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A Piece of Internet History Lost: IO.com Sold, Services To Shut Down
An anonymous reader writes "The former Illuminati Online domain, IO.com, has been sold, and all existing customers will lose all services associated with the domain. A 1990 Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games, then owner of the Illuminati Online BBS and later the IO.com domain led to the creation of the EFF and was an important milestone in the fight for online rights. While the domain has been sold in the past, the services offered to customers always remained unchanged. However, this most recent sale, to an unnamed party, will result in all services being dropped on July 1, and people will lose email addresses, web pages, and shell accounts that many have had for 15+ years." Bad news for me — io.com was my first real ISP, and I was hoping to see if I could revive the account.
I hope whoever bought it will use the domain for something befitting its history... But I'm prepared to be disappointed.
I gave up sigs almost a year ago.
...io.com was my first real ISP...
The ones you used before we're fake?
Phone numbers (like 867-5309), IO.Com, Chat account numbers (like IRC, Skype, ICQ), Slashdot uid's; they all have something in common:
jurisdiction.
When you register something, you have no control over it but to administer it for a short while in the influence of the registrar perview.
All these registration systems build a false sense of commerce and security.
Tor, Meshnet, and Peer-to-peer networks are hated because they are devoid of the impulses that cause a registration to be necessary: and those are the limiting of your activities through regulation.
Looks like /. managed to take it down early. Good Job everyone!
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
I joined just before the Operation Sundevil raid, and remember it fondly. Online roleplaying, beta testing SJ Games products, and brainstorming new games were awesome fun for a 20-something geek with too much free time on his hands. I even got a few of my ideas published in the Hacker and GURPS Illuminati products, and a free copy of GURPS Magic Items just for providing one of the staff with the lyrics to Monty Python's Dead Philosopher song.
Once the web emerged, and I got an ISP with NNTP service, a two-line BBS with a 30-minute per day time limit became passe. But from time to time I did poke back in the web presence.
And I still use the same handle now, just about everywhere, that I used then on IOBBS.
Shame that the regulars who stuck it out this long had to see it end this way. May I suggest you seek refuge in the Kenser & Co gazebo? Those guys are cut from the same cloth.
I can see the fnords!
All is well.
Never heard of it, and I suppose many others didn't either. Therefore, for this group of people it wasn't lost, it never existed.
Secret Service raid...Illuminati...led to the creation of the EFF
I knew it! The FOSS movement was a Freemason conspiracy to establish a New World Order through software infiltration. First they took over the server OS market, now they are aiming for the desktop market shares, after that, the entire world!
It's aliens from Jupiter, and they're not interested in the interplanetary internet finally getting around to establishing .ju or waiting for the British Indian Ocean Territory to relinquish .io
need to make room
That's what happens when you finally *do* begin to see the fnords. A pity about the relatively short notice, too.
Can't stop the Beta? Time to evacuate to ##altslashdot at webchat.freenode.net - Slashcott in effect.
It was on D-Day FRANCE was freed from the tyranny of the English and went on their way to develop even stinkier cheeses and more costlier wines.
Wrong illumni, you want aluminaughty; Just follow the metallic crinkling sound -- down the hall, too the left, first door into your own mind.
When in middle school, I loved Car Wars. Shame about the phone bill to Austin.
So when did SJGames relinquish control of io.com?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Of course, I'm familiar with the EFF, but I happened to forget what it stands for.
Anybody know offhand (without cheating)?
Electronic Freedom Fighters?
Electronic Frontier of Freedom?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I remember in my BBS days reading about the SJ Games raid by the Secret Service.
And as soon as I discovered local internet access (mostly through a borrowed account on a VAX at a local school), I started giving SJG's io.com $10/month for a shell account.
But it wasn't just a shell: It was a FreeBSD shell, back when Linux was still a toy, and it had an infallible NetApps backend with snapshots for ~ (which is still rare, even in this day of positively cheap disk storage). It was access to a good news spool, when Usenet was still Usenet. It was a short email address, when such things weren't so special. It was an Apache web server, with a few megabytes of disk quota and plenty of slack if you needed more from time to time. AAnd a personalized anonymous FTP server. And a proper dev environment for building your own software from source.
