15 ms·

History of AOL Warez

209 points by nimz 9y ago

notthegov 9y ago
Here is a short history on the early hacking groups (#pain)- http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/ http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/
staticautomatic 9y ago
Related: I have fond memories of middle school me mercilessly booting people out of AOL chat rooms with SubZero and other "progs."
- hprotagonist 9y ago
  oh man. that brings back some fun memories of the red dragon inn.
- rdudek 9y ago
  These “progs” are main reason I learned Visual Basic and then C/C++
- jmcgough 9y ago
  Me too. Being a script kiddy in those days was super fun.
oh_sigh 9y ago
Mods - perhaps a (2004) would be relevant to append to this title. At the time of writing of that post, the AOL warez scene was winding down and remembrances might be much fresher than the same retrospective written in 2017.
joshstrange 9y ago
If you find this stuff interesting, as I do, I would check out http://www.welcometothescene.com/ http://www.welcometothescene.com/ (Dead link). It was a web-series about the scene that was pretty much completely a screen recording of the "main character" which I don't think we ever see. The entire thing is watching chat logs and this person rip/upload movies and the like. I'm sure you can find a torrent kicking around out there of it (if you can't email me). Here is the wiki page on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries)
- wybiral 9y ago
  Archived episodes: https://archive.org/search.php?query=welcome%20to%20the%20scene https://archive.org/search.php?query=welcome%20to%20the%20sc...
  - jameskegel 9y ago
    Thank you!
- Answerawake 9y ago
  As soon as I opened up this article, memories of the theme song (Maylynne - Catch Me) came rushing back! I am glad someone else mentioned this series. It was a memorable part of my teen years.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
marpstar 9y ago
Had my (parents’) AOL account terminated when I was 11 years old (1999) for pirating Visual Basic 4 from an AOL mail server chat . Listened to that sweet dial up connection sound before being greeted with an account termination message. Had no idea what “piracy” even meant.
- allcentury 9y ago
  Funny enough I also got banned for "life", whatever that term meant. I got netzero for free for a while and that's actually how I found my replacement for AOL ... IRC. That community really helped me go from tinkerer to full on coder in a short summer.
- _e 9y ago
  You could add '^' to the modem string to silence the modem sound.
  - loopbit 9y ago
    But... but.. If you did, how would you know within the first few seconds if the connection would work? You'd have to wait until you got the success or error message.
Eclyps 9y ago
This brings back so many memories... this is where I really started my "programming" with Visual Basic 4, hunting the web for .bas files that I could load into my own VB project to create 1337 rainbow text in my IMs, punting users, trying to work around the rate limiting that they added to chatrooms... it's incredible that the AOL warez scene is essential the catalyst for my now successful career in technology 20+ years later.
- allcentury 9y ago
  Same! I used to spend hours picking the right theme song to bundle on the opening splash page to ship with my software that never worked. I left tech in college and only got back into in my late 20's, happy to be back but with a bit more maturity.
- platz 9y ago
  I got my family account banned for chat room ascii scripts
  - mrpound 9y ago
    Me too, haha
  - allcentury 9y ago
    those were the best!
- dec0dedab0de 9y ago
  Me too, but for prodigy.. I did help a friend with his AOL app when they added a spce to the title and it broke sendkeys
- vogt 9y ago
  Yep, same. My mother's best friend worked for MS at the time and brought me home VB4 in a giant box. Little did they know what I was up to (nothing too south of innocuous, I was mostly trying to spam render middle fingers in ASCII in AOL chatrooms)
- 9y ago
allcentury 9y ago
I remember trying to write punters in VB, phishing bots, etc. I thought progs were the funniest things ever and I thought I was so clever because I never had a subscription to AOL, I would just use another '30 days free AOL' CD that I collected every time I went to the mall with my parents. I am happy I never did anything too stupid but from a CS perspective I learned a lot very quickly.
- strictnein 9y ago
  Used to sign up for AOL using a credit card generator: Probably one of the ones here: http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PROGRAMS/FILES.HTM http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PROGRAMS/FILES.HTM
  - allcentury 9y ago
    Oh my - of course, how could I forget...
  - jlgaddis 9y ago
    Ditto. "CardMaster" (or something like that) allowed me to get online for quite a while.
    - jaequery 9y ago
      ah memories, CCMASTER, had a lot of fun with that one :)
- alsetmusic 9y ago
  > … I never had a subscription to AOL, I would just use another '30 days free AOL' CD… There was a modified version of the client app call AOL4Free that bypassed billing on the Mac. Monthly charge for the account, but unlimited use. I believe I read that it was generated built a college student.
  - bearbearbear 9y ago
    We used to trade overhead accounts. Overhead accounts were subaccounts of AOL employees. There were different levels of administrative ability with different types of OH accounts. There was also an employee version of AOL that had special menus to perform administrative functions. For a while I had a L3 OH which let me create sub accounts under anyone's account without their knowledge, log any screen name off with the click of a button, boot people from chat rooms and disable accounts. Unfortunately I got cocky (I was 15 so what'd you expect) and booted a catcwatch account, which of course immediately disabled my OH account.
linkmotif 9y ago
I really miss the word “warez” and appreciate all usages and references.
- mpg515 9y ago
  but you gotta say it wrong like "wah-rez"
strictnein 9y ago
I thINk EvERyonE Is foRGEttiNG to wRITe in AOL L33t. This brings back tons of memories. Including the first time I infected a computer with a virus and lost everything. Lesson learned.
Eclyps 9y ago
From the comments of the post: http://justinakapaste.com/category/aol-progs/ http://justinakapaste.com/category/aol-progs/ I was getting super nostalgic reading it, but when I started scrolling through these screenshots... my god, the memories just came flooding back. They all have a distinctly "warez" look, even though they are wildly different from one another.
- strictnein 9y ago
  Holy hell this is awesome. AoHades was the shit: http://justinakapaste.com/aohades/ http://justinakapaste.com/aohades/
  - mpg515 9y ago
    haha cybermun is one of my besties. really good dude
- allcentury 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing this, just in awe at some of the screenshots and remembering high school all over again. How could I forget about Fate and the awesome artwork they always had! http://justinakapaste.com/fate-x-3-0/ http://justinakapaste.com/fate-x-3-0/
  - artificial 9y ago
    An interesting blog post about those graphics and the cipher they used and how the developer was revealed. http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/05/03/cracking-magus-fate-zero-encryption/ http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/05/03/cracking-magus-fate-zero-...
