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Monkey.org
- mantux93 6y agowhat hell is that ? it looks interesting.. lol
- Octoth0rpe 6y agoI don't know the exact history of the domain, but many of the accounts on it are OG arbor networks people (a DoD spinoff focused on volumetric ddos mitigation/traffic engineering, now part of Netscout). Those that weren't there originally were at least in their circle. Also several were significant openbsd/openssh contributors back in the day.
- molesy 6y agoI don't know anything specifically about monkey.org but I went to high school with the user "dros" in the late 90's when local BBS's (Grex and M-Net) were still kind of cool and it was even cooler to have your own.
- Octoth0rpe 6y agoheh, I remember grex. Ann Arbor native?
- molesy 6y agoYep! From birth to CHS graduation in 99, then moved to California with the Versity.com team who went on to found Stubhub and Twilio without me. A more Ann Arbor story there is not!
- Octoth0rpe 6y agoPHS '99 here! I stuck around and ended at Netscout. Funnily enough, I was on a slack call earlier today with one user from monkey.org trying to figure out some bit of code from _another_ user on monkey.org :) tbf, the code was quite readable, but it wasn't in a language that I'm strong in.
- molesy 6y agoHigh five! You may win the Ann Arbor story thing. I think Andy (dros) is a Linux filesystem contributor working at NetApp. Definitely interesting stuff from many of the monkey.org users all over the interwebs!
- tptacek 6y agoDros was an Arbor person for awhile (he joined up the year I left) and then, like a bunch of Monkeys, a Duo person.
- rahimnathwani 6y agoAre you talking about grex.cyberspace.org?
- jlgaddis 6y agom-net.arbornet.org or some such? Why do I remember that and why does it sound familiar? (And after writing the above, my next thought was "Jennie? Jennie Garth? Describe her." -- yes, I'm odd.) -- EDIT: Oh, cool, it still exists [0] (And my questions are now answered!) -- [0]: http://m-net.arbornet.org/m-net.php http://m-net.arbornet.org/m-net.php
- reidjs 6y agoUser dues are $120 to find out. I think it’s a nameserver host? Idk.
- tectonic 6y agoAccording to a LinkedIn page, monkey.org is "The international house of primates, founded in 1995, offering services to a diversity of denizens across the globe. Headquartered around the world, we bring the brains and the brawn to many startup businesses and their associated acts around the globe."
- Retr0spectrum 6y agoLooks like it's just dataset, the kind you'd use to train a spam filter. Edit: the parent comment was edited. It originally ended with: > And has a lot of phishing stuff on it... https://monkey.org/~jose/phishing/ https://monkey.org/~jose/phishing/ > Maybe this should be deleted?
- kvathupo 6y agoOh man... In which case, no hard feelings if this is deleted, mods! I personally found the website intriguing as a proto-social network: it's a mysterious collection of people, whose photos and ramblings exude a certain sincerity, which I can't help but feel is violated by my mere stumbling on them! (It appears most are Arbor Networks alum)
- tptacek 6y agoIt predates Arbor, but the Venn diagram between the two overlaps a lot. Monkeys are all unusually nice people, for what it's worth. (I'm an Arbor alum, but not a Monkey).
- ilaksh 6y agoIf you send $120 and provide a username do you get signed up? Or do you have to get an invite or something?
- recursive 6y agoDo i have to be a monkey.org user? Yes. This is only for monkey.org users. IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS, PLEASE GO AWAY.
- A12-B 6y ago> We don't give out accounts to strangers. Everyone here knows dugsong, jim or dirt in real life. This helps keep out the riff-raff. https://monkey.org/pay/costs/ https://monkey.org/pay/costs/ Basically just a website for friends
- mattowen_uk 6y agoI know like 5 people in real life I would call 'friends'. Either I'm a shut-in, or these people are very socially promiscuous.
- dspillett 6y ago> Either I'm a shut-in, or these people are very socially promiscuous. The user list isn't particularly long, so I suspect more the former than the latter. And the quote above doesn't mention friends, just people who know people. The word "friend" is massively overused these days, thanks Facebook, but that doesn't seem relevant here.
