 Good morning Defconn, can I get a sign of life out there anything? Alright, how's Friday night treating y'all? Indeed, why do you think I'm wearing sunglasses? Defconn 12, it's pleased to present Mr. Doug Mone, former employee number 10 of DigX. Who has heard of DigX? Anyone? Give it up for DigX. Alright, and without further ado, Mr. Doug Mone. Yeah, we're showing me your pocket right now. Alright, I don't need to, yeah, things we don't need to know. Yes, welcome to Las Vegas, the only city where you can go like this, and I think you're shooting craps rather than something else. Good morning, my name is Doug Mone, and my name is KK, introduced me. I was employee number 10 at DigX. I started at DigX in October of 1993. I was with DigX from 1993 until about middle of 1997. Sometimes the memories get rusty because of old age, and sometimes because I'm repressing them. What do I cover in today's talk? I want to talk a little bit about DigX history circa 1993-1994 to give you a perspective of that. I need to talk a little bit about internet history, the infrastructure back then versus the way it is today. A lot of things that we take for granted like DSL and cable modems and other fast shit that just didn't exist back then. Let me tie you something, Sonny. And then talk about the first commercial web servers or services that were offered by DigX and basically offered by anybody on the planet at that time. Talk a little bit about the secret history for lack of a better term with MTV.com, CIA.gov, and pd.org. Why should you care? Well, those who forget that you could have passed are condemned to repeat it. A lot of the times you see lessons in history where stuff happens and then 10, 5, 10 years later it's the same sort of situation. It's only a different industry or the players are a little bit different or the companies are a little bit different. DigX literally started out in Doug Humphrey's basement in 1991 and he grew the company through a mixture of technical acumen, luck, and riding the internet wave into a company that went through an initial public offering in 1996. It was bought out by CLEC, Intermediate Communications in 1997. Intermediate saw DigX, the web hosting side of DigX, rolled it around a little bit, spun it off as an IPO again in 1999. It was a mere two years later after they bought it. Towards the end of DigX's lifespan it was bought by WorldCom for billions before the dot-bomb hit. And some of the history that we saw back then we're starting to see again today with the emergence of the wireless internet service providers and some of the other wireless players that are happening. Second African Early Contributions, we can attribute to DigX, not to DSR or UUNET. DigX was the first company to offer a commercial type of web server hosting business. It wasn't IBM, it wasn't EDS, it was DigX. MTVcom, the first entertainment web server, went on to the internet in 1993. And then things that we attribute to the Al Gore, why attribute to the Al Gore, Gold Rush, a lot of the government agencies like in the executive branch, including CIA, had to go and get web servers. Of course, PETA. DigX's founders, DigX was started by two people, two friends actually who became friends in college, Doug Humphrey and Mike Downey. Doug Humphrey was a hacker, not by trade, but basically for fun. He found his way to MIT, the time-sharing service along with a lot of other people back in the 80s. His handle there was DigX, short for Digital Express Group. He later went on to University of Maryland and even at U of M, he was a Practicer of the Arts of Phone Freaking. Well, I shouldn't say Practicer, Collector of Information of the Arts of Phone Freaking. He organized a conference in Washington, DC in 1980. It's called Watts 80 Play on the Watts 800 number lines. And then he also attended DEF CON over the years. And then his day job when he started founding, when he started up DigX, he was an engineer for a tandem computer corporation. Doug's a big guy. He's probably like, yeah, you look at priests and you think Doug Humphrey, and I often think to myself, I wonder who could take who in a fight, priests through Doug Humphrey, because Doug's a big guy. Doug also sometimes packs a 45, so it would be an interesting fight. Mike Downey, on the other hand, is a smaller guy. Maybe he's about a little bit taller than KK, the guy who introduced me here. Mike's Path and Life started out with Radio. He was at University of Maryland. He started up the WMEC radio station at U of M.D. and later ended up on WorldCom, IDB that is the satellite head side of WorldCom. He was stationed over all the Gulf War in 1991 and he was babysitting communications links between Central Command in the Gulf and the Pentagon and the line that the Air Force, well not the Air Force, but Central Command gave all the contractors there was don't worry, we'll get you out before the shooting starts. So it turns out that one night in January, they hear the planes roll off the airfields and mass. All the lights turned off and they run up to their DOD liaison and they go, they're just a rehearsal, right? The DOD guy goes, yeah, it's just a rehearsal, don't worry about it, go back to work. And then somebody ran in like a half hour later going, look what's going on, I'll see you in a few days later. Downey was a little bit, shall we say, perturbed by that because his post was sitting basically, was in a trailer on top of the command bunker for Central