    - allcentury 9y ago
      Really great find!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
platz 9y ago
Facebook needs it's AOHell and Da Chronic. Absolutely no subculture
- ianhawes 9y ago
  Agreed. But the FBI would infest it quickly with confidential informants and everyone would end up in jail. Times have changed with the advent of serious cyber security budgets.
exabrial 9y ago
I tried to punt Steve Case with Firetools once. It ended with our account suspended and I had to explain to my dad why AOL was calling us. Ah, good times.
rjurney 9y ago
Ah, AOHell. I hung with the creator as a teenager on IRC. One day someone came into the channel and they were screaming and ranting because... they were logged into AOL as Steve Case. I didn't hop on to verify, but he was kick-banning moderators and generally abusing his power. We were highly amused.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
mentos 9y ago
I owe the first ever program I wrote to the AOL Warez Scene. Still remember the day I stood in the software section of Barnes and Nobles to buy 'Visual Basic Professional 3.0 Programming'. I was trying to add startup music to the source code of another 'prog' I had downloaded and was able to lift an example in the VB 3.0 book to get it to work.
- allcentury 9y ago
  I remember learning how to add intro music to my VB project and made my entire family watch. It used Metallica's 'Enter Sandman' - I cringe and laugh at that memory. I think another prog had that as it's intro music so I was just trying to copy
- rootw0rm 9y ago
  i remember some AOL software I used at the time that had a NiN intro
paulie_a 9y ago
This did make me nostalgic. More so for the IRC Warez scene. Dalnet, Undernet, Effnet. I spent some time #3dwarez chatting with people sharing cracked copies of software. Many of the people worked in the industry but couldn't afford the 25K licence for personal use. So they traded it around. I was recently cleaning out some boxes of lost hardware. I kind of hoped I would find an old zip disk that had a copy of the 3D model file for the Titanic movie. Someone from the studio made it available. I think it was a lightwave 3d file and at the time had to download a copy of that just to view it.
- gxs 9y ago
  IRC was such an interesting place - vast with a ton of different niches. I spent a whole summer downloading and burning dreamcast games - to a 14 year old it felt like I'd won the lottery. All of my gaming friends hung out on IRC as well, on top of stuff like cracked passwords for pay sites , software, and just all the weird niche hangouts like the phreaking channels. It was a great part of growing up, sometimes I'm tempted to check in and see what's still around but somehow I never get around to it.
  - evincarofautumn 9y ago
    IRC is still an interesting place! Even just on Freenode there are a bunch of good channels. It’s not the same as the 90s (before my time online) and 2000s, but I’ve made a few friends & good acquaintances on technical channels, many of whom I’ve even had the pleasure of meeting in person, since many of us live in the SF bay area.
    - mpg515 9y ago
      freenode is definitely the useful network these days
      - erikbye 9y ago
        Agreed. Freenode is the network I frequent the most. Some of the programming language and framework specific channels are good. As it has always been, IRC can seem like a pretty hostile place to "noobs"; just don't ask to ask and RTFM before you do. #emacs is usually very helpful and friendly.
Overtonwindow 9y ago
This article is from 2007. Might be good to add that to the title.
tbrock 9y ago
People don’t even know. Macfilez, zelifcam, spending hours busting into rooms and convincing mass mail bots to send you email and downloading 3D studio max, maya, photoshop (100s of mb) in 1.4 mb mass mail chunks, building programs in OneClick on your Mac to write l33t text and bust into rooms, the AOL keyword “green”... those were the glory days. It made no sense, it was amazing.
- birdmanrad 9y ago
  we most likely know each other.. 2.7 for life.
  - sneak 9y ago
    One more from that scene! I still use the same nick. :)
    - mirimir 9y ago
      That reminds me. Sabu's long-ago friends on EFnet doxed him. They kept logs. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/doxed-how-sabu-was-outed-by-former-anons-long-before-his-arrest/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/doxed-how-sabu-w...
  - tbrock 9y ago
    Hahaha yes, pre-buddy list in 3.0 for sure. I think it was mostly 2.6 days from what I remember.
lloyddobbler 9y ago
Definitely brings back memories - although I was never into the AOL or IRC scene. I was mostly into the BBS world before that, and remember groups like Razor 1911 & THG. Would love it if someone would put together a doc like this about the BBS ANSI art scene - groups like iCE, ACiD, RELiC, etc. That was some amazing stuff, and a great community.
- mynewtb 9y ago
  Jason Scott's BBS documentary has an episode on the artscene.
ProAm 9y ago
orange-tubber
borne0 9y ago
Ah, trip down memory lane. I wasn't involved in this scene but around the same time there were vbulletin forums dedicated to hacked FTPs that allowed FXP transfers. The exploits were well known so any FTP was quickly overrun with people trying to fill up the HD faster with dir after dir of reserved names.... I had one on Interland for what felt like ages.... Ahh, good times...
tyoma 9y ago
Matt Mazur maintains an archive of aol-files.com, which has a lot of old AOL content: https://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files-com/ https://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files-com/
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bearbearbear 9y ago
AOHell was just one of the first visual basic applications for manipulating AOL. There were at least a dozen well known ones used for different purposes. Some of them were for tormenting people by sending automated IMs, some were for flooding mailboxes and some were for "phishing" but they were terrible; all they would do is open an IM to a random member and dump in a preset block of text that tried to convince them to hand over their password, and the scripts were bad. They were obviously written by young teenagers. These tools often had a small user interface that floated over the AOL window. They had panels that would slide out to perform various functions. The most popular tool for a while was Super Mad Cow. Super Mad Cow was a swiss army knife of AOL tools in one application. Here are some of the functions it had that I remember: * Phisher - You could set up macros that would randomly choose and IM accounts with preset blocks of text to try to social engineer people to give you their password or create a subaccount for them. * Forwarder - The application would open your mailbox, index all of your mail and then present an interface with checkboxes that you could multi-select to mass forward mail. * Lister Bot - In order for this to work you have to know that AOL had no limit on the size of your email inbox, so you could have gigabytes of data stored in your own inbox. This function would take a CD image, large zip or rar file, split it into small chunks of a few megabytes, attach each chunk to an email to yourself and tag the subject of each email with a serial number so lister clients could identify all the chunks for that file, download them and re-assemble them. This