The domain McDonalds.com slipped into the hands of Wired magazine reporter Josh Quittner when he first created it in 1994. "Josh and I sat there and did a whole bunch of whois lookups on the Fortune 500 companies," remembered fellow Wired staffer Brian Behlendorf. "Eventually Josh gave it back to McDonald's in exchange for McDonald's funding a T-1 in perpetuity to a high school in the Bronx."

Besides being a great prank on corporate America, it's a parable, commemorating forever those frontier days of the net when pesky issues like copyrights and trademark law simply hadn't occured to anyone. We were once that innocent.

It didn't last long. Quittner eventually wrote an article for Wired noting that Sprint had originally registered MCI.com - one of Sprint's competitors - for reasons that have never been fully explained.

The incident did not in any way resemble this picture. It's just that this is one of the greatest pictures of all time, and not including a link here would be morally wrong.