Let me say that there were many places on the old pre-forprofit Internet where people could meet to chat who were gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. For example: IRC - Internet Relay Chat was huge, there were some MUDs - MultiUser Dungeons (MOOs) and other off shoots, but they had their detractors, like IRC could display every person's location, and the users were not exclusively LGBT, MUDs had similar issues including a more difficult user interface and they were designed for game play which intrinsically spread users over their virtual landscape and made conversation and community more difficult. Among some other alternatives was Lintilla an adult chat site, which had one gay chat server on port 5002.
However, I did not realize until much later that in 1993 there was no exclusively LGBT Internet chat site.
I did not start out to make an LGBT server, this was more of a coding and deployment exercise. I tried running MUD code, but that was a memory hog and did not fix privacy concerns, I looked at other code bases and settled on a solution similar to Lintilla which was NUT (Neil's Unix Talker) code as a base. There was a simplistic backdoor which I removed and added some missing memory management. Some problems were the reliance on telnet to connect, similar to IRC and the inherent concurrent user login restrictions. But I could restrict who could view logins, and create a rudimentary authorization system, allowing only certain users to view content. And adding encryption to the authentication system.
I brought on a small group of five people from across various timezones to be administrators, and soon had a few hundred people using this system.
I named the talker "The Keep" mainly as a reference to the atmosphere being a small castle. Kind of a fantasy setting with several open public areas and a few rooms that could be made private and a jail to remove users that broke the rules. The rules were simple, like the interface, no fighting, no hate and no bullying.
For the Interface, everything was text based, you could chat in the room, chat directly to any person who was not set to private, post a short message on a room board, and leave a short message for users who may not be logged in, or even if they were logged in. Administrators were called Wizards and they could speak into any non-private room and listen to conversations in any non-private room, move users from one room to another, and speak directly to users even if they were set to private. You could block a user and not see any information about them, and all users could create a short profile.
The Keep opened to the public in April 1994 and shutdown December 1995.
At the end we had over 100,000 unique ids created which probably translated into about 10,000 unique users, primarily LGBT with allies and questioning people also visiting.
Attacks from without (Homophobes and fake Lesbians)
Throughout The Keep's existence there were various attacks from homophobes, none very creative, logging on and spewing hate language would get them and their IP address banned, writing various hate messages on the boards. Then they would target one person at a time, trying to get each to logout. Various denial of service attacks such as logging in and filling all of the lots, but this was defeated, and attempts to cut off the server's bandwidth, and these were avoided by some hasty server routes or dropping traffic or just moving to a different server temporarily, in 1994 firewalls were a rarity - May 1995 was the first time I installed firewall code. I had a small script that verified the service was running and would send me any new messages (forward from the talker mail to my direct email).
The most heinous attack was someone who kept trying to get The Keep shutdown, and would lie about the community there, make claims about x-rated picture exchange, when, unlike IRC, that was not a capability. Finally this person, still unknown to me, would entice members to send him via email pictures, but then the person on the other end of the email would claim to be "a child" and "his parents" would report the incoming pictures to our local police. After a few attacks, (they used the same email address Hyperion@...) the local authorities put him on mute and eventually they disappeared, hopefully to find the mental health resources they needed.
Another type of attack was directed at our Lesbian users, while the numbers were about half of our male users, they were a mainstay. Straight men would login and pretend to be Lesbian and attempt to chat with the various women there. I created an administrative protocol so those users we knew were women could ask us to verify if the person they were talking with was coming from a server with a woman logged in. Back in these days most workstations and servers were directly connected to the internet and ran a service called 'fingerd' and that could be used to remotely determine who was logged in. I had to disable this on The Keep's server along with many other services that were being attacked - see above. But in general most users did not know how to keep themself out of a localhost's utmp file (look it up, I am not going to explain here). So, Administrators would finger a remote workstation and let them know if they were female or male to the best of our resources. Life was easy and fun back then. A decade later women had the same problem where I worked, but no resources were dedicated to fix that issue.
The Rebirth and Shutdown
Summer of 1995, however, the University shutdown all non-academic activities, including a MUD that had been running for many years. I was about to sunset The Keep. I had taken a job at a local ISP - employee number five, but there was no place to start this up at that time. One of the users whose ID was Korey said he had a place we could run the code, so shortly before the deadline I moved the user database to a server about 3000 miles away, to Santa Clara, CA. Since most of my ISP work was admin and networking, aside from coding some security applications like a firewall to limit traffic from the ISP side and the other business functions - we sold custom database software, hardware running various flavors of Unix.