way you could have dozens of CD images, floppy images and other archives in your inbox that you could trade with other "couriers" (people who traded warez). The lister bot would automatically scan your inbox and make a list of all the packages you had, including packages that had been forwarded to you by other bots, then it would create an email with an index that you could forward to other screen names. The lister bot also had a chat bot function where you could enter a chat room and it would announce itself, and if someone typed a special keyword the bot would email them the list of your warez. The bot would also announce a specific list of hot items you had and chat participants could request those items straight away. Then that person could type a special keyword followed by the serial number of the package they wanted and your list server bot would automatically forward all the parts of that package from your inbox to the requesting screen name. The requested packages would arrive in the recipient's inbox and could be downloaded instantly, because you were just forwarding emails -- the way AOL forwarded emails inside their own system is they would just copy the files directly into your mailbox via their own filesystem, so there was virtually zero wait time. * Hidden keyword menu - AOL employees occasionally created silly content that could be accessed using unlisted keywords (the infamous cop eating a donut keyword comes to mind). The authors of Super Mad Cow would update the known hidden keywords with each new version and present a menu of them for easy access. * Mailbox manager - The mailbox manager would create a personal index of all the packages in your inbox and let you perform maintenance tasks on them at the package level, such as deleting and forwarding, without having to work with the individual emails that had chunks of the packages in them. It would also read emails from your other subaccounts with commands to forward packages to them, then it would delete the main copy so you could manage different kinds of packages using different subaccounts. For example you could have one subaccount for trading ebooks, one for music, one for games and one for porn. * List parser - The list parser would enter known warez chat rooms and watch for the LIST keyword. This was a keyword used by lister bots that indicated they were about to either dump a list of warez or offer to forward their list. The list parser would either read the list from the chat room and present a list of packages you could request with checkboxes and then automatically request all the necessary parts of the package for you, or it would request an email with the package list, open your inbox, parse the list and then do the same. Later on, list parsers gained the ability to scan your inbox to see if you already had some chunks of a package and only request the missing chunks.
chisleu 9y ago
YES! AOL, where you could store tons of email and move it around without even downloading until you wanted it. Glorious days. Of course, I was running Linux on a UMSDOS partition by the time I found out about it. :(
dplgk 9y ago
Super nastolgic here. I learned programming via VB3 Writing apps to mess with AOL. First using "send keys", then switching to WinAPI. Made animated intros with Warezed version of 3d studio max. So many memories and hours spent! Friends made too but they all drifted away. Recently got nastolgic just seeing my buddy list when I logged into my AOL account from the 90s (after AOL shutdown was announced). Pretty much owe my career to the scene. Stay l33t!
- albeebe1 9y ago
  aol.bas
- mpg515 9y ago
  311.dll
  - coleifer 9y ago
    vbwfind.dll, vbmsg.vbx
- inuhj 9y ago
  Making punters in VB3 got me started. I wonder if there is an equivalent avenue for kids to be subversive these days? Every generation says it but the frontiers are gone.
  - grkvlt 9y ago
    Really there's nothing to be proud of about writing programs to kick people off a system - that's called being an asshole - or distributing warez, that's called stealing. I'd hope people learning about technology today can do it without needing to do those 'subversive' things...
    - grkvlt 9y ago
      I can see I'm getting downvoted here, and I may have been a bit harsh, but it still seems like people are saying the equivalent of 'I got started in my career by breaking into abandoned buildings, impersonating security guards to get access to people's private offices, and stealing office supplies when I was younger' but the end result still doesn't justify the initial actions or crimes.
amatecha 9y ago
Mac users had the privilege of a less-popular platform, Hotline -- see an article on it here https://www.macworld.com/article/2031816/hotline-revisited.html https://www.macworld.com/article/2031816/hotline-revisited.h...
- tbrock 9y ago
  Hotline was THE shit. I ran my own server and tracker at some point.
- nemo44x 9y ago
  Hotline was pretty good. I ran a banner server there for a bit to make some cash since I was pretty broke in college at the time. A better version of Hotline was Carracho in my opinion. More open communities and a better experience overall. Super nostalgic for those days right now. It was about a lot more than the files, at least after a new users initial frenzy. Great discussion groups, etc. Any Carracho users here from back then?
  - amatecha 9y ago
    Carracho was alright, but I found KDX quickly took its place -- still quite a few servers running too!
    - nemo44x 9y ago
      Wasn’t a huge fan of KDX, probably because of the community I was engaged with on Carracho at the time. But good to hear it is still running. Might download the client and have a look!
- bluedino 9y ago
  MSN people seemed to all use PowWow to exchange material with questionable content
berberous 9y ago
There was one of these AOL progs that, in addition to all the scripts and AOL tools, had a picture of Jenna Jameson in some menu item. Anyone remember which one that was? Lol, sort of embarrassing what you remember...
distantsounds 9y ago
I spent so many hours writing AOL 'progs' as they were, I had a decompiled Fate X 2.5 thanks to DoDi's decompiler. The server and MM rooms were always full of pirated stuff, and punting people offline was always a blast. So many good memories of this growing up.
jonnathanson 9y ago
My god, this brings back some formative memories. Memories of AOHell. Memories of HappyHardcore, the self-styled hacker who claimed authorship of it. Memories of hanging out in Warez chat rooms, where everyone showed up in phished accounts to trade 'warez' and conspire to troll various AOL communities. Memories of taking apart System 7 shareware games with ResEdit and, in so doing, learning how they worked. Those were the days, man.
mpg515 9y ago
Ancient articles such as this one always bring kiddos out of the woodwork. I'm happy for that because it totally validates all the time I spent on that wretched network. Fun fact: Da Chronic is a cool dude (shout out #pain) and also wrote this fun thing about phishing: https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4692 https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4692
mpg515 9y ago
SuKiYaKi invited me into Allied and I made some of the best friends I ever made in my life at that time. This was the wild west for me
jjordan 9y ago
There's a Facebook group for you if this triggers the warm fuzzies: https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/ I also got started in programming during the "AOL Prog" era. Good times.