- gregschlom 6y agoFun, I remember that one of my colleagues at a previous startup had a @monkey.org email address. Went to check his LinkedIn and sure enough it says "founder at monkey.org". I'm surprised I remember this, it was 5 years ago. Guess the monkey.org domain is quite memorable indeed. If you're reading this, hi Dave!
- neilv 6y agoYep, memorable domain name. Maybe some monkey.org-HN crossover people will speak up with comments. Or maybe the first rule of Monkey Club is that they don't.
- MonkeyClub 6y agoThe first rule of Monkey Club is that we hate you.
- bcx 6y agoAs someone who spent time in Ann Arbor in the mid 2000s I think most of the monkeys were very much in the infosec realm and were good ppl. I would be curious to know how it all started if @dugsong is around maybe someone can ping him to learn more :) If I had to guess monkey.org was started around 1996, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a BBS before it moved online ;)
- emmelaich 6y agoDug Song founded Duo. (you might know that) https://duo.com/blog/post-author/dugsong https://duo.com/blog/post-author/dugsong I think he has an account here on HN. edit .. last post in 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dugsong https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dugsong
- alecco 6y agoI remember seeing a photo of @dugsong skating his bike and thinking "I'll never be that cool".
- ajmarsh 6y agoMany of the monkey.org and deathstar.org folks all worked for the same IT help desk at UofM which at the time was called "Facilities" best job I ever had. We are still looking for that stolen box of t-shirts!
- hayksaakian 6y agohttps://monkey.org/registrar/ https://monkey.org/registrar/ monkey.org provides for its users domain registration services. monkey.org can also transfer domains from other registrars to our system.
- sbarre 6y agoYep that's the beauty of OpenSRS[0], anyone can become a domain registrar.. (I don't know for sure that monkey.org uses them but you could also start your own registar this way if you wanted to). 0: https://opensrs.com/why/ https://opensrs.com/why/
- zhoujianfu 6y agoReminds me a lot of http://newdream.net/oldschool/ http://newdream.net/oldschool/ .. we started offering paid hosting to users too, and eventually became dreamhost.com!
- IBCNU 6y agoWow. You just blew my mind. Been a user since the late 90's and to see the intention...
- exogeny 6y agoNewdream is a great memory! The exploding of new media/design zines of in the late 1990s was really something. Newdream of course, but Lockjaw, K10K, Kiiroi, Newstoday, Uploading...man, that was a cool time. I loved that ethos. It just seemed like it was group after group of really talented teenagers with pirated copies of Photoshop putting together these elaborate projects and releases, sort of like the demo scene in Europe or the elite ANSI group artpacks from the BBS days. I haven’t thought about it or them in forever, but Lockjaw was my favorite. Whenever they’d have a release, it may as well have been my favorite band releasing a new album. You could just see how quickly the modern aesthetics (and what people figured out they could do with JavaScript) were changing. I worked part-time for a design studio back then (eventually bought by Razorfish, which should really date my story to a specific era!) and it was just so visibly obvious that the print designers weren’t going to be able to catch up. The new wave took over so fast, and it was all these cool punk kids who could design it and code it at the same time. I hesitate to call it “better” because there was nothing even close to frameworks or version control or anything back then. But it was certainly more original.
- 0898 6y agoJosh, remember those funny Dreamhost newsletters? What happened to those?
- zhoujianfu 6y agoI retired and Brett took over! But he kept them “funny” for a while?
- 6y ago
- userbinator 6y agoThese places on the "independent web" are sadly getting more and more obscure to find via search engines. It's an unfortunate reflection of the "mainstream web" that I feel compelled to remark on the use of simple HTML and CSS, only marred by a single Google Analytics script. There's not a lot of content here, but there's also not a lot of bloat either.
- sudobash1 6y agoThat's true, but on the other hand, I find myself steadily finding them anyway (many on HN). This site is obviously not for mass consumption by the general public, so it's OK that it isn't highly ranked by Google. Google is for the average user. Sites like this are discovered by their target audience and spread largely by wires of mouth.
