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Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?
61–70 of 145 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?
#62I have a still-functional though no longer in active use AOL account which I think is from ~1996 when I was ~9. My parents were subscribers so it was created as part of their family account.
By the late 2000s I had migrated to Gmail and was only using my AOL account for AIM. One day a friend texted me to ask if I might have been hacked. It turns out my mom's account--and thus those of mine and my siblings--had been compromised. We'd not been subscribed for a very long time, and AOL customer support for account recovery was basically non-existent for non-subscribers.
My brother happened to know Adrian Lamo[1]. Adrian still knew people on AOL's security team from when he was a thorn in their side. He was able get our accounts restored and enable additional protections for our accounts. I did a short phone call with him after it was done and thanked him for being so much more helpful than AOL. His response was, "I try to provide better customer support than the people I hack."
I haven't used that account for anything other than recovering other ancient accounts of mine since AIM was shutdown, although I wasn't using it very frequently by then anyway. Friends had long since migrated to other platforms.
[1] This was probably 1-2 years before he turned in Chelsea Manning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo
Re: Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?
#63I just recently switched the email associated with my Xbox account from the Hotmail I created in '98 or '99 to my current email address. That Xbox account is probably the oldest account I'm actively using since it's from around when Halo 2 launched.
I'm sure I have logins for older accounts stored in 1Password, but none of them would be anything actively used.
Re: Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?
#64I still have an ICQ account from 1996, and I can still sign into it. It's a low six-digit UIN.
Re: Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?
#65Probably hotmail from '96, scary! I seem to recall it was invite only from a friend whilst I was on a contract down in London.
Closed all my other big tech accounts over the past few years, mostly in protest, including finally google this week (html basic mode).
Re: Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?
#66Probably my eBay account, 29 March 1997; last used a couple of weeks ago
Re: Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?
#67I've been using Gmail since 2006, but I am now transitioning to iCloud with a custom domain as part of my #degoogling efforts.
Re: Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?
#68My email at a personal domain is going on 30 years.
Re: Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?
#69I still have an ICQ account from 1996, and I can still sign into it. It's a low six-digit UIN.
wow. How to test? I tried my old account on icq dot com but doesnt seem to exist.
Re: Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?
#70I still have an ICQ account from 1996, and I can still sign into it. It's a low six-digit UIN.
wow. How to test? I tried my old account on icq dot com but doesnt seem to exist.
I went to https://web.icq.com/ and signed in. You have to click on the text in the upper left to say "Login with password" so that it doesn't try to do it over SMS.