I worked to fix some of the problems with the Keep's code which meant moving from a telnet interface to a general socket and adding some padding. The first pass would connect several running talkers so a user could send messages directly to a user on a different instance, and perform some other commands, but really was more of a hack using some command line tools, flat files and a couple direct socket connections.
A few months after moving the code I found out that Korey was a project manager at an Internet Data Center, (I won't disclose the name, but they are gone now, and if you know, you know). He was creating tickets to have their networking team point the connections to various servers of their clients, and had one of their admins install the code there. I began asking questions when the code had problems running and I noticed the servers kept changing. Then Korey started logging in and pretending to be me, when I asked him about that he gave me an ultimatum to had over the code and let him be the owner or he would shut down The Keep.
It may seem like a small thing, but there were a tight knit group of us there, mostly college aged at Universities throughout the world, and some of them had come to me because they said they would have been lost if they had not found this place of community. Some people on there were locally famous or had well known relatives, and I had a protocol for them I blocked their IP address from being stored and put in a dummy IP address. Only administrators could see a user's IP address, but when I moved the code the logs were out of my control, so I stopped logging the IP address of most of the people who were at risk that I knew and just substituted a 172.random address in the public usable space. I just told people that the user must be behind a firewall and their address was not routeable.
In 1995 someone from gay.com logged in and started advertising on our site. They invited me and some of my admins to view their code - looked like an A/S/L site, organized by state and city, they had a large number of people (about 3K logged in) code was similar to IRC. As I told the person showing me around, kind of made me sad to see that was what people (gay men) wanted.
To close out this story, I had also added a poison pill, a command that had a password that only I knew and could run, no one could see that command, and it would delete all of the logs, libraries and binaries. So, I logged in one night, alone, and ran that command. I had pretty much completed the new upgrade, I needed to test on some different servers, and I was ok with walking away. I had left the University and was working a lot of hours, I was moving out of town and my direction was moving forward, but I was worried that under new management the user's confidential information might be exposed out of Santa Clara. The new team seemed to have a contempt for the people using the service, so he was going to start his own, even with The Keep shutdown, which was fine, they are easy to start, but his closed quick. There were fallback locations in Sweden that lasted for years, they may not have been perfect, but the user data was secure.
Thanks for reading this memory dump from the past. I am glad I could help back then. If you know of other LGBT chat sites let me know and I can include them.
d.
However, I did not realize until much later that in 1993 there was no exclusively LGBT Internet chat site.
I did not start out to make an LGBT server, this was more of a coding and deployment exercise. I tried running MUD code, but that was a memory hog and did not fix privacy concerns, I looked at other code bases and settled on a solution similar to Lintilla which was NUT (Neil's Unix Talker) code as a base. There was a simplistic backdoor which I removed and added some missing memory management. Some problems were the reliance on telnet to connect, similar to IRC and the inherent concurrent user login restrictions. But I could restrict who could view logins, and create a rudimentary authorization system, allowing only certain users to view content. And adding encryption to the authentication system.
I brought on a small group of five people from across various timezones to be administrators, and soon had a few hundred people using this system.
I named the talker "The Keep" mainly as a reference to the atmosphere being a small castle. Kind of a fantasy setting with several open public areas and a few rooms that could be made private and a jail to remove users that broke the rules. The rules were simple, like the interface, no fighting, no hate and no bullying.
For the Interface, everything was text based, you could chat in the room, chat directly to any person who was not set to private, post a short message on a room board, and leave a short message for users who may not be logged in, or even if they were logged in. Administrators were called Wizards and they could speak into any non-private room and listen to conversations in any non-private room, move users from one room to another, and speak directly to users even if they were set to private. You could block a user and not see any information about them, and all users could create a short profile.
The Keep opened to the public in April 1994 and shutdown December 1995.
At the end we had over 100,000 unique ids created which probably translated into about 10,000 unique users, primarily LGBT with allies and questioning people also visiting.
Attacks from without (Homophobes and fake Lesbians)
Throughout The Keep's existence there were various attacks from homophobes, none very creative, logging on and spewing hate language would get them and their IP address banned, writing various hate messages on the boards. Then they would target one person at a time, trying to get each to logout. Various denial of service attacks such as logging in and filling all of the lots, but this was defeated, and attempts to cut off the server's bandwidth, and these were avoided by some hasty server routes or dropping traffic or just moving to a different server temporarily, in 1994 firewalls were a rarity - May 1995 was the first time I installed firewall code. I had a small script that verified the service was running and would send me any new messages (forward from the talker mail to my direct email).