All on a fast T1. (Remember when a T1 was fast, and a Pentium-based FreeBSD box with 32 or 64MB of RAM could host more than 100 concurrent interactive users? You yungin's will say it's impossible, but it worked well.)
And the operators and managers seemed to actually give a shit about their users' needs. There was a sense of community between the users and the folks running the show that I've never seen elsewhere.
Things were different back then. The web was mostly text, Gopher still was useful, I never minded using Lynx as a browser, and the world's former-best music/discography site (cdnow.com) had an extremely functional and fast interface using...telnet.
Back them, if you wanted new dirt on the latest Linux happenings, you'd look at Matt Welsh's page, as there just weren't any others that were worth keeping up with.
I remember Steve Jackson himself writing on io.com's news (which was more of a .plan than a modern blog) about how he'd given every single desktop in his company proper Internet access, and how he (rightly!) suspected that his was one of the first companies to do so.
Eventually, my io.com account was banished due to a copyright complaint from an outside party. But by then I'd already built my own *nix boxen, and a more proper local ISP than the 9600bps VAX/VMS beast had cropped up that was both worthwhile and was feeding me dual-channel ISDN as a favor, so I never bothered to fight the copyright complaint.
But I still remember the IP address for pentagon.io.com (their first, and primary shell server) from way back when: 199.170.88.5. And I still ping "io.com" when troubleshooting network connectivity: It's a fast and easy way to see that DNS works and that packets are making their way to Texas and back.
But I guess that's gone now, too.
Goodbye, io.com.
Kid-proof tablet..
Bad news. www.tutamee.com
I've been jimm@io.com since 1994 or so --- maybe a year or two earlier than that. You know what I'm worried about most? All those open source projects, emails, and other digital resources that point to jimm@io.com are going to be pointing nowhere in a month. It feels like my online identity is being stolen. Except it's not being stolen, of course --- merely recalled.
io.com was bought by prismnet.com years ago. PrismNet changed hands a few times. The last guy who sold it to the current owner (for $20) didn't sell the io.com domain. He kept it but let them use it---until July 1, 2011.
Transcript show: self sigs atRandom.
Note: parent link isn't to anything shocking, despite names, and is on topic.
iO TV offers over 120 HD channels, including E! HD, Cartoon Network HD, fuse HD and more! Watch HD movies at no extra charge and hundreds of Free On Demand choices. Best of all, HD is free with iO TV!
Too soon?
I bet Cablevision bought it so they can have another place to play their IO digital cable rap song.
the Nodes all have geo-physical locations that only need to be aware that they in-fact have coordination to eachother by [...] satellite
But who would launch such a satellite? The cryptographic keys to get a message relayed by an existing satellite are controlled by a jurisdiction.
While it is certainly understandable that the owner of a valuable 2 letter domain that is currently hosting only a handful of customers would want to sell it, owners Richards & Richards have done so in a very shitty way. Only one month's notice, and absolutely no word from them at all to the customers.
"Screw you, io.com users. We don't care how long you've been around, and we don't care how hard it will be for you to adjust to losing an email address that you've had since 1993. We want our $$$ and we want it now. FOAD by July 1 plz thx."
Absolutely shitty behavior.
I thought Apple had hijacked it, since it starts with i, and they own everything with i. :-P
Remember when a T1 was fast, and a Pentium-based FreeBSD box with 32 or 64MB of RAM could host more than 100 concurrent interactive users? You yungin's will say it's impossible, but it worked well.)
Lies! My phone uses a dual core processor and 256MB of RAM and still can't reliably open my contacts list. I call shenanigans.
Sadly the shenanigans are on us these days. Bloated software indeed. 100 users on a Pentium with 32MB of RAM says it all. We have gone backwards since those days.
My first thought was Google (it would fit with their annual conference of that name and they have cash to play with), but shutting down services like that when they take over isn't their style.
.com name before the new bubble bursts, of course.
There is a TV provider going by that name, it could also be them.
Depending on how much it went for it could just be prospectors hoping to make something out of the two-letter
ahh... to go into the back room and power cycle modems before we got the AS53xx's. custom php ticket server, direct NNTP access w/ a mirror of... well, you know.. on your catalog of... zip drives. unmanaged 3com switches. microwave fries. unlimited cokes. an unauthorized upgrade to the netapp filer from a p90 to a p120 that somehow actually worked by just dropping in the new proc and flipping a jumper.... sendmail recipes from hell. procmailrc's all over the place. redhat vs slackware was alive and well (i wont tell you which had what). bonded POTS lines before my apartment could get ISDN....