lwerdna 9y ago
It was magic seeing all this on AOL as a kid. Free programs? AOHell, Fate X, proggies, I had to learn how these "gods" did all this. I warez'd VB and the rest is history. Looks like I'm in good company.
- mljoe 9y ago
  All this makes me wonder what will inspire the current school generation to get into computing.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Games have been the main draw since year dot. In that regard, nothing has changed.
jlgaddis 9y ago
Not AOL but /ctcp username ping +++ATH0 gave me many hours of enjoyment on IRC. (Forgive me if I've gotten the syntax wrong, it's been a long time.)
- dustinls 9y ago
  worked in channels too, everyone with a linksys router would get disconnected. also it was just +ATH0
  - jlgaddis 9y ago
    We might be thinking of different things then. This was specifically aimed at dial-up modems. Cable internet and DSL didnn't really exist. @Home had just launched their cable service around this time, if memory serves.
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
Can someone with knowledge of all of these early programs explained how they worked? I remember getting booted from rooms (and offline) all of the time during this period. It seemed like the Wild West, where all of these outlaws were above the law. It was glorious even though I was constantly in fear of being “punted”. Now as a technical adult I’m very curious how they could do it. Did they send a certain “magic” byte sequence to my username? Did they overload it somehow? I can still vividly recall an IM with a stream of sinister ASCII and suddenly poof! Offline!
- grifter 9y ago
  Some IM punters exploited issues with the primitive HTML renderering capabilities in AOL, when receiving certain HTML AOL would either take too many cycles render it, detracting from its network code cycles causing a disconnect from he server (booted), or in some cases crash. Some IMing also exploited bandwidth disparity, whereby they would send more than you could consume forcing a disconnect.
  - el_duderino 9y ago
    The 1IM punt HTML tag that overloaded AOL’s own buffer <font size="199999999999…"> and fill the 9's to the end of the IM window. I believe there was even a more effective one that was something like <font size="¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿...">.
    - gech 9y ago
      That was it? So simple
albeebe1 9y ago
Back in the day we used to called people lamers. Damn i feel like grandpa Simpson, and i'm only 35
noahdesu 9y ago
This is so interesting. Maybe once every couple years, I'll have a vivid memory of the IRC days back in mid to late 90s. I always try to find some record of it. The name of the group I associated with, and the nicks. They are right on the tip of my tongue, but I never can quite remember. I'd know them if I saw them written out, which is why I occasionally search. It'd be a trip to stumble upon all that old stuff some time.
- deepakhj 9y ago
  A lot of the scene reports are still archived online. Here’s an example: https://defacto2.net/file/detail/a74c1 https://defacto2.net/file/detail/a74c1
  - noahdesu 9y ago
    Wow. I found myself! It's all there. Thanks so much :)
cdubzzz 9y ago
The only reason I know anything about Adobe Photoshop and am able to use it professionally today is because of AOL warez. Thanks, zelifcam!
krisives 9y ago
Ah the days of FTP ratios long before BitTorrent
zomg 9y ago
amazing article, wow was that nostalgic. i was unpuntable on aol (still am!) and will never give away my secret! ;)
draw_down 9y ago
I used to mirror warez on an FTP server I ran on my PC on the university network. There are so many ways that wouldn’t happen today (it was dumb then, too). I remember when Napster came around; that was the beginning of the end of “anything goes” on a university residential network.
NuSkooler 9y ago
I grew up doing the BBS thing for many years, then when the internet started emerging with CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL a lot of us effectively moved there. Illicit things I remember the "AOL era": * CC generators actually worked to create an account that would last a good amount of time * In the early days (~ AOL v2.5) they had a CGI form you could fill out and have a disc sent to your home. So of course we scripted it and had hundreds of free formattable 3.5"'s. A bit down the road and MS had a similar thing for Windows '95 replacement discs -- they'd send you the entire set if one was bad, which was a lot of good discs :) * AOL at one point allowed ordering physical products (early digital cameras and the like) via your account credit. Mix in a phished account and you can see how that goes. * I can't remember the names right now, but there were services in which you could pick up a CD and get free dial-up email access. The gig is they would show you ads. Patch the EXE and viola, you essentially just have a PPP account to the web.
- inuhj 9y ago
  NetZero.
deepakhj 9y ago
I was in the upper echelon in the scene and the mid 90s-late 90s were the golden days.
mpg515 9y ago
DoDi's Visual Basic "Discompiler"
aolhistorian 9y ago
I found out about IRC because one of these AOHell-like programs included a copy of mirc. AOL actually incorporated features that these AOHell programs invented such as the “Buddy List”. Before the buddy list, one had to manually check to see if a particular person was logged in. Someone came up with the idea of automating the process and displaying a list of who was logged into AOL. Seems like a simple idea but sometimes the obvious isn’t so obvious. Everyone ultimately grew out of the actual AOL platform but still congregated on Efnet. Lessons learned from those days are still relevant today. For example, when people back then started to learn about *nix systems, one of the first things you HAD to learn was how to filter out ping floods. Then the smurf attack came along and to protect an irc channel from a takeover, one had to build a large and robust eggdrop botnet to maintain control of the channel. Then people started hacking the boxes that the eggdrops were hosted on and telling the bot to give the attacker operator status. To counter that then people incorporated +o/-b <hash> as a way to verify to the other bots that the person getting ops was legitimate. The IRC servers had to also keep up because people would DoS the servers to force net splits. A net split occurred when the irc server disconnected from the network and the attacker would trick the server into thinking it was a real operator. To do that, the attacker would part and then join the empty channel, since it was disconnected from the rest of the IRC network, to gets ops so when the server rejoined the network they would be given ops since there was no timestamp on who was the real op. For historical sake, some nicks from that I recall from the AOL scene were – GaL, Paladin, motel6, ttol, Code, UsNavy999, Panda, EViL`, amos, optima, proggie, shiver, BoNe, Chong, WiCKeD, low, Playa, Majin, mijit, bionic, trips
- nwellinghoff 9y ago
  Haaaa, YES!
dsnuh 9y ago
GuideDEW has entered the room. Anyone have a list of the old q codes?
nirav72 9y ago
I remember downloading my first version of visual basic and also turbo Pascal from AOL warez scene. This article brought back a lot of memories.
chauzer 9y ago
Wow, brings back memories. I remember it was cool to have an all lowercase or 3 letter or less screen name on AOL.

