[HN Gopher] What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers
___________________________________________________________________
What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers
Author : booleanbetrayal
Score : 236 points
Date : 2022-04-12 12:48 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| chrisallick wrote:
| i got started in coding making progz for aol in 4th grade.
| changed my life. great read!
| werber wrote:
| I am so much a product of this generation, I had forgotten so
| much of what this article mentions, but damn, this brought it
| back. I remember doing the exact punting scam, along with my
| first and only script kiddie DDOS back then (I was maybe 8 years
| old, and thought Bill Gates was my bully and that Linux was going
| to take over the world)
|
| Tangent, I started work on remaking "You've Got Mail" a few
| months ago, with an updated ethos, focusing on decentralized web.
|
| It's weird to cry over an article so unemotional, but, that era
| made me into who I am today.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Hacking q-link or Quantum Link was so much fun which later became
| aol. I think I still have a disk...
| beaker52 wrote:
| This is exactly where my programming career started. I was a
| young kid, aged 11 or 12, learning Visual Basic 5 & 6, making UIs
| that were backed by coms (I think that's what they were called?)
| downloaded off the internet.
|
| I wasn't knowledgeable enough to write the coms but I could make
| interfaces that called the functions within them. I made little
| apps that let you change the chat colours and phishing apps to
| message people so you could appear like an AOL staff member and
| maybe get their username and password.
|
| Those same chatrooms are where I was exposed to pornography for
| the first time. My innocence never recovered from that, but it is
| what it is.
| Duhck wrote:
| I have described this world to a few people in my life recently,
| and look back on it very fondly.
|
| Everyone was anonymous, everyone was crazy motivated, and it was
| a wild west of credit card theft, software theft, and more.
|
| I wrote a few prolific mass mailers and servers, was pretty well
| known in the scene, and was only 12/13 years old.
|
| I learned to program, create great user experiences, and more.
|
| My servers were the first to have plain text search: /server send
| photoshop instead of /server send 26-40
|
| It also hosted the lists via a PHP webapp, tracked metrics on the
| web across users of the app, and connected to IRC.
|
| It was a wonderful time of chaos, rapid learnings, and intrinsic
| motivation that shaped my life forever. If not for this period of
| time in my life, I dont know where Id find myself.
| ahmadss wrote:
| this describes the web3 + discord scene accurately today, but
| instead of Visual Basic, kids today are using Replit.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| Is there something equivalent to it nowadays?
| Duhck wrote:
| Yea as ahmadss describe above, web3 and discord is as close
| as you can get to this experience.
|
| A good friend had a really cool way of describing the
| evolution from web1(aol / dialup era) -> web3
|
| Web 1 was unmitigated chaos, lots of creativity, lots of
| experimentation, lots of illegal activity, not a lot of money
| being made
|
| Web 2 was ordered chaos, lots of money being made everywhere,
| not a ton of creativity but lots of business value creation
|
| Web 3 is the best of both worlds (and some of the worsts).
| Lots of creativity, boundless energy, lots of value but also
| lots of fraud.
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| Is it the best of both worlds only because there is money
| being made?
| stnmtn wrote:
| Discord bots, while wayyy more of a walled garden, brought me
| a lot of joy from the combination of short feedback loop
| (very easy to make bots do relatively complex things) and
| large userbase of more-tech-savyy-than-average users
|
| I hooked up OpenAI into my bot to allow GPT-3 like prompting
| in the servers I'm in; created a way to search for youtube
| videos and play them in a voice channel, and other dumb, fun
| things.
|
| Making it scale seems like it would be doable, but for now
| I'm keeping it to the servers I'm active in
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| A more interesting bit of AOL era ephemera was that we used away
| messages as people use Twitter today. In the AOL client you could
| set a short message (just a few hundred characters) as an away
| message that others would see if they had you in their contacts.
| People started to constantly set themselves 'away' with messages
| about what they were up to, how they were feeling, etc. I'm sure
| this likely influenced Jack Dorsey and the other early folks at
| Twitter since they were growing up and using AOL at the same
| time.
| anthk wrote:
| More like finger from Unix.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| My friend once (23 years ago) sent a wall at a local
| community college and had a Unix admin angrily stare at him
| through the classroom window. I distinctly remember him
| saying "if they didn't want me to do that they shouldn't run
| walld" and I couldn't disagree lol
| freeplay wrote:
| Always had to find that perfect lyric to convey the message.
| What a time.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| This whole thread (including your username) is a warm nostalgia
| bomb.
|
| Gonna have to go download some ZZT files now. I've heard
| there's somewhat of a community around it again.
| sejje wrote:
| This was me, too.
|
| Shout-outs to maxl, nion, frikk, fatmac, rikky, kai and oracle,
| syfa and some other good dudes from that time. Some of you are
| here, I know.
|
| Can't believe we're talking about dos32.bas in 2022.
| yarone wrote:
| I'm with you guys here. My first program was an AOL...program.
| Learned how to program by copying some kids I met in private AOL
| chat rooms.
|
| My first commercial program (shareware) was a legit AOL add-on
| (AoLOL!). Designed, built, and redesigned several times before I
| had the courage to ship it. Visual Basic 3.0. Used Win32 API to
| attach my program to the AOL toolbar (for AOL 2.5 and AOL 3.0).
| Had folks from all around the country send me a $14.95 check via
| US mail.
| sejje wrote:
| I was programming in VB6 (and hanging out in the vb6 private
| chat on AOL) in these days. I made a custom mp3 player with
| chat coms & feedback called 3pm, an AIM account storage utility
| (AIMs were like our NFTs I guess) called whorehouse (I was 16).
|
| I had a couple of "naughty" projects at the time, that netted
| me some cash as well. Stated generically, automated affiliate
| marketing using AOL. I made about $6,000 my junior and senior
| years of high school, and a couple of friends did as well using
| my program. It was fully hands-off besides having to restart it
| sometimes, although the code felt like a house of cards, even
| to me then as a total novice programmer.
| balls187 wrote:
| MM going out in 10. Type $$$ to get on.
| todd3834 wrote:
| The punter/proggie scene definitely got me into programming.
| Articles like this bring such a special kind of nostalgia. It was
| both educational and for me at the time, it was very rebellious.
| My parents did not want me downloading any of these things on our
| family computer. My friends and I would share floppy disks of
| punters as contraband.
|
| Learning Visual Basic and the open source community of .bas files
| was ahead of its time. The tutorials and programming guides, the
| general willingness to share information.
|
| I learned how to write C++ from a random guy who went by
| LostSideDead. If you happen to be reading this sir, thank you for
| spending so much time teaching a kid how to write code. I've made
| a long career of it and I love it.