It was a beautiful circus of magical mystery. But none of it existed.
EOF
It's the new Apple Orgasm site, where fanbois can all climax over the latest iProduct...
fnord fnord fnord. Hey! Wait! Don't pick up the ph{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
My shell accounts! Gone!
And that bastard Jackson still owes me money.
OK, a dumb question, but I can't find my answer through google search. Why did Steve Jackson lose control or sell io.com in the first place, so that he could later (now) completely lose the domain?
I'm just "this guy", you know?
Been there, done that. I almost went to work with Jher @ IO after I left Texas.Net, but ended up at OnRamp.
Sitting up on the 12th floor of 7th and Brazos for Y2K, listening to my police scanner and watching the crazyness down on 6th,
chatting with colleagues across town and across the country on IRC as we all did the same thing - waiting for a problem that
"never came" because we'd all worked to make sure it didn't happen.
... after that, the entire world!
Yeah, but where are we going to get 15 pair of lederhosen this time of night Brain! Zot!
ahh... to go into the back room and power cycle modems before we got the AS53xx's. custom php ticket server, direct NNTP access w/ a mirror of... well, you know.. on your catalog of... zip drives. unmanaged 3com switches. microwave fries. unlimited cokes. an unauthorized upgrade to the netapp filer from a p90 to a p120 that somehow actually worked by just dropping in the new proc and flipping a jumper.... sendmail recipes from hell. procmailrc's all over the place. redhat vs slackware was alive and well (i wont tell you which had what). bonded POTS lines before my apartment could get ISDN....
It was a beautiful circus of magical mystery. But none of it existed.
EOF
I remember all that, in addition to the 'circle of power' on the server room floor where we had to resurrect the Deliverator, the surprises the overnight staff would leave for the sales staff in the morning, and a whole bunch of guys and gals learning the ropes of this whole 'running the Internet' thing. Oddly enough, I'm back over where it started now, and trying to keep this article from /.-ing us. :)
I suppose I'll always be able to access it on archive.org, but just to be safe, I'm backing-up this recipe for sour dough starter: http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm
If you have an io.com shell account, we would like to gift you a lifetime free rsync.net account for the purposes of backing up, and parking, the contents of that shell account.
I have never had an io.com shell, but between rsync and tar+gpg+ftp you should be able to quickly and easily dump the contents of your shell to an rsync.net account.
Just email info@rsync.net and we'll set this up for you. FWIW, this is a continuation of our efforts to support the work being done by Jason Scott, the "Archive Team" and the safeguarding of digital history, generally.
Unless the buyer is Microsoft (embrace, extend, extinguish) and even then it doesn't make sense. Why purchase something of value only to discard what is valuable about it? Purchasing IO.com and then removing all users and services is like purchasing a bag of gold, and discarding the gold for the worthless bag. The very value of the site is the users and services!
The Admin and the Engineer
Bah, that was at the *new* office... I was employee #1 there (the first guy who didn't have a stake in the company) - installing BSDi, finally getting a terminal server instead of a big multi-serial-port card... twist-tying modems to pegboard... setting up the Metaverse... serial.io.com, eie.io.com, ... gopher and archie and ftp... signup scripts cobbled together in perl. EFF-Austin and Ho-Ho Con... the world and the internet were very different places back then.
Very sad. I've been jamshid@io.com for over 15 years. Yikes time flies. Thanks for the shell access and cgi-bin capabilities, back when that was useful and rare. Hope the new domain owners put it to good use, not to host some content farm or flash in the pan social site.
This happened to me three times, all three while I was job hunting. First McAfeemail.com shut down with two weeks notice, when I had around 150 resumes out there with that address. A year or so later the local ISP that I had signed up with went belly up overnight, leaving another 100 or so resumes stranded without an email address. Finally Qwest/USWest shut down their mail servers, giving users just two weeks to switch to MSN (at 50% higher price) where they would ever-so-graciously forward your mail for a month. Even with 200+ resumes out there I didn't want to deal with MSN (high speed service wasn't available in my area).