Command. So if the Iraqis got lucky with a scud or managed an attack, that was like one of the primary targets. Mike tried to get an airplane ride out of Saudi Arabia, but he couldn't get a plane ride for like three days since all commercial flights were shut down. But when the Gulf War started, he said, well, I'd like to pay, but I didn't sign up for this. He resigned his position and grabbed the first transport flight he could get out of to go home. This is Doug Humphrey. Anybody seen him? Anybody know him? Know him, seen him? Yes, now? Don't want to admit it? Okay, that's fine. Digix was started by Doug and Mike Downey, but there are like three other supporting characters that you may know or two that you may know of that are in the community or were in the DEF CON community at one time or another. Rob RS Seastrom provided some of the first hardware and brought up the first Digix's first dial-up system. RS the next year would be hired by Intercon Software and go off to start the first commercial internet link in Japan. Rob Stratton or Stratt did some of the first e-mail builds for Digix and it was guru on some of the initial concepts on how to get the system set up and running. Stratt went on to UUNET and from UUNET he started a wheel group, sold it off for a good bundle, and now he's working at NQTEL. Everybody knows what NQTEL is? Yes, now? Yeah, the CIA's venture fund. That's a job I'd like to have. Before 1993, Digix started up in 1990. Digix was going to be an e-mail exchange. Back in the early days, everybody was in Ireland. AOL, MCI, CompuServe, they all had different e-mail services but nobody could talk to each other. Digix was going to sit in the middle of all these different e-mail services and basically act as an intermediary. Switzerland, if you will, so people could exchange e-mail. The internet dial-up business started up as a sideline. They needed some cash to pay the bills. So they started up the system in September 1991 with six phone lines. And by the end of 1993, they had accumulated, you know, a little bit less than a year. They had over 2,000-plus users, 100-plus dial-up lines, lease line customers, dedicated slip and PPP customers, and they were also doing web hosting. Now, this picture that you see on the screen is a picture of Digix's home. On the second floor, above the Beijing Inn, or as I like to say, above the Chinese restaurant as the gods intended, that's where Digix was. Across the way, there was a 7-11, so we had 24x7 access to munchies and big gulps. A lot of our guys, a lot of the technical guys, when they did work, they described work in terms of big gulps. If it was like a two or three big gulp night, you knew it was a bad night. Now and then, just as a snapshot, you look at the technology back then versus what we've got today, and I don't want to sound too much like a cadre, but I mean, there's so much more capacity today, both in your home and in the ground. It really is amazing if you stop and think about it. Back in the day of 1994, the elite thing was a 28K modem. Today, you've got DSL, you've got cable. If you're really poor bastard, you've got a 56K modem, if nothing else. Back then, there was a T3 network run by A&S, and that was it. Nobody else was running T3s back then for internet connectivity. Today, it's kind of like almost passe. If you've got anything less than an OC48, if you're running a national internet IP-based network, and then some people have even gotten wedged up to OC192. Yesterday, you had to get T3s delivered on fiber. Today, with a little hardware magic, you can practically get a T3 delivered to your house on a handful of dry copper pairs. Fiber then was rare. Today, you basically got fiber to the home. Well, almost. But if you live in a country club, if you live in a newly built country club type of complex, there's a good chance that they might have fiber in the ground. And fiber also installed to the home. Again, back then, you had to explain to people what a web page was. Today, your grandma's got a web page. And then, back then, wired was the in thing, the new thing, the hip thing. And now, wired's like mainstream. Does anybody still read wired? Yeah, a couple people. Wired was much cooler back 10 years ago. Is there anybody who's running for wired in the audience? Okay. Infrastructure snapshot. What did the internet look like back then? There was one backbone. It was run by NSFnet, a government grant that was operated by ANS, advanced network systems. Basically, a conglomerate of IBM and MCI is a T3 high speed network. As the contract for NSFnet ran down, the educational based network, ANS received permission to sell commercial services as a part of the transfer of internet network operations out of the government and into the private sector. For everybody else, the T1, that 1.54 megabit per second pipe was a big deal. Both PSI and NetNU at the two largest guys who were running internet backgrounds at the time had national T1 backgrounds. They didn't have T3. Couldn't afford it. Didn't have enough traffic to justify it in most cases. DigX, and this is like the first piece of secret knowledge that few people know about, got a T1 backdoor deal from ANS. ANS had a seed program called DiamondMind where they wanted to stimulate the growth of commercial traffic on their newly emerging commercial network. They had this deal where if you asked the right people and you begged hard enough, you could get a free T1 for 12 months. And