Welcome to...

What is B1tchez.Org?

The proper question probably is "What was B1tchez.Org?"

B1tchez.Org was the first female run hack box. Ever. Think I'm wrong? I'm not.

Sure there were other boxes that had female sys admins. Sure they were on the Internet. Maybe even one or two of them got hacked or were hacked from.

That doesn't make them B1tchez.org. See, B1tchez.Org was run by hack chicks. It catered to the hack scene. Everyone and anyone could and did have an account on B1tchez.Org. Why? Because I gave them one. I gave everyone one. For free. And I let them do whatever they wanted. In exchange, they let me do whatever I wanted. This often included snooping through their home directories, reading their IRC logs and even eventually garnishing donations on demand.

Did they complain? No way. They weren't on niceguys.net or yourbestfriend.com. They had accounts on B1tchez.Org. What else could they expect? What else would they have stood for?

There are a few reasons B1tchez.Org was a huge success. By success we mean that it lives on in infamy to this day. You see B1tchez.Org was only online for maybe four or five months. Between February and May of 1996. Yes. Almost ten years ago. And for only a few months. And yet, still to this day, there is talk of B1tchez.Org. Email is still sent to B1tchez.Org addresses. People still ask around to find out how and where they can get an account.

The reason B1tchez.Org ruled is because it came at exactly the right time and under exactly the right circumstances. In 1996 the Internet was becoming legitimate, but not so legitimate that your mom was online sending emails. Not so legitimate that the word "google" became a dictionary term. The only things happening online in 1996 were Yahoo!, IRC and B1tchez.Org.

B1tchez.Org was also ingenious because it managed to stay online. The key was the operating system, and for that we must give thanks to where thanks is due. Steve Jobs. The pimp daddy computer genius of them all. Before there were sexy titanium powerbooks or a real, user-friendly UNIX based operating system like OS X, there was NeXTStep. This is the operating system that make those sexy black slabs and cubes purr. It also was the secret to B1tchez.Org. While everyone had their SunOS exploits readily available, they really didn't know what to do about a server using the NeXT operating system. It was sort of like speaking our own language. Or rather, Steve's language. God bless him.

The other reason B1tchez.Org could survive, exist and thrive was the generous, fortuitous hosting it had at Mindvox. Perhaps the grand-daddy of hacker territory, before everyone had accounts on B1tchez.Org I think everyone (at least anyone who mattered) had an account on Vox. I am convinced that feds who might have tracked hacker activity back to B1tchez.Org just gave up the whole pursuit when they saw that B1tchez.Org was hosted by Mindvox. Asking for background information on a user on Mindvox, and subsequently on B1tchez.Org, was completely useless. We didn't know who our users were. They had nicks and handles on IRC. They asked for accounts and they got them. It was completely irresponsible, almost anonymous and untraceable, but also completely liberating. For us at least.

Of course the second great thing Mindvox gave B1tchez.Org was full T3 connectivity, a hard-to-meet requirement for an EFnet IRC server. An ever harder requirement for an aspiring EFnet IRC server run for and by the #hack community. Splitting servers never was so simple. For a few glorious months there, everyone could hack from B1tchez.Org, irc from B1tchez.Org and be on the B1tchez.Org IRC server.

There were a few other good bits thrown in. There was the fun of telling everyone to pony up $5 a month if they wanted to keep their B1tchez.Org account. That wasn't so much fun for them, I suppose, but it was rad for me, as a college student, to come home and collect enough money from envelopes stuffed in my mailbox to cover dinner for me and Jennie and whatever boys were were letting escort us around at the time. There was also the B1tchez.Org MUD which was completely useless, pointless, half-assed and as insane as a modern day Alice in Wonderland virtual rabbit hole. Finally there was also the time I got the logs about Emmanuel and his involvement with some loser hack chick and her teenage boyfriend. Or, let me rephrase. Her aspirations for him and his aspirations for her boyfriend. Ahem. Making that the motd was probably the only moral thing B1tchez.Org ever did.

Finally, one of the best things that ever came from those good ol' days was Valentinocon. After spending six months living abroad in Melbourne, Australia, I returned to New York and wanted to be surrounded by my friends and favorite people. That's why I threw Valentinocon which was a weekend long "conference" held at my apartment the weekend before Valentine's Day. I invited pretty much everybody and pretty much everybody showed up. Present were folks from l0pht, Cult of the Dead Cow, MoD, 2600, Defcon and r00t, among others. We weren't quite aware of it at the time, but that weekend probably bonded most of us together for life. That may have been an implicit side effect of 20 people sharing a 400 square foot apartment, or it may have just been a rare, opportune moment in history where we all came together and reveled in the delinquency of youth. Like any good hacker "con" there was a lot of drunken behavior, some puking and vomiting, a little sex, some S&M, at least three shots of frontal nudity that I remember and one fateful arrest - all combined with a shared love of Internet technology and IRC.Valentinocon only happened once, so you missed out. For the rest of us, it's a weekend we'll never forget.

So that's the story of B1tchez.Org. Right now I've brought it back online. You could say by popular demand, even. Not sure if I'm going to go handing out B1tchez.Org shells again, but if I do I'm sure I'll be charging for them. In the meantime if you want me to give you a B1tchez.Org email address, I'll gladly forward mail for you for a small donation. I'm hoping to offer B1tchez.Org paraphenalia sometime soon and the money could go toward that eventuality. Or it could go toward dinner. Doesn't really matter to you, now does it? As long as you get the chance to relive the fun.

B1tchez.Org is a division of Girls Are Smarter. Also, coming soon, sponsored by B1tchez.Org, SexCamp.

To send praise, stories, old logs or other B1tchez.Org requests, contact L0ra (Laura Laytham). Also feel free to thank, praise and worship Xgirl, the better half of this whole mess. And if you want, you can buy some stuff too.

I am also looking for a publisher for my hack chick memoir. Contact me if you think you can help. Eventually I hope to publish sneak peaks and previews on this site too, so stay tuned.