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On the morning of Sept. 13, 1995, agents of the FBI fanned out across the country and raided the homes of more than 125 America Online subscribers. Roused from their sleep, the unlucky AOL users were presented with search warrants, then had to watch as the G-men hauled away their computers, storage media and any other suspicious-looking items. Thus began "Operation Innocent Images," an FBI investigation into alleged trafficking of child pornography via America Online. -The Net, January 1996
America Online Inc. is paradoxical-it prides itself on providing a familyoriented service, yet there have long been questions about just how well AOL polices its system. Although AOL claims to be easy to use and powerful, I have found its security poor, its service bad and its system weak and proprietary. While AOL's latest TV ads say the company is working around the clock to meet user needs, its actions seem to be]ie its claims.
AOL has troubled me for a long time. I became a member in 1993, but after a year on the service, it seemed as though AOL was pushing all the worst possibilities for the on-line world. Karen Coyle, Western regional director for the Berkeley, Calif., chapter of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, explained to me a couple of years ago why so many people keep signing up. "Few beginning computer users are knowledgeable about the full range of software available to them," she said, pointing out that AOL's software is now preinstalled on most new computers. At a historic fork in the road, people were moving on-line in unprecedented numbers and were unwittingly accepting the worst possible proprietary model.
So I began to raise my concerns in the frequently asked questions list for a newsgroup called alt.aol-sucks. Although I was a freelance writer, my criticisms of AOL became an after-hours passion that included contributions to Web pages, news articles and my own mailing list, which has grown to 8,000 members. In 1995, my friend James Egelhof created the Why AOL Sucks page (www.aolsucks.org, which received its 500,000th visitor last February, and he started archiving my columns.
My view from the grassroots often conflicts with the public image AOL tries to project with its enormous marketing budget. I recently read in...