Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 16:13:11 -0500 Subject: Re: Permit me to introduce myself/Q's for Kibo Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Status: R David Pachecho writes: jaxom17@hotmail.com says... > Hello. > > I've been a lurker in a.r.k. for about four months, and I felt > that it was time to introduce myself and contribute to this NG. YES, DAMMIT! WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING! Allow me to sit back and baste myself in the meat juices of your wisdom. LEAD ON, MACDUFF, CRIME FIGHTING DOG OF JUSTICE! > My name's Shawn David Struck, and I'm a dragon-oholic. ^^ HELLO SHAWN! I'M DAVID, 14-YEAR OLD UNIX WIZARD AND HACKER EXTRAORDINAIRE! ^^ > I work as a graphic designer/production staff member for a > local newspaper publishing company. > > I'm 19 years old, but I've lived on my own and supported myself > since I was 17. I live in the city of Metuchen (pronounced > meh-TUH-chin, named after the Native American chief whose tribe > the Europeans slaughtered and stole all thier neato multi-colored > corn.But thier name lives on in the town's name... > Nice consolation prize, eh?)in New Jersey (State Motto: "No, wait! > We can explain!"). HELLO SHAWN! ^^ > I have my own chunk of web at: STEAMIN'! --^ > Okay, formal introduction shtuffs are outta th' way. Now, onto > the questions/observations/nougat: > > I've spent the past three days poring over the archived rants of > Archimedes "Damn These Dishpan Hands" Plutonium. I've head his posts, > counter posts, other people comments and replies, his self-replies... > Gawd help me, I even waded through his ENTIRE web site. ::shudder:: > I have never seen a more deluded and self-absorbed individual, and I've > met some real kooks. And he's not even a harmless kook, becuase he's > been know to harass other people that dare to question him.. even calling > up their employers! Scary. You think THAT'S scary... what do you think of THIS!!! BWAA! HA HA HAAA! Scared ya, huh? Oh wait... you're on the other side of this wire. You can't see what's in my hand. Never mind. > But I have a question for the Great Kibo (tm): How exactly did Archimedes get > intertwined with alt.religion.kibology? I've been trying to search Dejanews > for the August '93 post that was your first response to one of his posts, but > the archives only go back as far as '95. Could you possibly repost what > Archie Pu said, and your reply? I'm really curious. Dear Curious in Metamucil: What a fun question! I'm sure that the answer has already been provided by other posters, so I will just summarize the current conclusions that are widely accepted by the most-recognized paleokibologists of today: In June 1993 world.std.com was still recruiting for the VP position in its advertising department. This was, back then, a position of much prestige, and recognized as such in the whole Internet/Usenet community. The VP of Advertising for Software Tool & Die had always been occupied by noted (and vocal) members of Usenet, especially the comp.*, control.* and since-deceased hack.* hierarchies (or "Big Three"). In fact, ST&D was probably the first company to hire for a position exclusively out of the Internet, and had been doing so since 1990. This position would report directly to the CIO of ST&D, who was at that time Matt McIrvin. Matt and Archimedes (who back then still went by his old name "Ludvig") were good friends, and had been since their time together at RPI: Ludvig had graduated with Matt's sister, and in fact had helped both Lara and Matt through tough financial times in the late '80s. Matt had developed a wide-ranging theory of how advertising for ST&D would operate, and had a curious new project he called "Flashpoint Advertising," which I referred to in a previous post[1]. This project would focus advertising energies on a particular individual, creating a "cult of personality disorder" that would be associated with someone "hip" and "cool" on the 'net. This association would lead back to the individual's ISP, allowing ST&D to increase its coffers by adding subscribers. The VP of Advertising would be the person to take the reigns of this project and bring it to fruition. Naturally, in late June 1993 the whole 'net was abuzz, and rife with rumours about who would be the person selected for the role. Everyone, however, agreed that it was down to Ludvig and James Parry (who had no other sobriquet at this point)... but that it was Ludvig's to lose, given his close association with McIrvin. Both had the experience, both were currently working in upper-echelon positions for existing major-market ISPs (Ludvig for The Well, Parry for WebTV), and both were eager to assume the position for the job. As I said, the job was in the palm of Ludvig's hands. While his qualifications were on par with Parry's, the fact that McIrvin owed him BIG favors (the previously-mentioned loans, plus the infamous Well kickback scheme scandal that wasn't revealed to the public until the next year) meant that Parry had an outside chance at the best. Parry was desperate, and understandably so. So he played his only ace card... a hacker of inconsiderable prowess, he had already hacked into the ST&D root accounts and had complete access to the main PDP-8 that was the backbone server for the company at that time. Parry had already hacked into McIrvin's email account as well, and discovered the draft of a message, addressed to Ludvig, offering him the VP position. This discovery prompted him into action: he started creating thousands of accounts on the PDP-8, providing them with news and email access, and distributing freely and anonymously them to college students around the Boston area... and after a couple of days, around the U.S. His idea was to create a solid base of users, all armed with free accounts, who upon graduation (and landing paying jobs) would be willing to pay to stay with ST&D in order maintain their existing email addresses and .plan files. He did this covertly, wanting to surprise McIrvin with a list of thousands of new users and potential customers for Software Tool & Die, thus virtually guaranteeing himself the position. After all, if he could do this _without_yet_ even working for ST&D - he thought to himself - imagine what he could do in the VP