- the_pwner224 6y ago> This site is obviously not for mass consumption by the general public, so it's OK that it isn't highly ranked by Google. Google is for the average user. Sites like this are discovered by their target audience and spread largely by wires of mouth. You find some really good in-depth content for niche areas on these sort of sites (personal HTML websites, neocities.org, etc.). But if you forget the URL, it's usually very hard to find them again on Google even with using specific keywords. Too much SEO spam clogging up the results. I suspect not having Google Analytics scripts on the pages may also contribute. One that I can remember off the top of my head was a blog with a pink-ish background with content on making quills and ink from plants, among other stuff. One post specifically had an easy ink recipe that used walnuts iirc. Google will show you tons of big SEO'd Wordpress blogs with ads/affiliate links but not the old school genuine site. Another one was the blog of a day trader (a real one, not a guy trying to sell day trading courses). Impossible to find. site:wordpress.com helps filter out some of the SEO spam but I think it must have been hosted on a custom domain. It definitely looked like a standard Wordpress website when I read it a long time ago.
- quenix 6y agoThis is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but why do you think sites such as these deserve any sort of high place on a search engine? The goal of a search engine is to present results which are -useful- to a user. These "independent web" sites are a neat relic at best and completely useless to the everyday user at worst. Compared to the tens of millions of competing -useful- sites, they are markedly less deserving of a spot. In fact, it would be unfair to award one to them purely because they are "independent".
- ittan 6y agoUmm, another independent space, but not a domain host, one of the more famous ones is. http://www.greenend.org.uk/ http://www.greenend.org.uk/ Putty is hosted here.
- KingOfCoders 6y ago"monkey.org has a bunch of users. most of them hate you."
- kristopolous 6y agoOk, how is that different from any other service on the internet?
- toyg 6y agoI guess they don’t try to pretend otherwise.
- _a1_ 6y agohate speech?
- bityard 6y agoI don't know why this is #4 on the front page, guess HN is bored tonight? monkey.org is a sort of loose collection of University of Michigan and/or Ann Arbor folks. Many of the people in the users section were early contributors to OpenBSD or went on to found and work for various startups in the area, some of which you've probably heard of.
- yoshamano 6y agoAs someone who has lived an hour away from Ann Arbor for his entire life, I find myself wandering over that way on a regular basis. As a teenager in the late 90’s and early 00’s the siren song of Pinball Pete’s, Middle Earth, Michigan/State Theaters, and Wizzywig (ESPECIALLY Wizzywig) were irresistible. I don’t remember how I came across monkey.org but I do remember there was a kind monkey who had scanned a great many of the menus from restaurants around town in a time when restaurants didn’t “Internet”. Ever since then I’d poke at monkey.org if I was really bored, and it’s been my go to test website. So, thanks monkey.org :)
- eps 6y agoUsed to work with a couple of guys closely involved with OpenBSD, both had monkey.org addresses. Both were Canadians.
- baddate 6y ago>monkey.org is happy to host sites for our users. but not you. interesting!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoHuh. Front page? What is everyone looking at exactly?
- _a1_ 6y agoSo many comments and I have no idea what monkey.org is and why I should care.
- erulabs 6y agoMy mentor at a small ISP in the early 2000s had friends and sites like this. I even remember Monkey.org specifically. I honestly feel like I grew up in the ruins of the old internet - too young to be a old beard and too old to be a digg/Reddit user and far too old to be a Twitter-er. Quake was too old and half-life was too new. I’ve always wanted to write about my lack of community - a sysadmin after sysadmins went extinct and the oldest of the devops - but I fear like the subject of the essay - no one would be around to read it. I miss the old goons I grew up idolizing. Wonder where they are now - with their children and their CTO positions. Don’t take community or friends for granted. Y’all Monkeys are luckier than you know.
- Namari 6y agoHow old are you?
- jdmoreira 6y agoHe must be 34 by my calculations :)
- Tepix 6y agoMy guess would be 38
- darkwater 6y agoHow can possibly Quake be too old then? It's from 1996 [1], which would make them 14y old at the time which is a perfect age to play Quake. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(video_game)
- necovek 6y agoBut it's possible they did not get online until much later. My dad did get us dial-up internet in 1995, but he was a uni professor doing stuff with computers for a long while (we've had a Novell Netware network at home in 1993). But basically nobody I knew was getting online too, and BBSes were still a thing for older beards.