| twox2 wrote:
| I have the prog scene to thank for some of my first forays into
| code. Mostly I was just decompiling existing progz, and re-
| skinning them and then we had a little crew that would re-
| release them. Not bad for 6th/7th graders. It was so much fun.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| People have pirated cassettes, VHS, floppy disks, CDs, USB
| drives. Some decades ago people even connected other people's
| hard drives into their computers.
|
| Then people pirated over phone, BBS, LAN parties, the Internet.
|
| Shit, there might be even people pirating shit over Ham radio.
| bluedino wrote:
| Similarly, I know a handful of people who got their start writing
| mIRC scripts
| gompertz wrote:
| That or TI-83 calculator applications. Now it seems to be
| Discord bots.
| bryans wrote:
| mIRC scripting was/is incredibly underrated, and was used for
| so much more than chat bots, as well. Among other things made
| easy, it provided a method of accessing raw sockets that
| allowed for basic IP spoofing, which was a boon for all sorts
| of inventive and mischievous behavior.
| CMay wrote:
| mIRC scripting was great. The first real useful script I
| wrote connected to babelfish.altavista.com with raw sockets
| around the time that came out and would scrape the HTML
| results from queries for realtime chat translation. Their
| backend was basically SYSTRAN, so it was like SYSTRAN for IRC
| via HTTP scraping.
|
| Had to set the incoming and outgoing languages manually
| before any chat and avoid doing it in any high traffic
| channels, but was fine for private messaging. You had to
| write in a kind of simplified verbosity without expressing
| too much style or culture in order to have the most
| successful communication. That experience alone taught me a
| lot.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if someone out there had already
| setup some rudimentary IRC translation before ~1997 without
| even needing to do an HTTP request by just having a word
| replacement flat file, but wasn't aware of one released
| publicly. Didn't share it at the time, because I was
| concerned it wouldn't scale well if it became popular and
| spammed the server with requests.
|
| Never did buy a license for mIRC and haven't really been on
| IRC since probably 2009 due to a mixture of Google Wave and
| Steam chat being sufficient, but ought to get around to that
| to give it the respect it deserved.
| hfourm wrote:
| It was Neopets, for me
| maicro wrote:
| Neopets for social engineering/scamming - converting
| "disposable" digital cameras into reusable (solder in a USB
| port, do...something to gain access to the memory to download
| files) was my introduction to hardware and firmware/software
| hacking and reverse engineering. Nowhere near enough of it
| stuck at the time, and I kinda wish I had gotten more in depth
| then, but ~19 years later those core interests have turned into
| skills...
| derevaunseraun wrote:
| TIL that AOL released a db of search queries from 2006. There's
| some pretty fucked shit in here ngl
|
| https://searchids.com/user/described/1
| 0des wrote:
| What's this useful for anyway, just curious? I don't see
| usernames but I do so that some people had some entries
| redacted somehow
| derevaunseraun wrote:
| It isn't lol. AOL just released search records and didn't
| initially redact all identifying information in the searches.
| They obviously got sued
|
| Ig it's useful from an aesthetic standpoint: we all get to
| see the raw, unfiltered stuff people typed into a search bar
| at one point.
|
| But something that would be interesting: what if this was the
| norm, and everything anyone ever types was public domain?
| Imagine if this just suddenly happened. I don't think we as a
| society would be able to handle it, we'd probably just try to
| cover it up.
| 0des wrote:
| This will happen soon, rest assured
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Ha! When 'apps' were still called progz! Sweet memories
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| The year was 2003 and I was in my second year of CS undergrad. I
| saw a cool utility in AOL instant messenger that recorded the
| username of every user that looked at your profile. I cloned it
| and added it to my profile. A few of my dorm mates liked it and
| asked me to put it in their profile. Even more people came asking
| and I made a simple website (buddytracker.us) where you could add
| the utility to your profile. I did no marketing but every profile
| using buddytracker had a hotmail like link to get your own
| profile tracker. The first month I had 30 users, the second 500,
| the third 5000, then 50000. The following year 3 million people
| had added a profile tracker. It was a life changing experience
| allowing me to pay off my student loans, travel and take a non-
| traditional career path. I work on side projects to this day and
| AOL is where I got my start.
| fyrefestival wrote:
| 1. cloned buddy tracker for yourself and friends
|
| 2. added a "get your own" link
|
| 3. ????
|
| 4. pay off your student loans!!!
|
| what was your step 3, the monetization?
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Probably ads on the site no? Only way I can think where views
| translate to money.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| The only buddy I want to remember was Bonzi :)
|
| Also, PS1 mod chips and copied games / VCDs were good for
| selling in school for a couple bucks.
| mattymurph wrote:
| That is fascinating. Thanks for sharing.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I was expelled from school for having a website where I listed
| downloads of all the AOL tools I could possibly find. There were
| thousands... The school network administrator somehow found my
| website and decided that these AOL tools were being used "to hack
| the Macintosh network and slow it down". I protested to the
| school principal that they were completely unrelated, but as a 13
| year old interested in hacking, I didn't have any credibility.
| That followed me around on my permanent record and other schools
| treated me like a criminal.
|
| Joke's on them, though. I learned to teach myself everything
| (since they refused to), dropped out of school, and got a job at
| a start-up. Don't stay in school, kids - hack for fun and profit!
| stripline wrote:
| This reminds me of how ignorant most adults & teachers were
| back then about the internet.
|
| When I was in 10th grade (~1995) my high school had a new class
| called "U.S. History with Internet". Kudos to my school for
| trying to include the internet in the curriculum, but what it
| amounted to was 3 days a week of normal history class and 2
| days spent in the computer lab. Ostensibly we were supposed to
| be doing history research on the internet, but of course we did
| anything but. The best part was they had the shop teacher teach
| for the internet days. He knew less about computers than most
| of us 15 year-olds. He'd slowly read directions off a paper -
| "Type in the U R L bar..." and we'd already be 5 steps ahead of
| him.
|
| My friend got in trouble for looking at homemade bongs, but the
| hilarious part is that the teacher was convinced he was
| actually looking up bomb making instructions and that "bong"
| was some sort of obfuscation.
| [deleted]
| purgedreality wrote:
| OnlineHost: CATWATCH has entered the room.
|
| Fun memories. I still have copies of a lot of those .bas files
| with the original pinter/punter code. Did anyone ever actually
| get a rainman account?
