Saturday, July 1, 2006

On July 1, 2006 at Midnight Eastern Daylight Time, the purpose of the website Eon8 was revealed, turning out to be an experiment on how the public reacts to a lack of information. Eon8, prior to the revelation, was a website counting down to July 1 created by a 23-year-old web designer from Florida known only as “Mike”. The bottom of the page featured links to other pages and a note on the “project status.” Eon8 is often “offline” due to the heavy traffic it is receiving.

Links to other pages included a “deployment tracker,” which featured a map of the world highlighting heavily populated areas, and “deployment logs,” which were revealed to be arbitrary characters encoded in MD5. Going to eon8.com/security listed a series of rejected “referers“; accessing the website from a link on a website that has not been approved by Eon8 would result in a rejected “referrer” page. Three other links on the main page were password-protected, however it was revealed today that there was no password. Anyone who managed to circumvent the password protection would find a page reading “This is a decoy folder. Please connect to the internal secure network.”

Predictions of the purpose of Eon8 included the distribution of computer viruses, viral marketing, and an alternate reality game. Additionally, plenty of references were made to the Book of Revelations and the Third Reich. The website’s popularity spread as a result of plenty of Internet communities reacting to it, including forum posts on 4chan, eBaum’s World, Something Awful, as well as a page on YTMND predicting the purpose of Eon8.