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The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by 21-year-old student Alex Tew from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels. Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon. The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; as of 9 May 2009, it is 40,044. On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross income. During the January 2006 auction, the website was subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack and ransom demand, which left it inaccessible to visitors for a week while its security system was upgraded. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Wiltshire Constabulary investigated the attack and extortion attempt. (more...)

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From Wikipedia's newest articles:

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• Jacob Zuma (pictured) is sworn in as South Africa's fourth president since the end of apartheid.
• Typhoon Chan-hom causes at least 26 deaths in northern Luzon, Philippines, with certain areas placed under a state of calamity.
• The arrest of Mas Selamat bin Kastari, Singapore's most-wanted fugitive and allegedly a Jemaah Islamiyah militant, is announced.
• The death toll in Brazil's most devastating floods in over 20 years reaches 19, with 186,000 people left homeless.
• Guinea recalls ambassadors from 30 countries worldwide without explanation.
• The 2009 World Table Tennis Championships conclude, with China's Wang Hao and Zhang Yining winning the men's singles and women's singles titles respectively.
• The European Parliament endorses a bill banning imports of seal products, drawing complaints from the Canadian government.
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May 10: Mother's Day in several countries (2009); Constitution Day in the Federated States of Micronesia

• 1503 – Christopher Columbus and his crew became the first Europeans to visit the Cayman Islands, naming them Las Tortugas after the numerous sea turtles there.
• 1824 – The National Gallery in London, which today houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900, opened to the public inside the former townhouse of the recently deceased art collector John Julius Angerstein.
• 1857 – The Sepoy Rebellion broke out in colonial India, threatening the rule of the British East India Company.
• 1869 – The golden spike ceremony was held at Promontory Summit, Utah, celebrating the completion of North America's First Transcontinental Railroad between the Missouri and Sacramento Rivers.
• 1893 – For trade purposes under the Tariff Act of 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Nix v. Hedden that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit.
• 1924 – J. Edgar Hoover (pictured) became the first director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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