I've decided that to avoid this situation in the future I'll just never get laid off again. That should work . . .
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
The whois lookup for io.com shows it was created Aug, 17th, 1993. I'll keep watching for the updated owner.
I had that account until December of 2010, when I decided I'd migrated all the folks that mattered to my newer email address and I wasn't getting anything but spam at the io.com address.
I wonder who is going to get the domain now, and how much they are coughing up for it.
This website was taken down due to reasons and stuff! You can still visit Goatse Security. Thank you!
Oh no!
"The former Goatse domain, goatse.fr, has been taken down, and all existing goatse'rs will lose all services associated with the domain. A 1492 court order to the Goatse Guy, then winner of the World's Most Stretch Anus award, and later named Slashdot's Best Editor under the name kdawson forcing the site to display a message to not look at it, led to the creation of the GNAA and was an important milestone in the fight for the online rights of gay, niggers. While the domain has been sold in the past, the services offered to customers always remained unchanged. However, this most recent sale, to an unnamed party, will result in all services being dropped on July 1, and people will lose email addresses, web pages, and shell accounts that many have had for 15+ years."
Sigh! I have had my io.com email account for a long time. It is going to be a pain to 1) remember a new one and 2) tell everyone.
AT
So yea, I was initiated to the internet via IO.com. And I too used OpenVMS Vax at school before I even knew what the "Open" part even meant. I just wish I had stayed CLI like the rest of you geeks. I struggle to even configure a .profile anymore and regular expressions are not regular to me at all. One thing I do remember that seemed very much a part of the secret-code-ring-key exciting mystery thing of it at the time was the "dot plan" [.pln ] Remeber those ? Everybody had one in the root of thier public account and it was where the coolest and most obscure and frightening ASCII art was paraded. As I remember, Bob Dobbs and Barney the Dinosaur were by far the most popular frameworks for the stram of conssiousness manifestos contained in any groover worth their salt with a "plan".
Does anybody do those anymore ? I wish I still had a copy of mine to be sure.
Oh, and what about that FNORD guy ? Is he really a would-be amature "art" photographer or is he actually, you know, OKOP ? ...just wondering...
I have had my mindglue@io.com account for almost 17 years. I am...not really sure what to do. I'm having a digital identity crisis. I have my email archived from 1995. I have...hundreds of emails from various internet services in my "accounts" folder.
I guess I'm going to have to spend the next month contacting them all, one by one.
*sniffle*
UNIVERSE PERFORATED HERE FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Some of your security holes remained as late as 2002. I used to telnet to io.com, log in as guest, where lynx was provided as the shell to access legacy customer self-maintenance and create new accounts, type "g ." and drop right down to the filesystem! Since directory permissions under /home were all over the map, I could enter and browse over half of the user's home folders, including downloading files locally. Someone fixed this after IO was moved to PrismNet. I worked at IO from 2000-2001, and presented a survey of overly-permissive /home file permissions to the "engineers". They didn't have a high regard for the phone techs. They had more important things to do, like giggle to themselves as they flirted in MUDs. Ahh, kitten....
Wow, looks like we had a chat 10/6/2001 about IO's refusal to implement Front Page Extensions:
You said:
> Did you ever bother to *check*? I cant imagine that a single "no" to a
> customer would result in a "harsh reprimand". IO certainly didn't seem like
> that kind of a place when I almost went to work for them in mid-'98
> (unfortunately, they wanted me to take a pay *cut* from where I was already
> putting in 80 hour weeks).
Later in the email, I said "You may be amused to hear that your chapter in the Book of IO is still told in hushed tones by the light of flickering monitors late at night. And the story of many others, who have come and gone. IO receives quite a few visits by ex employees and friends and there's always new things learned each time. Word sifts from one shift to the next.", LOL
Seriously, we Illuminati Online Alumni ought to have some kind of reunion... any takers?
an IO Alumni and Friends / Ex-ISP-Employees reunion would consist of a bunch of us old farts sitting around a table:
"Remember when..."
"Yeah..."
"Heh."
"Heh."
Then lots of drinking of hard alcohol.
The "good old days" of '95-2000 or so were fun. Lots of friendly competition, smack-talking each other on Usenet, but then we were all in it together and were just doing the same thing for different masters.
Whoops, forgot to log in before posting this one.