back then, T1s were like thousands of dollars. So this was a great deal. So Doug Humphrey went to ANS and wheeled and controlled. And he finally got a T1 out of ANS through this seed deal. And of course, we all liked it because it fit in with DigX General number one, which Doug liked to repeat often to us, just to make sure that we tried to do it. If you wanted to do business with us, you have to give us something for free. So we got a T1 from ANS. We loved ANS. Two key characters coming up towards 1993 as a company grew. They hired two systems people, Ed Kearn. Ed Kearn's a one-time doorman for the 930 Club, basically a club down in Washington, D.C. And then Ed Kearn also had some ties to three letter agencies, but every time I asked him questions about that, he'd shut up. Ed Kearn got a job at DigX because he was a dial-up customer in 1992 and he'd often call up Doug and bitch about the service and tell them that he needed to fix this or that. And finally, the two of them sat down and got into this discussion and they had an agreement reached where Ed would get root running the DigX dial-up systems as a systems admin and ultimately got a job out of it. Ed's a very interesting character. Even today, I think he still wears sweats and broken stocks, brainershine, snow, summer doesn't matter. I think his only concession to fashion and the weather is in the winter he'll put socks on before he puts on broken stocks. And fuck was his major vocabulary word. Dave McGuire was a systems programmer and hardware savant for lack of a better term. Dave engineered some of the hardware for the first commercial web server. I want to give Dave props because Dave's one of these like quiet guys. You don't hear a lot about it but he was slaving away in the back room for the first two, three, four years of DigX just making sure the systems were in. He's one of those guys who had the two and three super big gold knights. Pictures of Ed and Dave. Ed on the left is a guy pointing at the camera. He's probably going, don't take my fucking picture. The guy next to him in the suit and tie is a guy named Peter Lothberg. Does that ring about? No. Never mind. And the guy with happy smile on his face on the right is Dave McGuire. That's not his girlfriend but he's still happy. DigX in 1993. When I joined the company in October it had ten whole people. By December it had risen up to 20 people on payroll. One of the biggest battles DigX had to fight was with the R-Box. The phone companies did not get it in terms of the internet, the potential for growth, the potential for them to make money. When we were above the Chinese restaurant, we wanted desperately to get fiber optic cable. Fiber enabled people to, number one, deliver T3 type of service, which was very, very important. You needed to have speed. And number two, in order to get any sort of massive dial tone, you also needed fiber. Now, one of the other dirty little secrets is that DigX had gone up to 40 dial-up lines, 40 inbound dial-up lines, and we'd maxed out all the copper in Greenbelt. Local residents couldn't get second phone lines at all within the city limits of Greenbelt. We had sucked up all the excess copper. More importantly, from our perspective, some of the lines that we'd gotten were these substandard, crummy lines that were like marginal best case for delivering boys. So if somebody would try to do a 28 AK data connection on them and there'd be crap on it and they'd kick down to like 2400 Bob and they'd call us up and they'd bitch. It was a bad situation. We finally had to go to Bell Atlantic's engineers and go, well, what do we have to do in order to get fiber in here? And the guy we got to was this, was the straight shooting engineer. He goes, look, just order like 80 lines and they'll have to put in the fiber. They won't have any choice in the matter because once you order the service, by tariffs and by right, they have to deliver the service. So we sat and we placed it on order for like 80 phone lines in the month of December and then we wanted another 80 phone lines in the month of January. Didn't know how we were going to pay for them, but we had to order them anyways. Our sales rep was very, very happy but the Bell Atlantic engineers were not because once they saw that order placed they figured that they had to pull fiber from the local central office down to the, above the Chinese restaurant and that was something that, you know, it just didn't fit in their world view. One of the other things that didn't fit in their world view was our, was how much sales revenue and how much telecommunications capacity was flying through our small business rep. A typical small business rep for Bell Atlantic, you know, maybe sells a handful of lines a year, some centric service. If they're really, really, really lucky they'll sell to a business, they'll sell a 56K lease line. Our rep was showing up every month and she's like putting down 20, 30, 40 orders for phone lines every month and 50 ones and 56K is a lot of stuff. She made a lot of money. And just as an annoyance factor, you know, we were driving all this business for Bell Atlantic and other ISPs around the country were driving all this business for the R-Box but they never sent us any thank you notes. And it's very interesting because a lot of the popularity of the internet as it was in the years did drive a lot of installations of second lines and third lines in the households. DJ's competitors at