Greatest Social Experiment in History

Whoever 'Mike' is from eon8.com, I congratulate you.

For those of you that hadn't gotten swept up in the massive digital tide that was eon8.com, let me enlighten you. A strange internet poster known as x21b made a few vague posts about a website, eon8.com. These messages were cryptic, including random strings of text and links to files for download.

Visiting eon8.com would give the user a feeling that they were unwanted. Ominous error messages pertaining to security audits being failed, actions being recorded, and so on prevailed. The glory of this website was a counter, counting down until July 1st at midnight. The counter was elaborate in the fact that it took into account fake times on the computer, and relied on the server's time.

The site even had 'Secure Areas' protected by an SSL script and required HTACCESS usernames/passwords. Overall, the site looked like it really could be something bad.

I came across the site while reading Digg.com, which I am guessing is what sparked this gigantic moment in internet history. I saw forums crumble and die as a result of people pooling their knowledge (and that knowledge being ignored, and rediscovered over and over and over because people are too busy to read the previous posts) together in an effort to find out what is going on. Unfiction, I thank you for at least humoring the amount of new traffic that you now have. I may even join.

IRC channels began to pop up in an effort to keep the forum servers from dying as the counter got closer and closer to its mark. I joined two, just to see if there would be any difference (and there really wasn't).

The clocked ticked away......it finally reached Zero.....

And (wonder of wonders) the page auto refreshed to nothingness as hundreds of thousands of people effectively requested the site at once.

For those that got in, they were greeted with a message from the site's creator. To summarize:

"{eon8} Complete
As of July 1st, 2006, the E8 Project has completed.
The purpose of this project was to determine the reactions of the internet public to lack of information."

Mike, I wish to one day shake your hand, or at least duplicate what you accomplished on this night. The only thing you have to fear now are the rabid, disappointed geeks that are now probably finding out where you live, stealing all of the money from your bank accounts, signing you up for massive amounts of gay porn (or straight porn, in case you are gay), and the zombies that I have resurrected and are eager for your brains.

Oh, and the gigantic bandwidth bill in case you didn't notice that the site was hugely popular.

As a side note, leave a comment if you want to see all the files associated with the completion of eon8.com, I have them saved to keep as part of internet history.