A Piece of Internet History Lost: IO.com Sold, Services To Shut Down 123
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.
Ah well. (Score:1)
I hope whoever bought it will use the domain for something befitting its history... But I'm prepared to be disappointed.
Re:Ah well. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 y
Re:Ah well. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Perhaps yet another reason for more support of S/MIME. Should your mail server change hands like this, you could simply revoke your signed certificate and move on.
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let's just hope they don't use it for ill, intentionally or otherwise.
No, that would be iio.com.
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"You could Own this domain! Contact us for pricing!"
"Related searches for 'Illuminati Online' "
"Cheap Flights! Click here!"
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Duh (Score:1)
It's aliens from Jupiter, and they're not interested in the interplanetary internet [wikipedia.org] finally getting around to establishing .ju or waiting for the British Indian Ocean Territory to relinquish .io
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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.
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Re:Ah well. (Score:4, Funny)
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!
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I'm posting Anon so my brothers will not know it was me that let the secret out. ...yaddi yada...
They would kill me if I posted this under my real account and traced it back to me!
fail
Whoosh
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Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
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Me too!
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
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... 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.
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Ultimate RTFM from the IO BOFH.
-l
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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
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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.
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CARES? Proprietary medium of Commercial Speach. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Thus says the person registered with the most famous of Slashdot handles.
It's lonely in no-where land... You can see the world but no one can see you. If anyone wanted to send you some data that you didn't first request, no one would know where to send it. I'd PM you on IRC, but you've no handle to speak of. I'd pick up the phone and ring you up from time to time, but you're unlisted. I'd invite you to my private server, but you've no email address to receive it. I'd ask around if anyone has heard h
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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.
Early shutdown (Score:5, Funny)
I remember the IOBBS... (Score:2)
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-
fnord (Score:1)
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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 ...
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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.
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You should try innocent US baby sushi before you judge them.
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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.
YOU CAN'T MAKE TIN FOIL HATS OUT OF ALUMINIUM FOIL (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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Farewell, IO (Score:1)
Merry D-Day FRANCE, and have a happy summer (Score:1)
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.
pre-WWIV (Score:2)
When in middle school, I loved Car Wars. Shame about the phone bill to Austin.
So when did SJGames relinquish control of io.com?
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It was spun off way back in '96 or '97 or so, then went through some acquisitions.
Brain freeze (Score:1)
Of course, I'm familiar with the EFF, but I happened to forget what it stands for.
Anybody know offhand (without cheating [slashdot.org])?
Electronic Freedom Fighters?
Electronic Frontier of Freedom?
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That, or Elicit Frozen Fishsticks
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Erisian Fnord Front?
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Electronic Frontier Foundation.
No cheating necessary. I've been a supporter of them since they were founded back when BBS systems were king.
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Now get off my lawn...
I subscribed to io.com, way back when (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Lies! (Score:2)
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.
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Ah, you need to turn the GUI on your phone off and start using it in 80x24 text-mode. I did that with mine, lightning fast now!
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I run a 400mhz Sparc, with 256Mb ram and 7gb of disk space... It quite happily handles 50+ users even today, running a mix of irc sessions, esniper, text based mail clients (mutt/pine) and some development.
That said if people are actually interested in a shell service like io.com then i'm sure we could operate something similar.... Most shell accounts commercially available these days seem to almost exclusively cater to script kiddies on IRC just wanting to run large numbers of eggdrop bots...
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Eggdrop seemed to be unofficially frowned-upon at io.com, but they never really seemed to do much about it (or anything else) unless it was abusive or generated complaints: I know a guy who had set up a crontab to keep eggdrop reasonably awake, and as far as I recall he kept that bot alive for years at $10/month. But that was one bot, on a rather non-contested channel, with a rather cool ISP.
Myself, I used to keep screen sessions active for days, weeks, or months, running ircii, pine, tin, and a bash shel
Identity Recall (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Maybe if you got off your backside and bought a $1 domain that you actually OWN (or at least have a guaranteed annual right to) rather than having A@B.com (are you an international corporation?) you wouldn't have that problem.
Seriously, my MOTHER has her own domain name with infinite aliases and forwarding to a proper email account and has had for years and despite several changes in ISP, host and moving onto webmail still has the same address and has never had to inform people of the change. You could hav
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Oh, I can completely relate to how you feel. Thing is, if you're not in IT, you don't feel that way and sometimes they can't even comprehend that an email address wouldn't be from one of the free or ISP ones.
I have a couple of domains myself, and one is owned by my dad. That domain name is willekens.lu, because our family name is Willekens and we live in Luxembourg. It used to be a pretty expensive and exclusive TLD. Obviously, we all have our firstname@willekens.lu and you'd expect people to easily und
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"Obviously, we all have our firstname@willekens.lu and you'd expect people to easily understand that. Well, most non-IT people simply don't get it. They think you're pulling their leg because that's an email address that "can't be"."
As a vanity domain holder myself I experience this exact same problem. Many non-IT people positively brain lock when I tell them my email is firstname@lastname.net/com/org.
Sorry I don't have any earth shattering insight; just thought I'd share that your experience isn't unique.
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That's okay... It confirms what I've been thinking a long time. Thanks for that.
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Yes, and I've done exactly this. That doesn't ease the discomfort at losing an email address I've had for around 17 years, or change the fact that Google knows me best by that email address, as do many open source projects, mailing lists, and real live people.
I found the buyer! (Score:2)
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?
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Even the thought of that makes me want to cry. That multi-industry monopoly should be out of business*, not profiting (PDF) [corporate-ir.net] and steamrolling history.
*or at least offering à la carte, and apologizing both for astroturfing [wikipedia.org] and getting away with it [msg.com]
Cablevision (Score:2)
Handled Poorly by Richards & Richards (Score:2, Insightful)
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 wa
New Owners (Score:2)
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
if you had been in the office on y2k.. the stories (Score:1)
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 wel
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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.
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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 tha
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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.
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FNORD! (Score:1)
awwwwww crap! (Score:1)
My shell accounts! Gone!
And that bastard Jackson still owes me money.
Free rsync.net accounts for io.com shell logins (Score:2)
If you have an io.com shell account, we would like to gift you a lifetime free rsync.net [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 [textfiles.com], the "Archive Team [archiveteam.org]" an
This doesn't make sense. (Score:2)
Happens too many times (Score:2)
missed it by>< that much (Score:2)
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
I Too was a Cock-Teaser for Roosterama ! (Score:1)
17 years, and now... (Score:1)
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*
A Piece of Internet History Lost (Score:2)
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,
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to be the most vague and not bring in any drama: DSL
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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
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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 sel
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