the time are the evil triangle as it were. PSInet over in Northern Virginia. PSInet had basically started out by the guys who ran Nizernet went off, started up their own private company and basically said, well, if you don't hire us, we're not going to maintain Nizernet so it'll go down. For some reason PSI got the contract after that. UUNet at that time was 20 to 30 people. They were over in Falls Church, Virginia. UUNet started out as a nonprofit to distribute software. And as the internet evolved, UUNet became like the gold standard that everybody got compared to since UUNet had been the ones offering lease lines the longest and they had better technical support than PSInet. And then we also had to deal with Surinet which was run out of the University of Maryland. Basically it was a part of the old NSF net. They were regional consortium running a part of the NSF net. First commercial web hosting, first commercial server hosting was cooked up in the summer of 1993. Back then people wanted a net presence. Even back then there were certain organizations that wanted a net presence but they didn't want to have to deal with the overhead of operating server on the internet. They didn't want to have to deal with the headaches of phone company, UNIX management, TCPIP network management. So the ideal solution was why do we have to do it? We'll just outsource it to somebody else. Second thing became all hardware. Well okay, if we're going to go ahead and create these web server things and run them for people, we want to be able to have, you know, we want to be able to put a lot of these servers into a relatively small space. So Dave McGuire did this hardware hack and he got a VME chassis and got a hold of a couple of Sun 360 workstation boards and managed to do this hardware hack where the VME chassis would provide power to the sun boards and he was able to fit 12 boards into a chassis. They would do to remote boot via ethernet, disk access, via ethernet. But it was funny because we went and we talked to Sun and Sun was like, well no, you can't do that. And then, you know, two weeks later Dave has a situation where we're running this hardware basically on this hack. The cool thing about it was the 360 boards at the time were dirt cheap. Sun was getting out of the Sun 3 business. They were spinning up Spark. They were spinning up something else. So they were dumping Sun 3s off of their own desktops. We didn't have to do dumpster diving. There was somebody who was a friend of the company who basically went around and said, oh, that works, oh, you're getting ready to your workstation? No, I'll take you down to the dumpster for you. And you know, walk down, stick it in his car and then two days or three days later you drive over and we'd have like more 360s to play with. It wasn't illegal. I mean, the equipment was surplus and scheduled to go on the hardware anyways, but it had a few more fingerprints on it than I'd be comfortable with. Pre-saged blades, the thing that Dave put together, you know, pre-saged the, you know, the concept of server blades by, you know, five years, the hack that he put together was very nice. You could put a lot of servers into a compact space. You had fewer plugs. You didn't have to worry about one plug per workstation and you didn't have to worry about shelves. Solutions up until that time, like before David worked at this hardware hack was, you know, one workstation dedicated to a customer, one server. So you basically had a rack mount, this plugey business where you had a rack with shelves on it and why was this good? Well, from business perspective, PSI and unit were all focused on pipes. Least lines was the name of the game, that's what they wanted to sell. Web hosting or private domains, as we called them, were for people who didn't want to dork with UNIX or didn't want to dork with management headaches involved in terms of internet management. The cool thing about that was once that DigX got a lot of servers generated, it generated a lot of internet traffic coming into the company that we could leverage for the future. There was a discussion that the internet would evolve into something like the telephone company where at some date down the road you'd have to deal with settlements, like you deal with telephone settlements now where if I do a thousand minutes and you do two thousand minutes and if we exchange, if I exchange a thousand minutes and you exchange two thousand minutes, then somebody's going to have to pay the difference of a thousand minutes to me. Settlements didn't come to the internet. Instead, you had a situation of peering where if you generated enough traffic, you're considered a big boy on the internet and you had direct connections between ISPs. But more importantly, it made DigX a place to be because we had a lot of cool servers that we put up in 93. And finally, it made money. I jumped up the sunboard to cost us nothing and the cost of electricity to basically keep it up and running is relatively low overhead. Initial customers. The very, very first commercial company that paid for a web host, the American Library Association. We usually associate librarians as being like, pray to the paper, et cetera, et cetera, but the American Library Association wanted to have user.ala.wash.org for their email addresses. It was very important to them. And this was the more phenomenal dust because at that time, nobody knew what the hell a worldwide web was