209 points by nimz 9y ago

Here is a short history on the early hacking groups (#pain)- http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/ http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/

staticautomatic 9y ago

Related: I have fond memories of middle school me mercilessly booting people out of AOL chat rooms with SubZero and other "progs."

hprotagonist 9y ago
oh man. that brings back some fun memories of the red dragon inn.
rdudek 9y ago
These “progs” are main reason I learned Visual Basic and then C/C++
jmcgough 9y ago
Me too. Being a script kiddy in those days was super fun.

oh_sigh 9y ago

Mods - perhaps a (2004) would be relevant to append to this title. At the time of writing of that post, the AOL warez scene was winding down and remembrances might be much fresher than the same retrospective written in 2017.

joshstrange 9y ago

If you find this stuff interesting, as I do, I would check out http://www.welcometothescene.com/ http://www.welcometothescene.com/ (Dead link). It was a web-series about the scene that was pretty much completely a screen recording of the "main character" which I don't think we ever see. The entire thing is watching chat logs and this person rip/upload movies and the like. I'm sure you can find a torrent kicking around out there of it (if you can't email me). Here is the wiki page on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries)

wybiral 9y ago
Archived episodes: https://archive.org/search.php?query=welcome%20to%20the%20scene https://archive.org/search.php?query=welcome%20to%20the%20sc...
- jameskegel 9y ago
  Thank you!
Answerawake 9y ago
As soon as I opened up this article, memories of the theme song (Maylynne - Catch Me) came rushing back! I am glad someone else mentioned this series. It was a memorable part of my teen years.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

marpstar 9y ago

Had my (parents’) AOL account terminated when I was 11 years old (1999) for pirating Visual Basic 4 from an AOL mail server chat . Listened to that sweet dial up connection sound before being greeted with an account termination message. Had no idea what “piracy” even meant.

allcentury 9y ago
Funny enough I also got banned for "life", whatever that term meant. I got netzero for free for a while and that's actually how I found my replacement for AOL ... IRC. That community really helped me go from tinkerer to full on coder in a short summer.
_e 9y ago
You could add '^' to the modem string to silence the modem sound.
- loopbit 9y ago
  But... but.. If you did, how would you know within the first few seconds if the connection would work? You'd have to wait until you got the success or error message.

Eclyps 9y ago

This brings back so many memories... this is where I really started my "programming" with Visual Basic 4, hunting the web for .bas files that I could load into my own VB project to create 1337 rainbow text in my IMs, punting users, trying to work around the rate limiting that they added to chatrooms... it's incredible that the AOL warez scene is essential the catalyst for my now successful career in technology 20+ years later.

allcentury 9y ago
Same! I used to spend hours picking the right theme song to bundle on the opening splash page to ship with my software that never worked. I left tech in college and only got back into in my late 20's, happy to be back but with a bit more maturity.
platz 9y ago
I got my family account banned for chat room ascii scripts
- mrpound 9y ago
  Me too, haha
- allcentury 9y ago
  those were the best!
dec0dedab0de 9y ago
Me too, but for prodigy.. I did help a friend with his AOL app when they added a spce to the title and it broke sendkeys
vogt 9y ago
Yep, same. My mother's best friend worked for MS at the time and brought me home VB4 in a giant box. Little did they know what I was up to (nothing too south of innocuous, I was mostly trying to spam render middle fingers in ASCII in AOL chatrooms)
9y ago

allcentury 9y ago

I remember trying to write punters in VB, phishing bots, etc. I thought progs were the funniest things ever and I thought I was so clever because I never had a subscription to AOL, I would just use another '30 days free AOL' CD that I collected every time I went to the mall with my parents. I am happy I never did anything too stupid but from a CS perspective I learned a lot very quickly.

strictnein 9y ago
Used to sign up for AOL using a credit card generator: Probably one of the ones here: http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PROGRAMS/FILES.HTM http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PROGRAMS/FILES.HTM
- allcentury 9y ago
  Oh my - of course, how could I forget...
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  Ditto. "CardMaster" (or something like that) allowed me to get online for quite a while.
  - jaequery 9y ago
    ah memories, CCMASTER, had a lot of fun with that one :)
alsetmusic 9y ago
> … I never had a subscription to AOL, I would just use another '30 days free AOL' CD… There was a modified version of the client app call AOL4Free that bypassed billing on the Mac. Monthly charge for the account, but unlimited use. I believe I read that it was generated built a college student.
- bearbearbear 9y ago
  We used to trade overhead accounts. Overhead accounts were subaccounts of AOL employees. There were different levels of administrative ability with different types of OH accounts. There was also an employee version of AOL that had special menus to perform administrative functions. For a while I had a L3 OH which let me create sub accounts under anyone's account without their knowledge, log any screen name off with the click of a button, boot people from chat rooms and disable accounts. Unfortunately I got cocky (I was 15 so what'd you expect) and booted a catcwatch account, which of course immediately disabled my OH account.

linkmotif 9y ago

I really miss the word “warez” and appreciate all usages and references.

mpg515 9y ago
but you gotta say it wrong like "wah-rez"

strictnein 9y ago

I thINk EvERyonE Is foRGEttiNG to wRITe in AOL L33t. This brings back tons of memories. Including the first time I infected a computer with a virus and lost everything. Lesson learned.

