding, and responsible crypto gambling experiences. We believe in transparency, player protection, and giving you the tools to make informed choices — whether you want massive Bitcoin bonuses, ultra-fast withdrawals, or niche altcoin gaming.
"everything is so bad it's hopeless" or smth?
So much could be intercepted back then because of this. It wasn't until 2010 that various large services—including Yahoo Mail and Facebook—got a kick in their ass by a whitehat browser plugin that allowed anyone on the same network to trivially hijack session cookies of others, stimulating an adoption of HTTPS[1] during 2011-2012.
By the time the Snowden leaks occurred in 2013 the trend was heading toward encrypted-by-default and governments were having to adapt.
[1] https://threatpost.com/facebook-kills-firesheep-new-secure-b...
How would that actually work?
TLS runs on the client and the server. There's no "TLS magic box" in between.
Like let’s say you have a proxy server like Nginx on a server with a public facing ip address and then it also has access to a private subnet where your application servers are running. A visitor to your website’s browser make a secure https connection the nginx server where https would be terminated and then it would proxy traffic in plain http over your internal private subnet to the app server. And your are in a five eyes country where your intelligence services took it on themselves to follow the nsa or fbis instructions and plug a network device into those private subnets of all the big service providers inside their datacenters that is configured in something like a promiscuous way so it receives all the packets for any device on the network. Then those packets somehow end up in a big nsa datalake.. or something along those lines
(Or was, back then. These days you can probably collapse all of that into a single medium-sized epyc or something.)
I know where there are Sun V880s still running Oracle databases in a biggish cluster.
Their processor power, memory capacity, and storage capacity are exactly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 4 with a biggish SD card.
We have come a long way.
If there was it'd be called Cloudflare :)