anyway. It was a worldwide what? You go into major companies and you have to spend 20 minutes explaining to them what the internet was. ALA, the American Library Association, got it. The second customer, well not the second customer, but one of the customers that followed along shortly thereafter was mtv.com. And mtv.com was the very first entertainment type of host or entertainment type of server on the internet. And it was something that freaked the net purist out badly. Now I want to talk to you about somebody else who, how many of you remember Adam Curry from MTV? Okay, I see, oh yes, cool. Adam Curry, as somebody I call the internet Cassandra and I'll get into the reason why after that. Adam is the third guy on the left with the joint news mount. Third guy from the left. Adam Curry was a network pioneer. His day job, he was in a VJ and MTV. Every Friday without fail. And it was a top 20 video countdown. And in those days, MTV was really cool for me. Now I'm old, I watch VH1. I love the 80s. But I mean, you know, every Friday it was like okay, gotta get home and see what the hot videos are. And Adam was the man who introduced those videos. But Adam was a closet geek. He had an account, he had a dial up account on Panix. And one of the first things he did with his, I mean I looked at the internet, he started playing around with the internet and technology. And one of the first things he did was since he was tied in with all of these entertainment people at MTV, he developed his a gossip column that he called Cyber Sleeves. And he distributed it using the internet. And first he sent it out through email but it quickly grew to the point where he sent it to him at that time to maintain an email mailing list. So he goes, well, I'm going to take my gossip column. It's only text. Well, that's the only thing anybody had at those days anyways. And I'm going to stick it in my plan file. And then just let everybody know that they can see my weekly gossip column online. So he sticks it in his plan file. And I'm not really UNIX people but plan has a certain amount of overhead. And when you multiply that out of the world, fingering you to look at your plan file, the overhead drags Panix to its knees. The owner of Panix gets on the phone to Adam. And I'm not exactly sure what was said but it was something like you asshole. You don't know what you're doing. And the Panix guy basically said I don't want you on my system anymore. And Adam said, well, where do I go? And he's like, oh, I think there's some dumb company down in Greenbelt that might do business with you. So Adam Curry calls us up and I was in the sales guy but the sales guy I know basically gets on the phone and it's like, is this really Adam? It's really Adam Curry. And within like 10 minutes we had his AmEx information which of course is priceless. And in short order he was placing an order for us for a web server. Now Adam Curry did not actually have the rights to mtv.com. But Adam Curry got into this big discussion with Viacom before he registered the domain name mtv.com Viacom because they were cable people cable blinders Viacom wanted to do a paper view model on the internet and Adam's like, no, no, no, that's not going to work. People aren't going to pay for you because the internet's new and there's a lot of free stuff and Viacom's like pay-per-view, pay-per-view. And Adam bunged him enough that Viacom agreed to loan him the mtv.com domain name for an experiment. Because after all, Adam was spending all the money for sending up the server, operating it, putting up the content. Adam was investing a lot of time and money to set up the server. So Viacom's like, yeah, you want to spend your own time and cash, it's fine. So mtv.com the domain name got registered and put up and then immediately on the internet there was a whole big discussion on what this was going to mean in the future of the internet. The academic ubergeeks, that is the spoiled guys who never paid a dime for the internet access were afraid of the commercialism of this site corrupting the purity of the internet. There were a lot of emails flying back and forth about how this was bad and how marketing was going to come in and advertising was going to come in the internet and it was going to ruin everything. But, you know, it didn't bother Adam. You know, fine, it's my own money, I'm going to do what I want. Once we got mtv online people started hammering away at it. And one of the most popular things was, you know, trying to figure out the password to review some butthead. First day that mtv came online I got 50,000 hits. Which, you know, my website gets 50,000 hits in two days, man. But that, you know, with only 600 plus web servers online in 1993 30,000 hits a day was basically the most popular site on the internet. And then, as Adam added more content mtv became a destination site on the internet. And then that server and other servers put digix among the top traffic movers, people coming in and looking at stuff on the internet. At one point, digix was listed as like number five in terms of most bits moved around with the wall dot unix cd distribution being like number one. Like I said, Curry was a man before his time. Curry had this cushy job. Let's face it for a minute. The beautiful guy gets up every day, comes in every Friday, talks about videos. He's making a ton of money. He's meeting rock stars. Women are throwing themselves at him. Well, I'm assuming that. But, you