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Private room vb4, will never forget. Raw, Ash, MrChichis,
| igneus.. fun times.
| notadev wrote:
| Progz were sort of the gateway drug to real hacking of AOL. There
| was a headbanger dude named Beav who archived most progs for
| download on his Angelfire website LensHell. There's still an
| archive available (https://lenshellprogarchive.com)
|
| Progz were mostly for annoyance and were either released as one
| purpose programs, such as a punter to boot people offline, or a
| fader to color text in chat when colors were introduced, or an OH
| Scroller that scrolled endless text to disrupt chat (you would
| run these on hacked overhead aka "OH" accounts used by staff that
| didn't get auto-booted for scrolling). Some progs were sort of
| All-In-One programs where they had maybe a punter feature, a
| fader feature, etc. These all in one progs usually had a bunch of
| useless stuff like an "echo bot" or "trivia bot" or whatever.
| Some had more nefarious purposes like termers which were used to
| get people's accounts terminated. Things like punters and termers
| were usually short-lived as AOL would catch on to whichever
| method they were using an patch it.
|
| The article talks about the open-source sharing nature of progz,
| and maybe that was true for the folks who lived in the vb private
| chats or who released their BAS files (dos32.bas was my first
| ever intro to coding), but many in the hacker scene were typical
| teenage boys who would constantly try to one up each other and
| prove how leet or oldschool they were...and new methods weren't
| always widely shared. The biggest status symbols for AOL hackers
| were leet screen names, like "Boss" or "Hack". Even more leet
| were 3chars which were the smallest amount of characters in a
| screen name and thus hard to get. The leetest of all were
| restricted names that had banned words, like "FuckAOL" or were
| only 2chars like "DJ", or indents like " MrLeet" since they were
| seemingly impossible to make.
|
| In order to get these screen names, hackers would find ways to
| steal account information to reset the passwords, or use tools
| like Sub7 to infect users and then steal their passwords. More
| technically savvy hackers would exploit holes in AOL's systems
| such as the "sign up" page which was the source of a really
| famous hack in 2000. Other hackers were adept at finding ways to
| convince AOL to terminate an account for supposed threats.
| Because of this, most AOL hackers had an extensive numbers of <><
| or phished accounts to avoid a rival hacker from terming you
| "perm" account which was usually paid for by your parents. The
| term phish and its associated progz, phishers, phish tanks, etc.,
| were actually coined on AOL.
|
| Some guys from the scene are legendary. One guy who used AOL on a
| Mac would often find exploits only he could use, including one
| where he stole pretty much every 3char name available. Rumor has
| it he went on to create a very popular online game where users
| are slithering snakes. :-)
| sejje wrote:
| > the "sign up" page which was the source of a really famous
| hack in 2000
|
| I'm not sure if this is the same exploit, but there was an
| exploit where you could steal usernames from people during
| signup. The victim's username had to be an AIM-only account
| (never linked to a paid AOL account). Then with some sorcery,
| you bypassed the "invalid name (already taken)" UI block and
| the backend would make an AOL account with the username.
|
| I stole "christ" from someone this way. Sorry, Chris T. I was
| 16 years old. A friend stole it from me later, and then someone
| TOS'd it after that (banned it using a mod account).
|
| Random people would message the account all the time, as if it
| were actually God, and ask for advice. 16 year old me did my
| best to give well-considered advice.
|
| > including one where he stole pretty much every 3char name
| available
|
| Interesting. I think people in my friend circle were in
| possession of two until AIM pretty much died ('zad' and 'baz'--
| only 75% sure I got the 2nd one right). Guess they got lucky!
| notadev wrote:
| I think it was the same exploit which used free.aol.com. They
| had a 3-step sign up process with the first step letting you
| choose a name. It would validate the name was >= 3 chars in
| length, started with a letter, and didn't contain banned
| words. Once validated, the name was stored in a hidden input
| value in the source of the second page. Someone saved the
| webpage offline so you could replace the sn variable with any
| name not on use on AOL. Then open it locally and go right to
| step 3 where you enter credit details. This let you creat
| indents, 2chars, banned words, and steal AIMs.
| andrew_ wrote:
| This was me. I feel seen.
| bokohut wrote:
| Oh to reminisce about the adventures from the days when it all
| began. One could power on the PC and go make breakfast all the
| while a script executes after boot to "dial up" the wan. From the
| kitchen one listened to the audible feedback of the process as
| the spinning disk clattered and then the dopamine rush hits as
| the modem is dialing up, hoping the modem pool was not
| overloaded. Bbs, Irc, war dialing, AOL hax, NetZero punts and all
| the great fun is where several nerds found their calling, this
| nerd included. Some things have changed for the better while some
| things have changed for the worse yet here we are connecting
| everything, secure or not.
| bryans wrote:
| I think the one of the most interesting and overlooked stories
| about the AOL era, is how the warez scene used bots and AOL's
| mail system to host every piece of pirated content for years.
|
| Similar to IRC channels with bots that provided lists of
| available content and used DCC to transfer compressed files in
| small chunks -- these were still the days of 9600-56k, so
| transfers larger than floppies were often doomed to fail -- AOL
| private rooms would be filled with bots that would respond to
| requests and send files. The difference being that the AOL bots
| would email a list of available content, which could be a
| paginated list across multiple emails, or results for a specific
| search query. Then you would type another command into the chat
| to request a specific file or release, and the bot would forward
| you a series of emails with <1.4MB attachments (the maximum size
| at the time), already stored on AOL servers and ready to download
| at whatever speed your modem could handle.
|
| It took AOL a long time to catch on to this, and even then, they
| couldn't keep up with the sheer number of fake accounts being
| created -- or, as the article points out, accounts made with
| phished credit cards, of which there were hundreds of thousands
| floating around and a never-ending supply of new ones as AOL's
| userbase grew. They effectively hosted the warez scene throughout
| the 90s, until residential broadband became available and
| 10-100mbps was common in places like Sweden and Singapore, at
| which point the scene shifted to IRC and self-hosted top sites
| (i.e. private FTPs).
|
| It was a remarkably simple solution to a hosting problem, and the
| folks who organized it all will never get enough credit for their
| contribution toward creating a generation of graphics experts,
| for example, who couldn't afford the crazy prices of Photoshop or
| 3ds Max, but were able to use pirated copies to develop those
| skills and turn them into careers.
| notadev wrote:
| To expand on this a bit, when you mailed an attachment on AOL,
| it would upload and be hosted on their servers. So when you
| forwarded that email to someone, the download was just a
| pointer to the original location on their servers. Warez groups
| would recruit people for positions likw uploaders with strong
| connections who would just send tons of mail with attachments
| (to themselves I think). Then the progz/bots, called Mass
| Mailers (MMers) would sit in a private chat and wait for
| commands.
