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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.
let's just hope they don't use it for ill, intentionally or otherwise. Think about it, among other things whoever owns that domain now will be able to intercept all mail to io.com accounts, and with the quickness and suddenness of the transfer not everyone's who uses those addresses is going to be able to completely transition off them before the transfer happens
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
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!
Where are my mod points today? You make a very good point about the security risks involved in such a domain transfer. How many services use email verification? How many people are aware of all the services they subscribed to over the years? And even if they are, will they have time to track them all down and change all email addresses within one month?
One month is really not enough notification for something this invasive. Of course you can't really forbid someone to sell a domain name they own, but when you have users, they have rights too. I hope they will at least forward all incoming mail to their users' new addresses. If not, the security issues involved are pretty serious.
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!
The security issue here is identity theft. If you have access to someone's email account, you can pretend to be him. In this case, the new owner of the domain doesn't have access to old mail, but they do have access to new mail sent to those accounts. Any verification mail sent to those accounts will end up in the hands of the new owner, without the original user of that email account ever knowing.
Wrong illumni, you want aluminaughty; Just follow the metallic crinkling sound -- down the hall, too the left, first door into your own mind.
My bet would be a company into something like Flash-based SANs, with marketing guys not interested in the original meaning of IO.com but betting that such a catchy domain name will convince people they really care about IOPS, and/or to try and be perceived as the next big player in that field.
We'll see early enough anyway -- too soon I'm sure for everyone using on io.com today, sadly.
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.
I'm posting Anon so my brothers will not know it was me that let the secret out. You see Steve Jackson stole the domain from us Masons years ago. We were setting it up for secret online meetings and to hold the secret Mason Wiki for Master Mason access to find out what other Worshipful Masters were up to and to see live camera feeds of the holy grail as it toured the world as well as the other lesser artifacts like water from the fountain of youth, and the secret film of Kennedy being kidnapped by our secret mason strike squad and replaced with a life like dummy. etc...
WE now have it back once again! Our power is now complete! Unite my brothers!
I am glad to let the secret out, They would kill me if I posted this under my real account and traced it back to me!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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 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.
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.