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"AOL's Security Fiction"
On April 25 obscenely-named files appeared in the FTP sites of 14 AOL staffers. The files lingered throughout the weekend, a silent challenge to the work of AOL's Terms of Service manager and the head of the Guide program.Attempts to set a "decency" standard for on-line language would seem to be at odds with the often-repeated hacker credo, "information wants to be free." In one letter sent to Steve Case, a self-styled hacker told the AOL CEO that "people would'nt be fuckin with aol so much if you just allowed us free speech for all that fuckin money."
It's AOL's Terms of Service advisor who's charged with maintaining AOL's rules on decent language--so the hackers hit ftp://members.aol.com/tosadvisor. The obscene file names were displayed throughout that weekend. Ironically, the final directory listed on his FTP site was: private.
Though the image FTPTOS.GIF left in the hacked file library appeared to be an invalid GIF, its name corresponds to that of an "AOL Watch" screen-shot taken the weekend the attack occurred.