|
| Sending the `/list` command in chat would result in one or more
| emails with lists of software, usually split up to reduce file
| size. If I were looking for PhotoShop, I might see something
| like:
|
| [400] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 1/4
|
| [401] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 2/4
|
| [402] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 3/4
|
| [403] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 4/4
|
| I'd then send `/send 400-403` in the chat and in a few minutes
| I'd have four forwarded emails containing a portion of an
| archive. You'd do this for a bunch of stuff and then when going
| to bed, let AOL's download manager download everything
| overnight. AOL did more for the WaReZ scene than anyone else in
| the mid-to-late 90s.
| bdr wrote:
| Instead of /list, I remember the bots advertising with ASCII
| decorations like this:
|
| _,- _^_ -,_,- _^_ -,_,- _^ Enter 33 for /\/\ /\/\ ^_-,_,- _^_
| -,_,- _^_ -,_,- _^_ -,_
|
| (You'd type "33" in the chat to get a Mass Mail in your
| inbox.)
| notadev wrote:
| The MMers allowed you to specify chat commands, but the
| default was usually /list or /listme
| bdr wrote:
| Fixed formatting _,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^
| Enter 33 for /\/\ /\/\ ^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| This workflow is actually still in use in certain corners of
| the IRC world. It's kinda neat to see what other people are
| requesting in realtime.
| the42thdoctor wrote:
| And then what, you had to combine the four files yourself ?
| notadev wrote:
| They were usually RAR files, so you would use WinRAR to
| reassemble them into one archive.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| This naughtiness is what's missing now with the general public
| in the programming world. It has its pros and cons but man
| those days were so much fun.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Yeah; GitHub is orders of magnitude better than Planet Source
| Code ever was, but the high of posting your sick new vb5 BAS
| with "A+++++++++" in the title and getting all the gloves
| isn't really the same today.
|
| Also, irc and newsgroups were amazing back then. I was just
| talking with some friends in discord about our days with mIRC
| scripts, in particular Invision 2 and Excursion.
|
| I feel like AOL scripting was this weird subculture of
| teenagers who did VB vs the slightly older generation with
| their perl / C and Linux tinkering. I didn't personally get
| into FreeBSD until FreeBSD 4, and I felt kinda late to the
| party. This was around the time, for me, when Knoppix was
| cool and the world outside of Windows felt magical.
|
| Now, two decades later, instead of being some FSF dreamscape,
| sleep states and hybrid graphics on laptops cause problems
| across Win, Mac, and Linux, haha.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| My only fear is maybe our generation of hackers are old now
| and cryptocurrency is the place where the naughtiness is
| happening and we don't take it seriously because we are
| older.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > 10-100mbps was common in places like Sweden and Singapore
|
| Oh yeah, I remember sometime in the 90s talking to a Dutch guy
| that had a 6/6 SDSL connection and ran a server in their own
| home. I thought he must have been a billionaire but was blown
| away to discover they worked on assembly line.
| freefolks wrote:
| Actually the most overlooked things about AOL is about how
| their internal network (Merlin) got breeched through social
| engineering by a 14 yr old and did not have a clue about it for
| 5 years. Merlin is their tool that they use internally for
| their entire customer database and had a RAT installed that
| allowed people to create admin accounts, view peoples credit
| card, addresses, names and also allowed people to terminate
| accounts. AOL had 34 million paying users at this time.
| montag wrote:
| Any source for this? Interested to read more. I feel the
| whole AOL saga would make a great Netflix documentary series.
| Lots of interesting wrinkles, like the acquisition of Winamp.
| johnla wrote:
| I don't have a source but in my Technology specialized HS a
| classmate came in with a THICK looseleaf ringbound book
| filled with Names, address, phone and credit card info.
| Each sheet was in tiny print and absolutely filled to the
| brim. I'd have to guess there were easily over 500 pages
| print front and back. He said it was from AOL hacking. I
| was just noob playing with the AOHell prog and didn't
| really utilize the app for anything more than "busting"
| into Lobbies that were full.
| [deleted]
| brentm wrote:
| The good ol' mass mail!
| crate_barre wrote:
| Was this an AOL advent or a IRC one? There were irc channels
| specifically for warez where you did the same thing.
| dls2016 wrote:
| Phished credit cards? For a long time a silly credit card
| generator got past whatever simple check was performed when an
| account was created, allowing you access for a week or so until
| I guess an actual charge attempt was made. (This must have been
| around 1994 or 1995).
| nicoco wrote:
| Oh I remember using fake CC generators in the nineties, as a
| teenager, and being amazed that it permitted to create
| accounts on some* websites.
|
| * yes, porn
| natefox wrote:
| That saved my ass. Had been on AOL for a month or so, by
| stealing my dads CC number out of his wallet. Just happened
| to look at what the bill was going to be and it was something
| stupid like $400 (mid 90's dollars, so like a grand today).
|
| I quickly found a fake CC generator and updated the CC. I was
| panicked for about a week..but he never found out. It never
| hit his CC, and then I was changing the CC every couple of
| weeks whenever I got a warning.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Heck, you didn't even necessarily need a credit card in the
| earliest of days, when AOL (as well as EarthLink and
| CompuServe in fact) still let you pay using bank routing
| details. As long as the routing number was tied to a bank the
| service could lookup, it would take whatever account number
| you gave it and you were on the web!
|
| I won't say how I learned this, but maybe the context clues
| will fill you in on how it ended when six months into
| discovering the internet for the first time, my family got a
| visit from the local PD and some gentlemen from "a government
| office down state".
|
| I was 13 at the time. Not much came out it but some very
| strong words from a local magistrate, who ultimately showed
| clemency and dropped the affair with orders that I remain
| "off the web" for a year.
|
| My father on the other hand...was not so eager to let that
| one go, heh.
| dls2016 wrote:
| > I was 13. Not much came out it but some very strong words
| from a local magistrate, who ultimately they showed
| clemency.
|
| Same thing happened to a friend. After that, I got into
| music and developed a more "healthy" approach to the
| internet... using it to learn about synthesizers and
| download the occasional cracked plugin.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Got tired of burning through free trial AOL CD's and
| decided to "borrow" the username and password from Windows
| 95 Dial up networking provider at local high school.
|
| Went home and war dialed that local prefix (next city over)
| until I found the carrier number.
|
| I was 14 and it was 25 years ago
| ad-astra wrote:
| Reminds me of Hackers (the movie)
| jedberg wrote:
| Back in the 90s, gas station pump receipts still printed
| the full credit card number on them. Usually when you found
| one left behind, it was a corporate gas card that was
| useless.
|
| But occasionally you'd find someone who left behind their
| Visa or Mastercard number.