The most heinous attack was someone who kept trying to get The Keep shutdown, and would lie about the community there, make claims about x-rated picture exchange, when, unlike IRC, that was not a capability. Finally this person, still unknown to me, would entice members to send him via email pictures, but then the person on the other end of the email would claim to be "a child" and "his parents" would report the incoming pictures to our local police. After a few attacks, (they used the same email address Hyperion@...) the local authorities put him on mute and eventually they disappeared, hopefully to find the mental health resources they needed.
Another type of attack was directed at our Lesbian users, while the numbers were about half of our male users, they were a mainstay. Straight men would login and pretend to be Lesbian and attempt to chat with the various women there. I created an administrative protocol so those users we knew were women could ask us to verify if the person they were talking with was coming from a server with a woman logged in. Back in these days most workstations and servers were directly connected to the internet and ran a service called 'fingerd' and that could be used to remotely determine who was logged in. I had to disable this on The Keep's server along with many other services that were being attacked - see above. But in general most users did not know how to keep themself out of a localhost's utmp file (look it up, I am not going to explain here). So, Administrators would finger a remote workstation and let them know if they were female or male to the best of our resources. Life was easy and fun back then. A decade later women had the same problem where I worked, but no resources were dedicated to fix that issue.
The Rebirth and Shutdown
Summer of 1995, however, the University shutdown all non-academic activities, including a MUD that had been running for many years. I was about to sunset The Keep. I had taken a job at a local ISP - employee number five, but there was no place to start this up at that time. One of the users whose ID was Korey said he had a place we could run the code, so shortly before the deadline I moved the user database to a server about 3000 miles away, to Santa Clara, CA. Since most of my ISP work was admin and networking, aside from coding some security applications like a firewall to limit traffic from the ISP side and the other business functions - we sold custom database software, hardware running various flavors of Unix.
I worked to fix some of the problems with the Keep's code which meant moving from a telnet interface to a general socket and adding some padding. The first pass would connect several running talkers so a user could send messages directly to a user on a different instance, and perform some other commands, but really was more of a hack using some command line tools, flat files and a couple direct socket connections.
A few months after moving the code I found out that Korey was a project manager at an Internet Data Center, (I won't disclose the name, but they are gone now, and if you know, you know). He was creating tickets to have their networking team point the connections to various servers of their clients, and had one of their admins install the code there. I began asking questions when the code had problems running and I noticed the servers kept changing. Then Korey started logging in and pretending to be me, when I asked him about that he gave me an ultimatum to had over the code and let him be the owner or he would shut down The Keep.
It may seem like a small thing, but there were a tight knit group of us there, mostly college aged at Universities throughout the world, and some of them had come to me because they said they would have been lost if they had not found this place of community. Some people on there were locally famous or had well known relatives, and I had a protocol for them I blocked their IP address from being stored and put in a dummy IP address. Only administrators could see a user's IP address, but when I moved the code the logs were out of my control, so I stopped logging the IP address of most of the people who were at risk that I knew and just substituted a 172.random address in the public usable space. I just told people that the user must be behind a firewall and their address was not routeable.
In 1995 someone from gay.com logged in and started advertising on our site. They invited me and some of my admins to view their code - looked like an A/S/L site, organized by state and city, they had a large number of people (about 3K logged in) code was similar to IRC. As I told the person showing me around, kind of made me sad to see that was what people (gay men) wanted.
To close out this story, I had also added a poison pill, a command that had a password that only I knew and could run, no one could see that command, and it would delete all of the logs, libraries and binaries. So, I logged in one night, alone, and ran that command. I had pretty much completed the new upgrade, I needed to test on some different servers, and I was ok with walking away. I had left the University and was working a lot of hours, I was moving out of town and my direction was moving forward, but I was worried that under new management the user's confidential information might be exposed out of Santa Clara. The new team seemed to have a contempt for the people using the service, so he was going to start his own, even with The Keep shutdown, which was fine, they are easy to start, but his closed quick. There were fallback locations in Sweden that lasted for years, they may not have been perfect, but the user data was secure.
Thanks for reading this memory dump from the past. I am glad I could help back then. If you know of other LGBT chat sites let me know and I can include them.
d.
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