One of my early-career jobs was working for an ISP that old fogies may remember called Slip.Net. This was 1994, just before everything took off in the commercia

One of my early-career jobs was working for an ISP that old fogies may remember called Slip.Net. This was 1994, just before everything took off in the commercial Internet space. There were a couple gray area things that resulted in me being eager to leave that particular company. The first was that they were a "free" ISP. The way they made money was that all their POPs were in facilities taking advantage of the rules around long distance termination fees. Effectively you could set up a CLEC in a corn field in Iowa and as long as you could get a lot of people to call you, you could make money from the Bells. Free Internet access, but a long-distance call. It was probably a good deal for people who didn't have a local POP anyway. However, it led to a weird incentive -- you wanted to keep people connected. In order to sign up for the service you had to dial into it. In order to create an account (these were regular shell accounts on SunOS systems mostly -- totally insane by today's standards) we had to have an entry in /etc/passwd and of course you needed their login to get an entry there. We had worked out how to take their details and create an account, but you had to disconnect to log back in as that new user, and we lost money every time someone disconnected. The solution was obvious -- please modify logind so that you could essentially sudo from the "setup" user into their new shell right there in the existing session. Boy that was fun, and felt a little dirty. It turns out the other thing people liked to do besides Internet dialup that would keep their computer on the phone for a long time was to download porn (you could argue they were doing that with their Internet dialup too). So of course the company ran many Wildcat-based porn BBSes out of each of their POPs. In fact that business came first. They flew me out to (somewhere outside of Toronto I think) to upgrade the access for a particular POP and asked me to load some CDs in the jukebox at the same time. I didn't think much of it, but when I got there I realized that these were all hardcore porn. I don't think there's anything inherently unethical about porn, but it clearly also didn't check the box on things I'm going to tell my mother about my job. I left that job after about 6 months, but I liked it better than the one before it, where they weren't paying their phone bills and would regularly tell their customers that they were having "technical problems" while they got SBC to turn their access back on. I think I lasted most of 3 months there.