| akamia wrote:
| Even in the early 2000s this was a thing in some places.
| I remember working at a store that printed the full CC#
| on the customer's receipt. As an employee, it would've
| been ridiculously easy to steal credit card information.
| You could just print a second copy of the receipt after
| the customer left.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| My story was being a 10 year old in the mid-90s and dialing
| up the Apogee BBS using a number displayed in some
| shareware game's splashscreen. Turns out that hour-long
| call to Garland Texas (from Toronto) resulted in a really
| hefty phone bill, which I was asked to help out with since
| I had a paper route at the time.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| I was in a similar situation in the mid 90's when I was 13
| and wanted to get online but wasn't allowed to. I ended up
| finding a loophole in where if I launch the Prodigy
| installer from the CD, it would dial up to the Internet to
| get a local list of servers. I found that I could minimize
| the full screen installer and could use Internet for about
| 10 minutes before it kicked me off. I could only do this
| when my parents were not around and I had to constantly run
| a long telephone cable to their room and unplug their phone
| as that was the nearest jack. That worked for good while.
| :)
| soupfordummies wrote:
| The rent payment portal my apartment uses still checks bank
| accounts this way.
|
| I know this because of the late charges I incurred due to a
| typo on the account number that the system accepted.
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| this was how I got into programming. got my first copy of
| Frontpage off one of those Warez rooms and put my site on aol
| hometown. it was animated gifs and NES roms. sponsored by
| cyberthrills(?) casino. surprisingly I never got a payment lol
| bradly wrote:
| Wow, I did about the same thing. Took me about 23 years to go
| from using Frontpage to put rotating, flaming skulls any page
| I made to my job at Apple.
| beaker52 wrote:
| Man, those gifs were the best.
|
| I feel like I went on a similar journey to you. I wouldn't
| be where I am today without that beginning.
| metamet wrote:
| I would love to hear the story of those who created those
| iconic gifs--the flaming skull and the twinkling
| Christmas tree stick out the most to me.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| JS snow was top-tier, as were flashing holiday lights
| with transparent backgrounds around the site for the
| holidays. Bonus points for midi choons.
|
| It was truly a lit time when you could control browser
| window size and position on the desktop from within JS,
| even eject the CD ROM! Free cup holder JS jokes freaked
| out the older folks. So good.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Fortune City for me, eventually convinced my dad to pay for a
| boxed copy of Macromedia Flash 4 and a real hosting account
| with front page extensions. I think it even did PHP, which
| led to lots of messing around with every PHP CMS under the
| sun, including a lot of time with PHP-Nuke.
|
| I never really figured that every hour spent messing with all
| that would translate into so much more value than any of my
| school work. The scope of our computer courses at school was
| basically touch typing and MS Office 97/98.
| pram wrote:
| There were even hijacked AOL keywords with warez. The internal
| site builder had a simplistic BBS forum type thing, I remember
| one of those being used to link files. Very convenient!
| dylan604 wrote:
| I never used AOL. It just seemed dumb to have that abstraction
| layer to the internet when other providers just went straight
| to the web. AOL keywords drove me crazy hearing radio ads "use
| AOL Keyword _____".
|
| Instead of this bot driven email, I made use of the
| alt.binary.mac.applications and similar newsgroups.
|
| But this email system you describe sounds exactly AOLish
| version of newsgroups. A way of holding someone's hand while
| the powerusers just went straight to the source.
| bsder wrote:
| Lucky. You _had_ another provider.
|
| In the US, one of the key things that Prodigy (remember
| them?), AOL and some other providers had was that they had a
| lot of "local" phone numbers instead of "long distance". This
| meant that your connection was a single charge and didn't
| rack up with time. That was a _BIG_ deal.
|
| In addition, email addresses were still sufficiently uncommon
| and hard enough to get hold of that people were using
| "unmentionable" means to get them even up to about 1994 or
| so.
| steeve wrote:
| Thank you for the trip down memory lane. This by far the
| fastest way to get warez back in the day!
| benburton wrote:
| If I recall correctly, the primary method of "punting" was to
| send an instant message with a bunch of unclosed HTML tags, which
| the client's renderer wouldn't be able to handle and would crash
| the AOL application.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| This is how it worked and 486 PC at the time would happily
| overflow AIM32.exe and stop responding thanks. Sanitize those
| inputs!
| bryans wrote:
| The unclosed tags were one method, and the other was applying a
| different formatting to every character. Even one or two
| messages of maximum length was enough to crash the client.
| todd3834 wrote:
| Another was abusing certain attributes like setting the font
| size to 99...99 or an element with a very large width
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I discovered a punter on MSN messenger.
|
| You could use swear words by substituting the ascii equivalent
| for a letter.
|
| So looking at the ascii chart, I was wondering if BELL would do
| anything but it didn't.
|
| However, NULL would boot all my friends offline and re-boot
| them off as they auto-re-logged in except myself.
| WillyF wrote:
| An IM with repeating <h1><br> tags until you hit the character
| limit was good for about 30 seconds of lag/freezing on the Mac
| client. 10 of those in fast succession would pretty much make
| you have to restart your computer.
| agotterer wrote:
| This could have been written about me. I remember going to a
| friends house one night and seeing FateX for the first time. We
| spent a night mass mailing people and causing general chaos
| online. I went home and got my hands on Hellraiser, AO Korn,
| Pepsi, Havok, MIB, and a slew of other progz which I cant
| remember their names.
|
| One day I asked my dad how they were made and he said he had some
| vague idea. So he took me to CompUSA and we left with a Learn
| Visual Basic in 24 hours book and Visual Basic software box. I
| went off and started writing my own programs and hanging out in
| various AOL related programming chat rooms. I made IRL friends
| from people that were part of that scene and that I met in those
| chat rooms. I have very fond memories of the internet back then.
|
| I was 13 at the time I started coding AOL progz and went on to
| have a career in software development because of it.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Methodus Toolz + Shit Talker Version 1.2 By Jaundice back when
| you could make free Skype calls to land lines. People still
| answered the phone and couldn't fathom that they were talking
| with a computer.
| fourstar wrote:
| If you remember Hypah, he went on to some success with
| slither.io. Plenty of people got their start that way, myself
| included.
| booleanbetrayal wrote:
| This one is definitely a nostalgia blast. As a 15 year old kid,
| it was very empowering to discover what you could do to
| programmatically bypass rules that were apparently in place for
| everyone else to adhere to.
| jl2718 wrote:
| 1. 25 years ago a 28.8k modem and Cyrix 486 with 8mb ram on AOL
| had better end-user performance than today's most popular web
| apps. There is still no mass-market equivalent to the appeal of
| those chat rooms. Technology will never defeat latency bloat of
| tracking hooks.
