Oh yeah you are right no jumped to conclusions. Nice link there, the AOLserver tho was just a web server, not the whole server framework or OS.
https://github.com/aolserver/aolserver It was written by some company that we bought. It was also the basis for Greenspun’s excellent book on database backed web sites.
Yeah, and on rereading the original article, the hack was just guessing the passwords to admin AIM accounts. I hope it wasn’t mine! From my perspective that is “works as designed”. I don’t think the TFA was ever put into AIM login, but it was all a while ago. But anyways, nice to seem one of the dumb names I came up with in the press. I also wrote wam (web authentication module), Hermes (messenger of the Gods - like buddy list but where users could add data sources to the list, with filters or alarms), Ewoks (“external web Oscar knowledge server”, an http server that allowed for easy integration into the server message framework we used) and re-wrote morf “master Oscar registration facility”. The original was a custom written no-SQL DB and we moved it to Sybase with sharding.). All C. All event loop based. All really solid infrastructure written by people doing it for the third time. Fun times. Had an actual agile process and brought the coolness of the internet to many people for the first time.