know, one day he just walked off of his job his vj job at mtv and he said, I'm going to go do this internet thing. And then on Monday morning Adam, on Monday morning Howard Stern is making fun of Adam Curry saying what kind of a dumb schmuck he is. And Adam didn't care. So I'd like to refer to Adam as a Cassandra of the internet. He was one of the first people to talk about putting music online, intellectual property rights with music. But when he was having this discussion nobody really paid attention until much, much later. Ultimately Adam got to the point where MTV.com became so popular that Viacom decided they wanted it back. And there was a very ugly situation where nobody had really established the rights as to who owned the Viacom name. Then there were lawsuits, threats, blah, blah, blah, and it finally got settled very quietly out of court. But I don't really cry for Adam because one of the companies that he founded made like a couple hundred million dollars being sold as it was sold off. So Adam took the money, went off to Amsterdam. He married a model. He literally did marry a model. And now he's living happily ever after in a castle in the Netherlands. Adam's got a saying that it's on his blog that I think is very appropriate for DEFCON. There aren't no secrets, only information you don't yet have. Now if we leave the commercial world the other thing that drove web servers at the time was Al Gore. I know that Gore was I'm not going to get into you did Gore claim to be the father of the internet? Well, not. But Gore did do something that was very, very important for driving the growth of the internet and had this initiative called reinventing government. And one of the mandates he put out to the executive branch of government was a vow shall get on the internet by the fall of 1994. I'll kick your ass. Well, he didn't say that, but it was implied. Now if you take a look at the three branches of government there's the Supreme Court there's Congress and the executive branch. Well, the Supreme Court doesn't spend a whole lot of money. While Congress allocates money operationally wise Congress doesn't spend a lot of money except on themselves and perks. So the bulk of the money that's spent is the executive branch. The bottom line at all there were a lot of agencies over the summer of 1994 that were running around trying to figure out how to get on the internet to make Al Gore happy. And his memory serves how many of you guys are feds and know? Wow. The federal physically closed us out on September 30th. So there were a lot of people with excess funds sitting in their accounts that they needed to spend out by the end of the fiscal year. So it became a very big windfall for young internet companies. And I was personally involved with CPSC Consumer Product Safety Commission getting on the internet as well as a government agency called CAA.gov. CAA.gov is a very, very interesting thing. Is anybody from the CIA representing them? Not that you'll admit it, but okay. The Central Intelligence Agency didn't really want to be officially hooked up on the internet as kind of something that they were going to do to make Al happy. If you dug around into various bits and pieces on the internet the who is implied that they had a T1 via UnionNet, maybe a T1 via ANS, but nobody was really sure. And those who knew weren't really talking that loudly. The CIA knew that their website would become a hot target. Anybody... I mean it was something that was going to definitely be attacked and would make the bones for somebody. There was also some tension between the old guard and the new guard. That is people who were old-time CIA employees versus like some of the young people that had come in with the Gore administration and were pushing the new technology. But there wasn't a lot of tension. So the CIA wanted to get a presence on the internet to get Al off of their back. For them, outsourcing was the most logical solution. They didn't want to have the web server in-house. And unfortunately, DigX was the only game in town. Everybody else did not comprehend web serving. Server hosting at all. PSI did not do it. UnionNet did not do it. IBM would have done it, but it would have been a million-dollar contract had taken three years. Same with AWS. Well, for less than a thousand bucks a month, we'll host a Sunforce server for you. One of the big jokes was it's security. There would be an air gap the size of the Beltway. CIA is located in Langley, Virginia. Langley, Virginia would be over here. Then we were over in Greenbelt, and that distance was about 50 miles. So they liked the size of that air gap a lot. Yeah. Yeah. So you know what I'm saying. Yeah, but in 1994, we were happy to take the government's money. I want to tell you a story about Mike Downey and Peter. Mike Downey is the guy on the left. Not on the right. It's a t-shirt that he's wearing. It's a t-shirt that says it's called the DigX files. A play on the X files is you can tell from the logo. The back it had, I want to believe was on the back. There were another set of shirts printed up for a few of us that said trust no one. Let me talk about PETA.org. PETA.org was Mike Downey's crusade, well at least one of them at the time. Mike Downey was toward the end of 1995, 1996, 1997, he was bored. Basically the company had grown large enough that they didn't need Mike Downey's utility infielder skills anymore. So he sat in the office and he puttered around. So