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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.
clearly he was on AOL before IO
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
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.
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
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.
Yeah, kind of like the Japanese that lived in America that were jailed and sent to camps during WW2. Didn't happen because you never heard of it too right? Protip: it's called history and archiving history is important. Your childish views that if you never heard of it it doesn't exist or matter is awful.
Wrong illumni, you want aluminaughty; Just follow the metallic crinkling sound -- down the hall, too the left, first door into your own mind.
Hmm, that's very close to a godwin, that is. Comparing WW2 atrocities with the shutting down of an internet domain, old though it may be? Really?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
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
Electronic Freedom Foundation
That, or Elicit Frozen Fishsticks
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
No cheating necessary. I've been a supporter of them since they were founded back when BBS systems were king.
That you never heard of it doesn't mean it never existed, or isn't important. SJGames and IO played an important role in early internet freedom and the founding of EFF. I do hope you've heard of that.
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..
Back in the early '90s, there were two kinds of service that you could dial into (aside from bulletin board systems). Online Service Providers (OSPs) offered a large walled-garden network. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provided Internet access. ISPs might have hosted some content (e.g. web or FTP sites for their users), but all of this content was accessible by anyone on any ISP. OSPs hosted content that was only visible within their network. Often, OSPs didn't use TCP, but many of them did provide Internet access via some tunnelling mechanism. Quite often, OSPs would charge more for Internet access than for access to their internal network. Two of the big OSPs were AOL and CompuServe. These typically gave you a fixed number of normal minutes online per month, but charged you more per minute for premium services, of which Internet access was one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Naw, he was on Juno before IO.
So the Japanese should still be kept in camps, because that's history and it's important to preserve it?
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.
I assume you are trolling. Recall the saying about history and those that forget history are doomed to repeat it (paraphrased).. Anyways one of the things Italy has done is marked a sign in the Ghetto district of Venice, Italy. On it is basically apologizing for the way the Jewish people were treated. It's a physical reminder and a symbolic one that the perpetrators will not ever forget what was done and as long as that sign stays up a reminder not to do it again.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
Pretty much *not* a Godwin, as nobody was compared to the Nazis.
The Nazis weren't the only people to do Evil in history, or even during WW2 ...
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.
Me too!
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.
Civil rights? Freedom of speech?
Someone bought a domain and decided to not continue the services the previous owner offered. People start talking about how it's a shame such an old and symbolic domain now vanishes. Someone says it isn't a big deal to people who've never heard of it, and someone else compares that to WW2 atrocities - let me call them 'questionable american policies' if you prefer.
Where did the civil rights issue come in?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Which is why I said "close to a godwin" - and yes, I'm well aware that it was the Americans imprisoning countless innocent asians based on nothing but the color of their skin.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Their slanted eyes also played a role, as did their buck teeth and affinity for raw fish, rice and killing innocent US babies.
You should try innocent US baby sushi before you judge them.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
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
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.
to be the most vague and not bring in any drama: DSL
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.
I worked for IO from 1995-1997, I started right after they moved out of the SJ offices to their own space on South IH 35 in Austin.
(I might have some of the facts wrong here, but this is the gist of it, as I remember things)
Steve was a part owner of io.com, but he ran into some troubles, had a criminal accountant that ran off with his money, and he wound up selling his shares of Illuminati Online to his brother so he could save SJ Games.
His brother and whatever other partners were still around, wound up selling to Prism.net soon after, which is when they went from being Illuminati Online to just IOCOM. Steve wouldn't let them keep the 'Illuminati' name, that trademark was his.
I had a lot of fun working with those guys back then.
Fnord.
Yep. I had shell access, usenet and FTP from io.com once upon a time. I only had a 386 so didn't try to set up SLIP with them. They literally required you to buy an O'Reilly (or similar) book on SLIP from them in order to sign up for the service. If you could prove that you already owned the book, they would refund a certain portion of the sign-up fee.
1, 99% of users would have no use for shell accounts... Especially today, when broadband is prevalent so people can leave things running on their own machine... Shells were most useful when it was too expensive to keep a dialup connected 24/7.
2, 99% of users have no use for usenet, and a lot of the 1% only use it for warez, which isnt exactly what it was intended for (or is really suitable for)...
3, Quite a few ISPs still run mirror sites, and they are actually more useful today than they were way back when... In those days, your dialup could download at 2-3KB/sec and you could achieve these speeds from almost any site, these days i have 50mbit/sec from my isp, but due to over subscription of their peering links i rarely get more than 20mbit downloading, yet i can achieve the full 50mbit/sec rate from their internal mirror site.
4, lowest common denominator service... back in the days, 99% of isp customers were clued up people so you could have a useful conversation with them and resolve problems quickly... These days, 99% of isp customers are technically illiterate and won't understand technical explanations, nor be able to follow complicated instructions... Also most ISPs are now run by businessmen rather than geeks, who will happily lie to customers about the true nature of a problem. Back in the days if i couldn't connect, i would call the isp and they would give me a simple response like "router X has failed which links the dialup pool to the backbone, we expect it to be back online in 2 hours"... Being capable of understanding this information, i realise theres nothing i can do and just get on with something else for 2 hours... Recently someone i knew called their ISP to complain about being unable to connect, they had her reboot multiple times, install redundant software, mess with settings, reinstall redundant software for about 4 hours before she gave up... I went to check on it 2 hours later and it worked immediately, turns out the ISP was suffering an outage at the time but company policy was not to admit to any problems and so they wasted my friends time and made her feel it was her fault.
6, economies of scale... i run a small isp, and would love to provide all these services... however doing so would cost more than the big mass market players, and most people would not pay extra even for a better service.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Erisian Fnord Front?
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.
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Now get off my lawn...
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
I remember CompuServe costing $12/hour. And GENIE (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) changing $18/hour during the day and $6/hour at night.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
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.
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
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."
And also like that, a remainder of IO.com should be fine. No need to keep the actual thing running for remembering.
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: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
... thus ensuring that they could downsize the tech support hotline to an answerphone playing a loop of "Open your manual at page one, read to the back cover, then set up your connection. Thank you and goodbye."
Sweet. We should try this at work.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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....
I was a CST there 2000-2001 and I don't actually remember encountering any legacy DSL customers...
IO entered and withdrew from the DSL scene in a very short timeframe. There should still be some apologetic articles in Illuminati Online's news posts. Being resellers, IO's staff were at a disadvantage with regard to provisioning and troubleshooting DSL issues. The truth is either that IO was mistreated by SBC, or IO management simply screwed up in trying to establish the process. Possibly a combination of both. I'm sure it lost IO a lot of money. IO continued to offer dialup and ISDN.
"Illuminati Online, dropped its ADSL in December after offering it for only two months. A worker there who asked not to be identified says the ISP also had problems with Southwestern Bell." (see tinyurl com ioquitsadsl, second from last paragraph -but their dates are off since i'm certain that IO had given up on ADSL some time before June 2000)
I see you were warned about having a mail spool greater than 10MB by lori fife around 12/22/2000, lol. I kept all of my work email. Deliverator was always smoking and groaning. It was the cause of most of our customer complaints during business hours. 400Mhz isn't much power when 10,000 business customers are emailing big attachments. The other two email servers were only used for spooling email that was coming in too fast to toss into inboxes. For some bizarre reason, IO staff used the SAME email server as the customers! We'd get yelled at for not knowing the contents of some memo, when the memo was still lost somewhere.
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?
Whoops, forgot to log in before posting this one.
Ultimate RTFM from the IO BOFH.
-l
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