position? The plan backfired. Naturally, the students loved their free accounts, and by September 1993 the 'net was flooded with new users. But since none of them had received any of the UseNet Co. required training in Netiquette, Crossposting and Advanced Smilie Techniques, they wreaked havoc everywhere they went. To make matters worse, the colleges these students worked for began realizing the potential for advertising (much as the visionary McIrvin had), and decided to set up their own ISPs, using the until-then unused ".edu" DNS suffix. The students deserted ST&D when they realized that they would have to pay for the accounts after graduation, correctly assuming that the colleges would have an impossible time collecting the account fees (since they were simply added to the school loans that the students had no intention of paying anyway), and so the vast pool of revenue that Parry had envisaged evaporated in days. So Parry had blood on his hands: the 'net had been reduced to a chaotic shambles, Usenet was completely unusable due to the newbie infestations, and the signal/noise ratio plummeted. The September That Never Ended had begun. To make things worse, it could all be traced back to the std.com PDP-8, since all the students knew that this was where their initial free accounts had come from. So Parry made his next mistake: he logged into std.com using the root account, deleted all traces of his presence, and rewrote the system logs to make it look like the person who had created the accounts and modified the fee processing daemons had been... Ludvig Plutonium. And then, according to the unauthorized biography that he published in 1997: "...I pushed my chair back from the desk. What had I done? No matter, it was too late: the root password had been changed using a random number generator, so even I could no longer gain access to it. The deed was done, and I, reluctant Pilatus, washed my hands of the whole affair. I held my head in my hands and wept openly. Ludvig would be ruined, his reputation as leader, genius and philanthropist would lay in tatters at his feet, and he would become the laughing stock and scapegoat of the whole of the Internet: all due to my carelessness and ego-tripping. But I couldn't allow myself to think about this now: there were other things to do, other matters that required my attention. For example, Solid Gold was on."[3] The next day came to be known as "Faecal Ventilation Day." McIrvin logged into the PDP-8, read the anonymous email "tip" that had been forwarded to him, read the logs and went nuts: he immediately signed on to ICQ, found Ludvig and laid into him. No one but Matt and Ludvig know what happened during that chat session, and both have remained tight- lipped about it ever since, but those who logged into the Internet that long night still talk of being able to hear the wires screaming. Here were the two most senior members of the UseNet Cabal (TINUC), exchanging language never heard before in the mostly sombre electronic halls of the new medium. At the end of FV-Day, Ludvig's career had been destroyed... but so had Matt's. He was fired as CIO of ST&D, his controlling interest in the company ceremonially stripped from him, his wife and children publicly flogged. The job of CIO went to Matt's second secretary's junior sub- assistant, a young man named Barry Shein who immediately hired James Parry (the only real candidate left) as VP of Advertising. James, who had read about the "Flashpoint Advertising" project while hacking McIrvin's emails, immediately implemented the project, but with a twist: he first made it sound as if the idea was originally his, and then made sure that the "Cult of Personality Disorder" would be constructed around *himself*. He created a new personality to go with the cult, gave himself the pseudonym of "Kibo," newgrouped alt.religion.kibology... and the rest, as they say, is history. It has obviously been overwhelmingly successful, meaning that Parry now has the run of ST&D, implementing policy, administering the finances, and most important of all: determining who got an account on the powerful PDP-11 that was brought in to replace the now-unusable (since no one had the root password any more) PDP-8. Shein was reduced to the position of figurehead, merely a finger-puppet controlled by Parry, his role one of just being allowed to feed the ST&D piranha. By November 1993, James "Kibo" Parry owned ST&D... and thus the Internet. Granted, an Internet in chaos and ruin: but Kibo played the fiddle as Usenet burned, and proclaimed himself Emperor over all that remained. He had the power to do so: an account on the ST&D PDP-11 at that time could fetch up to $11,000 (for setup fees only) on the open market. McIrvin and Parry have never referred to the issue again, preferring to ignore the whole salacious and traumatic episode. It's doubtful that McIrvin realizes the chicanery and deceit that took place at that time, but one cannot feel any sympathy for him: the skeletons in Matt's closets were much more far-reaching in their implications, and were far more serious than the simple destruction of the Internet wrought by James. And Ludvig? He went insane. He immediately renounced computing and everything related to it, resigned in disgrace from his job at The Well and went to work for Dartmouth University as a Physics Professor. The posts you see from him today are not written by him, as he to this day refuses to touch a keyboard. Instead, his TA laboriously types in the posts that Ludvig (now "Archimedes") scratches on the inside of coconut shells, using nothing but stiff, uncooked spaghetti. What was the question again? [...random other stuff from Shawn (HELLO SHAWN!) elided so that this post comes in under the UseNet Co. legal 100-line limit...] > Heh. Well, anyhow, I look forward to participating in what I'm sure will be > interesting discussions and such. Oh, I'm sorry. You're in the wrong newsgroup. You're looking for rec.org.mensa. Second hallway, down to the left. Sorry about that: please ignore everything you just read above. > Shawn David Struck HELLO SHAWN! -dp. [1] See in alt.religion.kibology and misc.legal. [2] TINF [3] "How I destroyed the Internet and sold it to Bill Gates", J.K. Parry. 1997, Waldenbooks, Aisle 7 (Cleaning Supplies).