Bianca.com

bianca.com is an alternative virtual community that was created on 14 February 1994 by a group of Chicago (Later moved to San Francisco) dot-com software developers including David Thau and Chris Miller. bianca was the world's first web-based chat room.Fact|date=February 2007 It later also became a popular theme camp at Burning Man.

The site has long been infamous for its extreme free speech and raucous discourse, and its sociological effect on the Internet and elsewhere has been extensively detailed in a thesis by "Freeform" (Miller), [http://www.freeform.org/thesis/toc.html] who studies bianca-style chat rooms as a sort of petri dish for incubating deviant behavior:

In 1997 Radio Shack sought to prevent bianca's "Smut Shack" from using that name, citing their previous use of the word "shack" and claiming exclusive use. They later backed down from their legal action.

In 1999 the site was purchased by professional pornography site Nerve.com, but by 2001 they'd given up on the venture due to excessive bandwidth costs. [http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,43825,00.html] Nerve announced bianca's impending closure, though Thau vowed to find a way to preserve at least part of the site.

Flooding,cyber attacks and the demise

At the time of the site's creation, the posts in bianca's chat rooms could be of any length. If a user had a 100 line long poem they wanted to post, the chat software would have accepted and posted it. This was manageable when bianca was a smaller more closely knit community. However, as bianca grew more popular, cyber vandals eventually found their way to bianca, and they too could post 100 line long rants if they pleased. As the site prided itself on allowing all users freedom of speech, little effort was made to correct what quickly became a problem in terms of both site management and bandwidth, bringing the system to its knees. [http://www.freeform.org/thesis/deviant.html]

Some anti flooding software was later added, but was shown to be less then impervious to persistent hackers

In the final days of the site's full blown operations in 2003 and 2004, the site became the target of hackers and cyber attacks. The attacks included but were not limited to, exhausting the sites bandwidth by flooding Bianca’s message boards with text that included links disguised as leading to porn sights. Remnants of this vandalism can still be found on the skeletal remains of Bianca.com to this very day

Although it is unclear who was actually managing the server, bianca's operated with intermittent functionality and frequent outages as late as early 2007. At some point after that, hackers were able to access the server and delete the contents, using a function that rendered the date irretrievable, and thus today, the home page still exists, but all that is accessible beyond that are some archived messages and the sits update page

bianca.org

The sister-site [http://www.bianca.org bianca.org] houses some information about the core group involved with bianca.com-related real world activities. This site claims:

bianca.org is the real-world extension of the online community known as bianca.com, which doesn't necessarily mean that we bare [sic] " [sic] " any resemblance or likeness to any of the activities of bianca.com but we do take our name and spirit from that which is the great bianca!

External links

* [http://www.bianca.com/ bianca.com]
* [http://www.bianca.org/ bianca.org]
* [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2001/03/22/bianca.DTL sfgate: World's biggest online sex party]
* [http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,24395,00.html Demise of bianca's?]
* [http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,43825,00.html Wired Magazine on bianca's bandwidth woes]