La Paranoia @ http://
paranoia.com was a great source of
counterculture,
underground, and just plain useful information in the earlier days of the web. Paranoia hosted such diverse gems as the
World Sex Guide, the sci.electronics.repair FAQ, the Concise Guide to
Clinton Scandals, and a large volume of drug-related information.
Back in the day paranoia.com also offered shell account and web hosting ISP services to those with anonymity requirements or content that conventional ISPs were unwilling to deal with.
The Austin, Texas -based site debuted online sometime in 1994 on a lowly 14.4kbps connection. Through the efforts of webmaster KevinTX and other contributors, it worked its way up to a T1 connection serving up to 150,000 visitors per week before shutting down in mid-1998, apparently for financial reasons.
The paranoia.com domain has since changed ownership and many of the bigger chunks of content have now spun off their own sites. Some mirror sites are still around; Lycaeum maintains a historical mirror of most of paranoia's narcotic data at http://paranoia.lycaeum.org/.