|
| 2. The anonymous or weakly pseudonymous internet was a superior
| user experience. It felt like an escape to freedom, similar to
| traveling to another country with chosen friends. The strong
| identity internet feels like surveillance more than escape. It
| leads me to believe that 'the metaverse' will always suck, not
| matter how good the technology gets.
|
| 3. What killed AOL? They had two separate generations of internet
| dominance, first the entire stack, and then with messenger after
| the ISP disruption. A company that can lead a massive growth
| industry, and then pivot to a successful product after their own
| disruption seems like a solid blue chip. I know what happened,
| they started focusing on old incompetent subscribers by giving
| them a familiar interface poorly replicated on the browser. But
| how? Who thought this was a good idea?
| edmundsauto wrote:
| If someone built the same featureset as AOL had, I bet it would
| be faster today. I remember massive annoying delays, computers
| freezing and crashing, not to say anything about download
| speeds.
|
| I think our memories of the past are rosy, plus they are not
| making a direct comparison. IRC chat programs are pretty snappy
| when they have feature parity; Slack is bloated because it does
| a whole lot more than AOL Chat.
|
| Whether you like the features or want to pay for them with the
| decreased performance, that's a different issue that I have no
| opinion on.
| flatiron wrote:
| DSL and cable killed them. I had aol until the cable company
| offered high speed and by that time I wasn't really using AOL
| as a client as I had moved to Linux. My parents still used
| windows and had no problem just using Netscape/IE or whatever
| since the browser had by then become the killer app.
| digitalsin wrote:
| Man, unless people were in this world they don't quite understand
| it. I miss those days, because those days sparked my desire to
| become a programmer. Without groups like UPS I would never have
| gotten hold of tools like VB at the time I needed it to as a
| teenager to create that spark.
|
| What a great time :)
| danb235 wrote:
| I learned to program by writing apps to punt other users and
| scroll chat rooms. Those were the good ol' days!
| ottoludd wrote:
| There's still mirrors of AOL-Files on the web somewhere. I was
| looking at my profile I submitted to their "AOL People" directory
| back in '98 not too long ago
| kirse wrote:
| One of the AOL-Files OGs:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=734502
| fourstar wrote:
| I do this from time to time! Archive.org.
| _justinfunk wrote:
| My first "hacking" success was with an ad-supported ISP called
| NetZero. The app logged you on to the web and had a persistent
| ad-banner on the screen. If you opened a full-screen app - in my
| case Starcraft - it would kick you off the internet.
|
| However, I discovered that if you killed the NetZero application
| at just the right time (after connecting to the network but
| before the ad banner was initialized), you could stay online with
| no ad-banner and pwn some Zerg.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Hah, I remember using that old trick to sneak NetZero on my
| family computer and get around AOL's parental control filters
| when they weren't home
| taddevries wrote:
| I used NetZero for a summer by setting up a dumb dialer machine
| that shared its network connection to the rest of the house.
| The dumb dialer autoconnected to NetZero when outbound traffic
| was detected and since there was no monitor plugged in no one
| ever saw the ads. Was a pretty simple solution for a couple
| broke college guys.
| todd3834 wrote:
| Even better was that if you looked at the logs it would show
| the hidden credentials for dialing in. You could copy those and
| create your own dial up connection without using the app at all
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Also did this with netzero. Didn't like their software/UI
| "borrowed" their credentials and plugged them into Windows 95
| Dial up networking FTW
| sisk wrote:
| Even better even better: the password encoding scheme was
| rot13 prefixed with a zero and postfixed with a one. I made a
| keygen for it. Completely forgot about it until this very
| moment!
| owlninja wrote:
| I was just thinking about these the other day, incredibly timely
| HN post. The look of all these progs was always so cool to me as
| a kid. Would love to see some old screenshots!
| NicoleJO wrote:
| Closest thing I can point to in regards to screenshots:
| http://14forums.blogspot.com/2013/04/computing_6296.html
| tterrace wrote:
| Dos32.bas with Visual Basic was my first intro to programming.
| There was no useful search so you had to navigate through
| webrings to get programming tutorials. There were also networks
| of private vb channels where the hackers hung out, those were
| always fun to drop in on.
|
| Maybe I'm looking back with rose-colored glasses but I remember
| Visual Basic being intuitive and approachable for beginners in a
| way that I haven't seen since.
|
| The fader text is a nice touch too, that immediately makes me
| nostalgic.
| random-human wrote:
| > Maybe I'm looking back with rose-colored glasses but I
| remember Visual Basic being intuitive and approachable for
| beginners
|
| I think those are indeed some heavily tinted glasses. I got a
| job programming out of HS but took night classes to get a
| degree in network admin. The first programming class I took was
| VB (never used it before) and completed the semester project
| the first day, then added a bunch of extra features the next
| class and was asked to help teach other students because the
| guy couldn't keep up with everyone that needed serious help
| (literally everyone). Still not sure if it was because they
| were overthinking the structure of programming or if their
| thought processes just didn't naturally gel with it. Changing
| the way they thought about it seemed to work best
|
| The positive was finding joy in helping them learn, the
| negative was the next semester in a networking course we were
| learning outdated tech and was asked to help again. Instead of
| paying the school to teach their classes, I continued to spend
| my work lunch in the server room with the admin guys showing me
| the ins & outs of networking/servers etc and I helped them with
| their scripting skills. Never went back to school - it was a
| complete joke.
| valgaze wrote:
| What a scene-- these are great:
| https://patorjk.com/blog/2012/05/03/cracking-magus-fate-zero...
| I looked further and found each cipher was simply doing a
| character offset, meaning each cipher was a Caesar Cipher.
| The offsets were 70, 97, 116 and 101, respectively. If you
| look up the corresponding ASCII code for those numbers, you
| get the word "Fate". I tried out this new decoding strategy
| and was able to successfully decode a directory of MaGuS'
| files. I had broken the code! MaGuS was using what is known
| as the Vigenere Cipher, and for that particular directory,
| "Fate" was the pass-phrase.
| DrBoring wrote:
| In 2001, I submitted a AIM password decryption program to
| patorjk.com . It's still there today.
|
| Ctrl+F "AIM PW Decrypter" @
| http://patorjk.com/programming/vb6examples.htm
|
| I recently rewrote the code in Javascript just for fun. I'll
| have to post it somewhere someday.