Eclyps 9y ago

From the comments of the post: http://justinakapaste.com/category/aol-progs/ http://justinakapaste.com/category/aol-progs/ I was getting super nostalgic reading it, but when I started scrolling through these screenshots... my god, the memories just came flooding back. They all have a distinctly "warez" look, even though they are wildly different from one another.

strictnein 9y ago
Holy hell this is awesome. AoHades was the shit: http://justinakapaste.com/aohades/ http://justinakapaste.com/aohades/
- mpg515 9y ago
  haha cybermun is one of my besties. really good dude
allcentury 9y ago
Thanks for sharing this, just in awe at some of the screenshots and remembering high school all over again. How could I forget about Fate and the awesome artwork they always had! http://justinakapaste.com/fate-x-3-0/ http://justinakapaste.com/fate-x-3-0/
- artificial 9y ago
  An interesting blog post about those graphics and the cipher they used and how the developer was revealed. http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/05/03/cracking-magus-fate-zero-encryption/ http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/05/03/cracking-magus-fate-zero-...
  - allcentury 9y ago
    Really great find!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

platz 9y ago

Facebook needs it's AOHell and Da Chronic. Absolutely no subculture

ianhawes 9y ago
Agreed. But the FBI would infest it quickly with confidential informants and everyone would end up in jail. Times have changed with the advent of serious cyber security budgets.

exabrial 9y ago

I tried to punt Steve Case with Firetools once. It ended with our account suspended and I had to explain to my dad why AOL was calling us. Ah, good times.

rjurney 9y ago

Ah, AOHell. I hung with the creator as a teenager on IRC. One day someone came into the channel and they were screaming and ranting because... they were logged into AOL as Steve Case. I didn't hop on to verify, but he was kick-banning moderators and generally abusing his power. We were highly amused.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

mentos 9y ago

I owe the first ever program I wrote to the AOL Warez Scene. Still remember the day I stood in the software section of Barnes and Nobles to buy 'Visual Basic Professional 3.0 Programming'. I was trying to add startup music to the source code of another 'prog' I had downloaded and was able to lift an example in the VB 3.0 book to get it to work.

allcentury 9y ago
I remember learning how to add intro music to my VB project and made my entire family watch. It used Metallica's 'Enter Sandman' - I cringe and laugh at that memory. I think another prog had that as it's intro music so I was just trying to copy
rootw0rm 9y ago
i remember some AOL software I used at the time that had a NiN intro

paulie_a 9y ago

This did make me nostalgic. More so for the IRC Warez scene. Dalnet, Undernet, Effnet. I spent some time #3dwarez chatting with people sharing cracked copies of software. Many of the people worked in the industry but couldn't afford the 25K licence for personal use. So they traded it around. I was recently cleaning out some boxes of lost hardware. I kind of hoped I would find an old zip disk that had a copy of the 3D model file for the Titanic movie. Someone from the studio made it available. I think it was a lightwave 3d file and at the time had to download a copy of that just to view it.

gxs 9y ago
IRC was such an interesting place - vast with a ton of different niches. I spent a whole summer downloading and burning dreamcast games - to a 14 year old it felt like I'd won the lottery. All of my gaming friends hung out on IRC as well, on top of stuff like cracked passwords for pay sites , software, and just all the weird niche hangouts like the phreaking channels. It was a great part of growing up, sometimes I'm tempted to check in and see what's still around but somehow I never get around to it.
- evincarofautumn 9y ago
  IRC is still an interesting place! Even just on Freenode there are a bunch of good channels. It’s not the same as the 90s (before my time online) and 2000s, but I’ve made a few friends & good acquaintances on technical channels, many of whom I’ve even had the pleasure of meeting in person, since many of us live in the SF bay area.
  - mpg515 9y ago
    freenode is definitely the useful network these days
    - erikbye 9y ago
      Agreed. Freenode is the network I frequent the most. Some of the programming language and framework specific channels are good. As it has always been, IRC can seem like a pretty hostile place to "noobs"; just don't ask to ask and RTFM before you do. #emacs is usually very helpful and friendly.

Overtonwindow 9y ago

This article is from 2007. Might be good to add that to the title.

tbrock 9y ago

People don’t even know. Macfilez, zelifcam, spending hours busting into rooms and convincing mass mail bots to send you email and downloading 3D studio max, maya, photoshop (100s of mb) in 1.4 mb mass mail chunks, building programs in OneClick on your Mac to write l33t text and bust into rooms, the AOL keyword “green”... those were the glory days. It made no sense, it was amazing.

birdmanrad 9y ago
we most likely know each other.. 2.7 for life.
- sneak 9y ago
  One more from that scene! I still use the same nick. :)
  - mirimir 9y ago
    That reminds me. Sabu's long-ago friends on EFnet doxed him. They kept logs. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/doxed-how-sabu-was-outed-by-former-anons-long-before-his-arrest/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/doxed-how-sabu-w...
- tbrock 9y ago
  Hahaha yes, pre-buddy list in 3.0 for sure. I think it was mostly 2.6 days from what I remember.

lloyddobbler 9y ago

Definitely brings back memories - although I was never into the AOL or IRC scene. I was mostly into the BBS world before that, and remember groups like Razor 1911 & THG. Would love it if someone would put together a doc like this about the BBS ANSI art scene - groups like iCE, ACiD, RELiC, etc. That was some amazing stuff, and a great community.

mynewtb 9y ago
Jason Scott's BBS documentary has an episode on the artscene.

ProAm 9y ago

orange-tubber

borne0 9y ago

Ah, trip down memory lane. I wasn't involved in this scene but around the same time there were vbulletin forums dedicated to hacked FTPs that allowed FXP transfers. The exploits were well known so any FTP was quickly overrun with people trying to fill up the HD faster with dir after dir of reserved names.... I had one on Interland for what felt like ages.... Ahh, good times...

tyoma 9y ago

Matt Mazur maintains an archive of aol-files.com, which has a lot of old AOL content: https://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files-com/ https://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files-com/