- mcbain 6y agoI see that domain and immediately I’m back in the conference room at Usenix 2000 watching dugsong perform wizardry with dsniff during his lightning talk. Standing ovation. So good. A lifetime ago.
- resters 6y agoOne time I watched dugsong hacking away at something on his laptop... he had drawn a crowd. I wonder what happened to all the monkey.org people... I imagine most are in the security world at this point.
- rodolphoarruda 6y agoMade me think of another possible online community: 12monkeys.org If you have seen the movie (1995), you know what I mean.
- alecco 6y agohttps://monkey.org/~provos/ https://monkey.org/~provos/ Head of Sec @ Stripe, former Google, finder of websites with malware. And YouTuber blacksmith. The guy is bigger than life. https://www.youtube.com/user/mintwart https://www.youtube.com/user/mintwart
- morazow 6y agohttps://monkey.org/~marius/ https://monkey.org/~marius/ Marius also has great profile, I am happy user of his libraries (e.g, finagle)!
- segmondy 6y agohttps://monkey.org/~dugsong/ https://monkey.org/~dugsong/ - Author of dsniff - Member of w00w00 - Major contributor to openssh and making it ubiquitous - Pushed OpenBSD forward back in the day. These guys, back in the day they will drive from Ann Arbor to Windsor, Canada to write code to get around the US crypto export. - Knows quite a bit about Kerberos - Oh wait, Founder of Duo security.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CryptoPunk 6y agoI like the late-90s Matrix aesthetic.
- jzer0cool 6y ago"We'll still keep track of your user dues, however, just in case you make it big someday". L.O.L
- mromanuk 6y agoSometimes HN expose me to things that I don't understand or care, but I like it. Reminds me how big the Internet is.
- motohagiography 6y agoThese communities are really special. I was lucky enough to be a included in a few (though not this one directly), and if you are part of one, be generous to it and preserve it as best you can. People change and they won't always be the people you want to be like, but treat them like the ones you've got. Good on them that they're still cool.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- milkysquid 6y agoReminds me of LoneStar SDF group http://sdf.org http://sdf.org
- milkysquid 6y agoReminds me of Lonsestar SDF server group https://sdf.org https://sdf.org
- shidoshi 6y agoMorning, folks. Shidoshi@ (almost everywhere, including Monkey) here. This was quite funny to wake up to. I did ping Dug, Dave, and Jim this morning, so maybe one of them will drop in and give a history lesson. If any of you are looking to join Niels and me at Stripe, do please drop me a note.
- segmondy 6y agoHey, I was amused to see this here this morning. :-D
- NelsonMinar 6y ago/wave
- AntiImperialist 6y agoThe website is blocked by Malwarebytes. You may want to check what is causing it to do that.
- personaelit 6y agoI think I hate myself for saying this, but this is the sort of thing that has the facade of being funny, but really isn't funny at all. Like, what's the actual joke here? "monkey.org is happy to host sites for our users. but not you."
- mk4p 6y agoTotally agree. "monkey.org has a bunch of users. most of them hate you." Okay?
- personaelit 6y agoThe alt text is pertinent. https://xkcd.com/1210/ https://xkcd.com/1210/
- bityard 6y agoIt's not meant to be a joke, it's just the cyberspace equivalent of a private clubhouse for a group of tech people who live or went to college in Ann Arbor, MI. There are websites (and other services) hosted here, but it's not web hosting for the general public. You have to know someone to get an account here, and from what I can tell it's been mostly dormant for the last decade or longer. I know and worked with several of the people on the users list. Great people, but I don't know why this is on the HN front page.
- jchook 6y agoLooks like private hosting for friends, similar to http://tilde.club http://tilde.club
- phreack 6y agoIt is kind of frustrating when everyone talks about this like it's this obviously famous thing, acting pretentiously, lamenting how there's nothing like it anymore, shunning everyone else - and it turns out it's basically a microculture from not just America, but a very specific location in America, from a very specific time. "Things were so much better back then, but you wouldn't get it you weren't there and I'm not going to let you understand". Gah. If you want whatever this is to come back in spirit, stop lamenting at very turn and be more open, make friends, build stuff, or at the very least explain what's going on and share the magic, we're all interested in niche stuff here and who knows, maybe you'll get in touch with someone with the same brain frequency you're looking for.