|
| ---
|
| Tangentially related, I once stole a 4-character AIM screenname
| from someone who infected a computer at my school with some
| backdoor. I found his IP address via `netstat`, and then was
| able to access his C: drive because Windows File Sharing was
| turned on with anonymous access. I guess he didn't even have a
| firewall to block the port. I copied his registry database, and
| decrypted the AIM password and changed it. He got it back by
| using AOL's password reset by email tool.
|
| I wonder if whoever it was (he or she) reads HN.
| ctvo wrote:
| Grew up on this stuff. Still fondly remember the warez bots in
| channels that would forward emails with archives attached for
| pirated software, often in 1.44MiB increments since it had to fit
| on floppy disks.
|
| It was a gateway for many of us into other distribution mediums
| for pirated software. I was part of that scene for years helping
| with various tasks as a teenager.
| elromulous wrote:
| Ah, reminds me of the "good ol' days" of the port 139 exploit[1]
|
| [1] https://insecure.org/sploits/windows.OOB.DOS.html
| treesknees wrote:
| Yep, idling to win out chatroom ownership when AOL reset the
| server. Using Tameclone to flood out clients and Uccom (or
| bizkit047's version of it) to take over and moderate. It was my
| first real move into programming and running a server in my
| basement.
|
| I still have all of my source code. My only claim to fame was I
| wrote a program to automate the generation of ICQ accounts (which
| could login to AIM for botting, and were harder to ban since you
| couldn't setup a wildcard match for the screen names being all
| "random" numbers.) Apparently it was good enough that someone
| felt it was worth cracking my crappy copy protection.
| jron wrote:
| Do you remember an old ICQ program that generated accounts with
| user defined numbers so long as they weren't already in use?
| The software was hosted on a page with quite a few other ICQ
| related applications. I'd love to find an archive of the site.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| I think even more than mailtools/fileservs and punters, my
| favorite thing about AOL progz was just being more expressive.
| When you hung out in TeenPoolParty13, you could be extra cool by
| sending text that was wavy, or mixed colors, or different sizes,
| fonts, etc when the actual UI didn't let you use that many
| options. But it let you embed HTML (and I guess UTF) so with a
| prog you could be more expressive, or just plain weird.
|
| I've never forgotten how progz, Geocities, and MySpace all showed
| that people _want_ to express their individuality and experiment
| if you give them the chance. But the boring commercialism of the
| 2010s internet killed the user 's ability to be special.
| ct0 wrote:
| I was just thinking about progz! I miss those and cant even
| find any examples of them documented on the internet. Where has
| the rainbow color text gone?!
| KyeRussell wrote:
| I have an inkling of the pendulum swinging the other way. Even
| beyond the usual "all the nerd boys are stoked about iMacs
| having colours again after decades of boring grey", there are
| other hints at people increasingly pushing for more self-
| expression online. I hope that the next Facebook is a bit more
| like MySpace in this regard, though that's certainly an extreme
| pipe dream.
| maram wrote:
| This is a funny story I read on hacking AOL messenger.
|
| https://twitter.com/davidbyttow/status/1099112484974125056
| mise_en_place wrote:
| I still remember AOHell and similar tools, was interested as a
| kid in how the credit card # generation worked and learned about
| the method payment processors used to validate credit card
| numbers. But I was mostly interested in the punting feature, me
| and my friends used to spend hours doing that to each other
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Not really hacking AOL, but I found that you could get the
| passwords in plain text from the Filesystem, which meant I could
| get around the parental controls and use it when I wanted!
|
| Submitted it to "happy hacker" and it got in the newsletter, I
| was super chuffed as a 13? yr old!
|
| Edit: I had a thing called "aol admin tools" which I have no idea
| if it was legit or not but could see lots more than I could
| normally lol
| kevstev wrote:
| Happy Hacker- that's a blast from the past I had nearly
| forgotten about. Do you happen to know if any culture like this
| still exists today? I am sure there is something somewhere, but
| it was a fairly significant part of the early internet, these
| days, I am sure it still exists, but it seems to be in far more
| obscure corners of the internet. I wouldn't even know where to
| start, but I would suspect discord might be hosting a lot of
| this type of discussion.
| ottoludd wrote:
| The "modal tool" I think they called it. It was accessed from a
| asterisk-marked drop-down menu.
|
| T4nk by Kai, empee3 player by freeza and A.S.S. (AOL spamming
| system) by Mikey were my favorite AOL proggies. I remember
| hanging out in the private room "vb" a lot, with all the
| crackers and spammers chatsending their rates
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| > empee3 player by freeza
|
| Wow, what a blast from the past this is.
| notadev wrote:
| For lame progz, I loved Gothic Nightmares by Masta. Every
| time it opened it'd play the intro to ICP's Great Milenko and
| just made you feel like you were some cool hacker dude lol.
| Mikey's VIP spammer was pretty awesome too, except he
| inserted his own affiliate links in every n message so he was
| probably making a lot of money from a lot of unsuspecting IM
| spammers.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Using AOHell as a 14 year old was a very exciting experience.
| artificial wrote:
| Fate, Pepsi, faders. Good times.
| marpstar wrote:
| Pepsi Prog was the one that led me into an AOL warez
| mailserver chat to obtain a pirated copy of Visual Basic 4 to
| try and build my own prog. At 11 years old.
|
| I later forwarded the email with the VB4 installer attached
| to it to another AOL user. AOL detected that and terminated
| my family's account.
|
| Good times, indeed.
| fourstar wrote:
| For me, Gothic Nightmares.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There were two ways to reliably punt a person off AOL: spam them
| with IMs using a prog or simply pick up the phone line.
| todd3834 wrote:
| There were email punts as well that would crash the app if
| opened. It was very entertaining as a child to punt someone on
| your buddy list and hear the door slam as they repeatedly tried
| to open an email with a too good to be true subject line.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| Different AOL versions had different exploits, too. For some
| versions, if you sent a single IM with a font size of
| 9999999999999999999999999999999999999... It would lock up their
| whole machine and they'd soon drop offline.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Lol, I'm guessing that was some kind of unchecked overflow
| error. X-(
| zomg wrote:
| my biggest sense of pride back in the day was being
| "unpuntable". the process was insanely simple, delete or move
| aol's RichText.dll file and the client defaulted to
| plaintext. i would also use older versions of the client (i
| think 2.0 and older did not support HTML).
|
| people would try to punt me and all i'd see in the IM window
| are the various (and there were many) combinations of HTML
| tags, which i would save and use myself to manually punt
| others.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| or tell them to press ALT+F4
| pram wrote:
| A classic non-prog method was to link C:\CON\CON in a chat
| room, it made Windows 95/98 bluescreen.