one of the things he did was register a lot of domain names and one of the domain names that he went out and registered was PETA.org and PETA.org was people eating tasty animals. Now you go and read Mike's accounts of this on the website and Mike hadn't even put up, had registered, within a week Mike was getting hate mail from vegans. And it wasn't very sophisticated email it was on the form of brought yourself a case of hate haven't you? PETA found out shortly thereafter and they started suing Mike. And PETA and Mike ended up in this multi-year battle that I think was resolved in 2000 or 2001 where PETA actually did get the domain name PETA.org back into their control. But this really didn't but you know PETA in my mind they're a bunch of vegan hypocrites. Because if you looked at their tactics shortly after Mike Downey did this on the internet they started registering parody domain names of their own. PETA's got at least over 70 domains like Death McChicken and stuff like that registered on the internet. And then this year they did the whole stunt where they had beef.com spoofing the beef, the American Cattleman's Association beef.org website. Where did Digix go from there? Digix had its first IPO in 1996 it was sold to Intermediate Communication in 1997 for $150 million cash when it was sold at however over 600 employees. That's not really that shabby for a company that started out in somebody's basement in 1991. I think it's public record Humphrey walked away with a deal with about $12 million cash in his pocket. Digix got ended up once it was bought by Intermediate Communications it got split up into a Leastline Association a Leastline organization in a web server units. The web server unit was spun off in 1999 early two years later to make some more cash for Intermedia and finally Intermedia was sold to WorldCom for $5 billion in stock. The ironic thing about this is that Intermediate Communications was bought so that WorldCom could get majority ownership in Digix. Once WorldCom bought Intermedia they threw away the pieces and just kept the web host. Just very briefly a change of ownership that Leastline group and the server group Digix was first the company then it was bought by Intermedia and then the pieces of Digix that were the Leastline group were transferred over to Allegiance Telecom when WorldCom came in and bought Intermedia and then as of last year Allegiance Telecom was bought out by Exo Communications. Now on the server side of the group it was Digix then it was Intermedia Digix then Digix was spun out as an IPO and then WorldCom MCI acquired Digix. Digix is now solely MCI's property as of 2004 or as I was saying to KK Digix is MCI's bitch. Digix is now WorldCom owns 100% of Digix's stock. You go to Digix.com website you basically get directed to MFS's MCI's website Where are they now? Doug Humphrey has his own SS7 phone switch life's good when you have money and a surplus Royal Navy patrol boat that's about 100 feet long he likes to refer to it as 100 feet of British steel it's called the Bat's Maroo it hangs out in Baltimore Harbor talking about Christian cults around the country No, literally Mike Downey is on a crusade basically against Operation Rescue and he's developing some operations to inform people about the risks of Operation Rescue Ed Kern is currently a Cisco and David McGuire's freelance consulting Digix the book Hopefully by fall of 2000 Von Publishing will be putting out a book about Digix's history it'll cover roughly the start of Digix through the end of 1997 and include such things like Venture Capital Money and the first IPO for Digix and then through its acquisition by Intermediate Communications The era from 1997 through 2004 is not covered in the book being developed about Digix it's going to be another project you get a very complex set of relationships and soap operas of ownership because you took Digix, you spun off its web hosting group Intermediate spun a lot of spun out a lot of spun out the web hosting group moved people in and out to run it and then IPO'd it in 1999 and then once again WorldCom Bernie Abbors for whatever reason really wanted the Digix name and the Digix web hosting group it really pissed off John Sidmore that Bernie Abbors bought Digix for like $5 billion and he didn't even talk to his number two man about buying the company. He bought it for like a premium price and ended up throwing away half of what he bought in Intermediate just to keep the web business but then we all know what happened to Bernie. Party favor there are pictures of the Digix Christmas party in 1996 floating around on the internet I did not take them I did not post them I'm not responsible for their content or publishing them electronically the pictures were taken by a non-Digix employee who was invited to the Christmas party he's a guest with a camera okay what does this tell you about guests with cameras the pictures are posted on our website in Sweden and the URL is publicly available somewhere as well as in this presentation if you dig around you'll find it on Orkett and Google Personal Horing I run I write for Vaughan Magazine the inquire website over in the UK and mobile radio technology once in a while the end and I'll take questions questions yes no maybe yes yeah I got to give email presentation and they'll put it up so you'll be able to get that URL on Orkett other questions well if that's that then this is it thank you very much for attending