Castle Cops Closes

[nihil]

The IT security site Castle Cops (formerly Computer Cops) has shut down.

http://www.castlecops.com/

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Secur...s-100981.shtml

Sign of the times I am afraid

[oofki]

At least the founder has a job, but thats too bad.. Couldn't PPC ads have saved them? ...

[HTRegz]

nihil: I hope by "Sign of the times" you weren't referring to economic downturn. I hate how suddenly that's the excuse for everything... especially since in many cases it couldn't be further from the truth.

Castle Cops has been hit hard and frequently by DDoS, there comes a point when it isn't really worth it to continue if that's continually happening. The founder's job with Microsoft also played a role in it. Sure money may have been a factor but I just had to comment because "sign of the times" seems to be the latest cop out statement.

[nihil]

No, I don't think that the recession or the credit crunch (the two are different economic phenomena) had anything to do with this.

I was referring to what I seem to see as a trend or "mood swing" in the internet regarding specialist or "niche" sites such as CC. Back in the day, these sites were very popular and active, now I notice a marked decline in activity, and several sites I used to frequent have closed. This I would guess has been going on for 3 or 4 years, so it certainly started well before our current economic woes.

There just seems to have been a fall off of interest in and popularity of technical sites manned by enthusiastic volunteers. I guess that is just part of the evolution of IT and the internet.

The other problem would seem to be where a site or project is dependent on one or a very few key individuals, and they decide to "move on". This is what seems to have happened to CC? they just didn't seem to be able to find a successor.

I guess that the recession might have some effect in making it more difficult to find sponsorship and hosting, but I haven't noticed any of that so far.

[The-Spec]

I vouch for electronic sit-ins agianst google. This would force the internet as we know it to revert back to meta search engines leading to poorly designed webpages. It would be 1990-something all over again.