| notadev wrote:
| AOL would let you play wav files in a chat room that
| everyone, who had that file on their system, would hear. You
| could play the default AOL sounds like {S gotmail and
| everyone in the chat would hear "You've Got Mail". When
| someone found out you could send {S con\con or {s aux\aux,
| you could clear out an entire chatroom since all other
| chatters would get a BSoD.
| turdnagel wrote:
| Good to see an article around this era of "hacking" (writing
| punters in VB). I haven't seen too much about it and I'd love to
| know if there are others.
|
| My fondest recollection was that there was a Pokemon battling
| type game (Pokemon Platinum, I think?) where you could battle
| Pokemon over chat. The creator had hard-coded his AOL username
| into the binary to unlock a bunch of moves and skills. We figured
| out you could load the binary into a hex editing app and change
| the screen name - only problem was, it had to be the same length
| as the creator's: 9 characters. So made a new screen name, the
| one that stuck with me for the next 10-15 years, so I could
| unlock some pointless features in an AOL program. But it
| introduced me to Visual Basic, hex editing, and generally being
| interested in tinkering with computers and software.
| ronald_dregan wrote:
| Those literally got me started programming back in the day. The
| developers name was GerbilFan, I believe. There was a few
| different versions of the Pokemon battler app - some of them
| were Gym-editions (meant to be used by friends of theirs I
| guess?) that, if I'm remembering correctly, let their team have
| powerful Pokemon guaranteed. I actually learned how gradients
| work because of the gym-themed background gradients in the
| program (blueish for water, redish for fire, etc).
| oldstrangers wrote:
| This is a flashback to some memories I had completely forgotten
| about. I remember getting into the 'super admin' backend of AOL
| back in the day. That was so much fun.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Maybe I should write an article titled "How Lotus123 macros got
| me interested in programming".
|
| I wrote such a complicated program that I found out Bill Gates
| was wrong: 640K was not enough for everyone. But I realized that
| I could divide my mess of macros into categories, save them in
| separate files, and then selectively import only those that were
| being used at the time with a "root" set of macros. I was 18 or
| 19 at the time. It was many moons later when I learned about
| virtual memory and swap space, I realized I'd implement my own
| version of virtual memory/swap. In a very caveman like fashion.
| All without messing with someone else.
| RexM wrote:
| If anyone is interested, I have an archive of a lot of AOL
| progs[0].
|
| These got me into programming and I made a couple of my own that
| are now completely lost to time.
|
| ccoms (chat commands) were my favorite. The program would scan
| the chat and when you sent a command, it'd do whatever you asked
| and send a response back to the chat for everyone to see.
| Basically turning the AOL chat into a public command line. One of
| the more popular things people used it for was for playing
| pirated music. You'd send `play rammstein` to the chat, and it'd
| start playing a random Rammstein song from your mp3 collection.
|
| I started writing one later[1], although I haven't touched it
| since 2016. It'd connect to your spotify account, instead.
|
| Also, it seems Mark Zuckerberg was in the scene. He apparently
| wrote Darth Phader (a fader.) A fader would make your text in
| chats fade colors by injecting html to change the text color
| between each character. So, your text would start blue and fade
| to red further along in the message, then maybe go back to blue,
| it was all configurable in most of them.
|
| Edit: I can't believe I left this out, but there's also a
| facebook group[2], Justin has a site with a lot of content about
| progs[3], and I recently stumbled on the AOL Underground
| Podcast[4].
|
| [0]: https://progs.rexflex.net/
|
| [1]: https://github.com/RexMorgan/qwik-tools
|
| [2]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/
|
| [3]: https://justinakapaste.com/
|
| [4]: https://aolunderground.com/
| notadev wrote:
| I hated ccoms. Just flooded chat. Eventually chats would just
| be everyone shuffling through their list of 10K songs
| downloaded from Napster.
| RexM wrote:
| Yeah, 15 year old me was pretty blown away, though.
|
| It was also a way to discover music from other people's
| curated collections. It exposed me to a lot of music I
| wouldn't have heard, otherwise.
| treesknees wrote:
| Wow, very cool. I see at least 3 programs I wrote or helped
| with in the AIM section. I'll have to dig out my source code to
| see if any others are present. Definitely going to spin up a VM
| and see them run again. Thanks for this.
| RexM wrote:
| No problem, have fun.
|
| You're going to run into issues with ocx files. You can
| search around for them online, but it's a real hassle
| downloading them to older versions of Windows because SSL
| support has moved on from what Windows 95/98/ME/2000 can
| handle.
|
| I've found I can either hit the download without https from
| the Windows box, or copy them to an S3 bucket and use an http
| URL to download it out of the bucket.
| 4e530344963049 wrote:
| Ha, seems I am on Justin's site:
| https://justinakapaste.com/search/tsa
| freeplay wrote:
| This is amazing. Just the other day, I was thinking about how
| the AOL progs scene set my career in motion before I even knew
| what software engineer was.
|
| Your archive just gave me my nostalgia fix for the next month.
| Thanks.
| Duhck wrote:
| This is amazing because I see 4 of my own proggies up here. I
| need to get a VM setup to run these!
|
| Thanks for putting this together
| todd3834 wrote:
| Unbelievable! It looks like the prog I made in 6th grade is on
| there. Gotta download into a VM to make sure it's mine and not
| someone using the same name. I'll update this thread when I
| know.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| The good old days where I meant a bunch of aspiring developers in
| the PC Dev chat.
| robgibbons wrote:
| AIM subprofiles were my first foray into writing HTML, hosting
| web servers, and "hacking." I used a server called
| SmallHTTPServer to host my subprofile that I later ended up
| bundling into a self-extracting ZIP file. The trick was to make
| people think the ZIP was just photos. When you did Direct Connect
| to people, you could see their IP address in your command prompt.
| So when they opened the ZIP it started serving their C:\ drive
| over FTP/HTTP at a known IP. Good times.
| sejje wrote:
| One of the first serious HTML pages I remember editing was a
| clone of an "AOL InstaKiss" page that was used for phishing.
|
| Spoofed email address sends you an email with a link to an
| instakiss some secret admirer sent you, you get there and are
| presented with a very official-looking login, credentials are
| logged and it passes you through to some generic instakiss
| card.
|
| I didn't create the cloned page, but I did maintain a copy of
| it for a while.
|
| We got a few admin-level accounts this way (various levels of
| admin).
|
| Admin accounts were kinda like nukes, it was good to have some
| to protect yourself from other nefarious teenagers messing with
| your normal accounts.
| whatcd wrote:
| cerver rooms anyone? :D
| lom wrote:
| I feel like the same is happening with bots in todays chat
| platforms. I know some kids who first got into programming
| because they wanted to program a discord bot.
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