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

bearbearbear 9y ago

AOHell was just one of the first visual basic applications for manipulating AOL. There were at least a dozen well known ones used for different purposes. Some of them were for tormenting people by sending automated IMs, some were for flooding mailboxes and some were for "phishing" but they were terrible; all they would do is open an IM to a random member and dump in a preset block of text that tried to convince them to hand over their password, and the scripts were bad. They were obviously written by young teenagers. These tools often had a small user interface that floated over the AOL window. They had panels that would slide out to perform various functions. The most popular tool for a while was Super Mad Cow. Super Mad Cow was a swiss army knife of AOL tools in one application. Here are some of the functions it had that I remember: * Phisher - You could set up macros that would randomly choose and IM accounts with preset blocks of text to try to social engineer people to give you their password or create a subaccount for them. * Forwarder - The application would open your mailbox, index all of your mail and then present an interface with checkboxes that you could multi-select to mass forward mail. * Lister Bot - In order for this to work you have to know that AOL had no limit on the size of your email inbox, so you could have gigabytes of data stored in your own inbox. This function would take a CD image, large zip or rar file, split it into small chunks of a few megabytes, attach each chunk to an email to yourself and tag the subject of each email with a serial number so lister clients could identify all the chunks for that file, download them and re-assemble them. This way you could have dozens of CD images, floppy images and other archives in your inbox that you could trade with other "couriers" (people who traded warez). The lister bot would automatically scan your inbox and make a list of all the packages you had, including packages that had been forwarded to you by other bots, then it would create an email with an index that you could forward to other screen names. The lister bot also had a chat bot function where you could enter a chat room and it would announce itself, and if someone typed a special keyword the bot would email them the list of your warez. The bot would also announce a specific list of hot items you had and chat participants could request those items straight away. Then that person could type a special keyword followed by the serial number of the package they wanted and your list server bot would automatically forward all the parts of that package from your inbox to the requesting screen name. The requested packages would arrive in the recipient's inbox and could be downloaded instantly, because you were just forwarding emails -- the way AOL forwarded emails inside their own system is they would just copy the files directly into your mailbox via their own filesystem, so there was virtually zero wait time. * Hidden keyword menu - AOL employees occasionally created silly content that could be accessed using unlisted keywords (the infamous cop eating a donut keyword comes to mind). The authors of Super Mad Cow would update the known hidden keywords with each new version and present a menu of them for easy access. * Mailbox manager - The mailbox manager would create a personal index of all the packages in your inbox and let you perform maintenance tasks on them at the package level, such as deleting and forwarding, without having to work with the individual emails that had chunks of the packages in them. It would also read emails from your other subaccounts with commands to forward packages to them, then it would delete the main copy so you could manage different kinds of packages using different subaccounts. For example you could have one subaccount for trading ebooks, one for music, one for games and one for porn. * List parser - The list parser would enter known warez chat rooms and watch for the LIST keyword. This was a keyword used by lister bots that indicated they were about to either dump a list of warez or offer to forward their list. The list parser would either read the list from the chat room and present a list of packages you could request with checkboxes and then automatically request all the necessary parts of the package for you, or it would request an email with the package list, open your inbox, parse the list and then do the same. Later on, list parsers gained the ability to scan your inbox to see if you already had some chunks of a package and only request the missing chunks.

chisleu 9y ago

YES! AOL, where you could store tons of email and move it around without even downloading until you wanted it. Glorious days. Of course, I was running Linux on a UMSDOS partition by the time I found out about it. :(

dplgk 9y ago

Super nastolgic here. I learned programming via VB3 Writing apps to mess with AOL. First using "send keys", then switching to WinAPI. Made animated intros with Warezed version of 3d studio max. So many memories and hours spent! Friends made too but they all drifted away. Recently got nastolgic just seeing my buddy list when I logged into my AOL account from the 90s (after AOL shutdown was announced). Pretty much owe my career to the scene. Stay l33t!

albeebe1 9y ago
aol.bas
mpg515 9y ago
311.dll
- coleifer 9y ago
  vbwfind.dll, vbmsg.vbx
inuhj 9y ago
Making punters in VB3 got me started. I wonder if there is an equivalent avenue for kids to be subversive these days? Every generation says it but the frontiers are gone.
- grkvlt 9y ago
  Really there's nothing to be proud of about writing programs to kick people off a system - that's called being an asshole - or distributing warez, that's called stealing. I'd hope people learning about technology today can do it without needing to do those 'subversive' things...
  - grkvlt 9y ago
    I can see I'm getting downvoted here, and I may have been a bit harsh, but it still seems like people are saying the equivalent of 'I got started in my career by breaking into abandoned buildings, impersonating security guards to get access to people's private offices, and stealing office supplies when I was younger' but the end result still doesn't justify the initial actions or crimes.

amatecha 9y ago

Mac users had the privilege of a less-popular platform, Hotline -- see an article on it here https://www.macworld.com/article/2031816/hotline-revisited.html https://www.macworld.com/article/2031816/hotline-revisited.h...

tbrock 9y ago
Hotline was THE shit. I ran my own server and tracker at some point.
nemo44x 9y ago
Hotline was pretty good. I ran a banner server there for a bit to make some cash since I was pretty broke in college at the time. A better version of Hotline was Carracho in my opinion. More open communities and a better experience overall. Super nostalgic for those days right now. It was about a lot more than the files, at least after a new users initial frenzy. Great discussion groups, etc. Any Carracho users here from back then?
- amatecha 9y ago
  Carracho was alright, but I found KDX quickly took its place -- still quite a few servers running too!
  - nemo44x 9y ago
    Wasn’t a huge fan of KDX, probably because of the community I was engaged with on Carracho at the time. But good to hear it is still running. Might download the client and have a look!
bluedino 9y ago
MSN people seemed to all use PowWow to exchange material with questionable content

berberous 9y ago

There was one of these AOL progs that, in addition to all the scripts and AOL tools, had a picture of Jenna Jameson in some menu item. Anyone remember which one that was? Lol, sort of embarrassing what you remember...

distantsounds 9y ago

I spent so many hours writing AOL 'progs' as they were, I had a decompiled Fate X 2.5 thanks to DoDi's decompiler. The server and MM rooms were always full of pirated stuff, and punting people offline was always a blast. So many good memories of this growing up.

jonnathanson 9y ago

My god, this brings back some formative memories. Memories of AOHell. Memories of HappyHardcore, the self-styled hacker who claimed authorship of it. Memories of hanging out in Warez chat rooms, where everyone showed up in phished accounts to trade 'warez' and conspire to troll various AOL communities. Memories of taking apart System 7 shareware games with ResEdit and, in so doing, learning how they worked. Those were the days, man.

mpg515 9y ago

Ancient articles such as this one always bring kiddos out of the woodwork. I'm happy for that because it totally validates all the time I spent on that wretched network. Fun fact: Da Chronic is a cool dude (shout out #pain) and also wrote this fun thing about phishing: https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4692 https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4692

mpg515 9y ago

SuKiYaKi invited me into Allied and I made some of the best friends I ever made in my life at that time. This was the wild west for me

jjordan 9y ago

There's a Facebook group for you if this triggers the warm fuzzies: https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/ I also got started in programming during the "AOL Prog" era. Good times.

