Remember CJB.NET?

Picture this, it's ~2001, you just finished duct taping together your first Geocities website. You are pumped to share it with everyone on IRC....but the URL isn't nearly as cool as you imagined it would be. You get stuck with something like: http://geocities/Heartland/Hills/4729.index.html.

You can't expect people to remember that or type all that out in the address bar. Remember, it's 2001, people actually have to type URLs in instead of relying on Google and AI to just feed them links.

Also, domains are expensive, I'm talking $35 a year for a .com. You are just a teenager, you can't afford that.

In comes CJB to save the day

CJB.net launched in 1998 and over the years provided a handful of services but their claim to fame was allowing the general public to get short and sweet URLs for their personal websites. Instead of that Geocities link above, you could register http://c00lhandle.cjb.net...completely free...no catch. Now that looks much better doesn't it?

But how?

Under the hood, they used a wildcard DNS record. This would send all *.cjb.net traffic to one server that would look your name up in a database and then do a HTTP redirect to your website.

Other services

• Free email aliases like c00lhandle@cjb.net. This worked similar to the URLs. It was essentially a mail forwarding service that would forward emails to your yahoo or hotmail.
• Hidden frame forwarding. This was an optional feature that would essentially load your site in a frame so users would see the cjb.net url in the address bar while on your site. Without it, when users would type in your cjb.net URL and be redirected to your site, they would see your long URL in the address bar.
• A simple control panel for your user account. Let you view your URL, rename it, delete it, change the destination.

How they made money

Their main revenue sources could be boiled down to:

• Banner advertisements: Displayed on the CJB.NET homepage, registration pages, login pages, and control panel.
• Premium account upgrades: Users could pay for additional features such as removing ads, more forwarding options, or enhanced services.

Competitors

• Dot TK (.tk): Offered free domain registration and URL redirection using frame-based masking, letting users point a short .tk address.
• No-IP: Offered free subdomains (e.g., ://no-ip.com) and redirection tools, primarily targeting users pointing traffic to home servers or dynamic IP connections.
• DynDNS (Dyn.org): Offered dynamic DNS routing and free hostname aliasing.

The Decline

Sometime after the mid 2000s, the email forwarding started to get flaky and messages started disappearing. Redirects were starting to become unreliable. Around 2008, many people had moved onto other services. This is because domain registration became much more affordable and people started relying on searching for websites instead of typing in URLs. Personal websites were also becoming less popular due to social media platforms (boo).

Abuse

In addition to the above, the following were final nails in the coffin:

• Phishing / Brand Spoofing: Attackers registered deceptive subdomains (like paypal.cjb.net or ebay.cjb.net) to trick victims into entering banking credentials. The frame-masking technology hid the real, messy destination URL, keeping the fake CJB address permanently in the user's browser address bar.
• Malware: Bad actors used short URLs to mask destinations containing exploits, trojan horses, and spyware. Victims clicked what they thought was a personal homepage, only to have malicious payloads automatically triggered via security vulnerabilities.
• Spam: Spammers took advantage of the free mail exchange features to blast junk mail, register junk forum accounts, and bypass early automated spam filters.
• Adware: CJB came under fire for it's relationship with an adware distributor called 180solutions (later Zango). Allegedly, CJB hosted sites were presented with misleading prompts encouraging them to install advertising software. This caught the attention of the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), which filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for deceptive practices by CJB.

The End

The service ultimately shutdown around July of 2012. The domain is still registered as of writing this post and is set to expire in 2027. R.I.P. 🙏🏻

Easter Egg

Want to see every cjb.net URL indexed by Archive.org ? Here's a little trick, type this URL in your address bar, prepare for it to load forever: http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=cjb.net&matchType=domain&output=text&fl=original&collapse=urlkey