lwerdna 9y ago

It was magic seeing all this on AOL as a kid. Free programs? AOHell, Fate X, proggies, I had to learn how these "gods" did all this. I warez'd VB and the rest is history. Looks like I'm in good company.

mljoe 9y ago
All this makes me wonder what will inspire the current school generation to get into computing.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Games have been the main draw since year dot. In that regard, nothing has changed.

jlgaddis 9y ago

Not AOL but /ctcp username ping +++ATH0 gave me many hours of enjoyment on IRC. (Forgive me if I've gotten the syntax wrong, it's been a long time.)

dustinls 9y ago
worked in channels too, everyone with a linksys router would get disconnected. also it was just +ATH0
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  We might be thinking of different things then. This was specifically aimed at dial-up modems. Cable internet and DSL didnn't really exist. @Home had just launched their cable service around this time, if memory serves.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

Can someone with knowledge of all of these early programs explained how they worked? I remember getting booted from rooms (and offline) all of the time during this period. It seemed like the Wild West, where all of these outlaws were above the law. It was glorious even though I was constantly in fear of being “punted”. Now as a technical adult I’m very curious how they could do it. Did they send a certain “magic” byte sequence to my username? Did they overload it somehow? I can still vividly recall an IM with a stream of sinister ASCII and suddenly poof! Offline!

grifter 9y ago
Some IM punters exploited issues with the primitive HTML renderering capabilities in AOL, when receiving certain HTML AOL would either take too many cycles render it, detracting from its network code cycles causing a disconnect from he server (booted), or in some cases crash. Some IMing also exploited bandwidth disparity, whereby they would send more than you could consume forcing a disconnect.
- el_duderino 9y ago
  The 1IM punt HTML tag that overloaded AOL’s own buffer <font size="199999999999…"> and fill the 9's to the end of the IM window. I believe there was even a more effective one that was something like <font size="¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿...">.
  - gech 9y ago
    That was it? So simple

albeebe1 9y ago

Back in the day we used to called people lamers. Damn i feel like grandpa Simpson, and i'm only 35

noahdesu 9y ago

This is so interesting. Maybe once every couple years, I'll have a vivid memory of the IRC days back in mid to late 90s. I always try to find some record of it. The name of the group I associated with, and the nicks. They are right on the tip of my tongue, but I never can quite remember. I'd know them if I saw them written out, which is why I occasionally search. It'd be a trip to stumble upon all that old stuff some time.

deepakhj 9y ago
A lot of the scene reports are still archived online. Here’s an example: https://defacto2.net/file/detail/a74c1 https://defacto2.net/file/detail/a74c1
- noahdesu 9y ago
  Wow. I found myself! It's all there. Thanks so much :)

cdubzzz 9y ago

The only reason I know anything about Adobe Photoshop and am able to use it professionally today is because of AOL warez. Thanks, zelifcam!

krisives 9y ago

Ah the days of FTP ratios long before BitTorrent

zomg 9y ago

amazing article, wow was that nostalgic. i was unpuntable on aol (still am!) and will never give away my secret! ;)

draw_down 9y ago

I used to mirror warez on an FTP server I ran on my PC on the university network. There are so many ways that wouldn’t happen today (it was dumb then, too). I remember when Napster came around; that was the beginning of the end of “anything goes” on a university residential network.

NuSkooler 9y ago

I grew up doing the BBS thing for many years, then when the internet started emerging with CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL a lot of us effectively moved there. Illicit things I remember the "AOL era": * CC generators actually worked to create an account that would last a good amount of time * In the early days (~ AOL v2.5) they had a CGI form you could fill out and have a disc sent to your home. So of course we scripted it and had hundreds of free formattable 3.5"'s. A bit down the road and MS had a similar thing for Windows '95 replacement discs -- they'd send you the entire set if one was bad, which was a lot of good discs :) * AOL at one point allowed ordering physical products (early digital cameras and the like) via your account credit. Mix in a phished account and you can see how that goes. * I can't remember the names right now, but there were services in which you could pick up a CD and get free dial-up email access. The gig is they would show you ads. Patch the EXE and viola, you essentially just have a PPP account to the web.

inuhj 9y ago
NetZero.

deepakhj 9y ago

I was in the upper echelon in the scene and the mid 90s-late 90s were the golden days.

mpg515 9y ago

DoDi's Visual Basic "Discompiler"

aolhistorian 9y ago

I found out about IRC because one of these AOHell-like programs included a copy of mirc. AOL actually incorporated features that these AOHell programs invented such as the “Buddy List”. Before the buddy list, one had to manually check to see if a particular person was logged in. Someone came up with the idea of automating the process and displaying a list of who was logged into AOL. Seems like a simple idea but sometimes the obvious isn’t so obvious. Everyone ultimately grew out of the actual AOL platform but still congregated on Efnet. Lessons learned from those days are still relevant today. For example, when people back then started to learn about *nix systems, one of the first things you HAD to learn was how to filter out ping floods. Then the smurf attack came along and to protect an irc channel from a takeover, one had to build a large and robust eggdrop botnet to maintain control of the channel. Then people started hacking the boxes that the eggdrops were hosted on and telling the bot to give the attacker operator status. To counter that then people incorporated +o/-b <hash> as a way to verify to the other bots that the person getting ops was legitimate. The IRC servers had to also keep up because people would DoS the servers to force net splits. A net split occurred when the irc server disconnected from the network and the attacker would trick the server into thinking it was a real operator. To do that, the attacker would part and then join the empty channel, since it was disconnected from the rest of the IRC network, to gets ops so when the server rejoined the network they would be given ops since there was no timestamp on who was the real op. For historical sake, some nicks from that I recall from the AOL scene were – GaL, Paladin, motel6, ttol, Code, UsNavy999, Panda, EViL`, amos, optima, proggie, shiver, BoNe, Chong, WiCKeD, low, Playa, Majin, mijit, bionic, trips

nwellinghoff 9y ago
Haaaa, YES!

dsnuh 9y ago

GuideDEW has entered the room. Anyone have a list of the old q codes?

nirav72 9y ago

I remember downloading my first version of visual basic and also turbo Pascal from AOL warez scene. This article brought back a lot of memories.

chauzer 9y ago

Wow, brings back memories. I remember it was cool to have an all lowercase or 3 letter or less screen name on AOL.