14 ms·
AOL 3.0 reverse engineered
- pbear2k21 4y agoIf anyone wants to check it out or take a deeper technical dive our discord is https://discord.gg/reaol https://discord.gg/reaol
- elpocko 4y agoI'm interested, but not interested enough to join Discord.
- 0daystock 4y agoWhy can't you just publish the open source on Github or something?
- pbear2k21 4y agoThat's planned. Would be blasphemy not to.
- DanAtC 4y agoCan't even open that link on iOS without being redirected to download Discord. Pass
- imwillofficial 4y ago
- Sesse__ 4y agoStrictly speaking, it's because Discord goes out of their way to block mobile browsers.
- imwillofficial 4y agoI've noticed this trend more and more with apps, reddit starting doing it too recently. There are times when walled gardens work, when they make sense. This is not that time.
- je_bailey 4y agoI miss clients like this. It reminds me of a better time when the internet was young and fresh to me. It does amuse me that this written up on livejournal.
- smitty1e 4y agoI liked the Three Line Novel thing on AOL.
- reaperducer 4y agoIt reminds me of a better time when the internet was young and fresh to me. I remember when AOL was seen as evil that was going to kill the open internet. It was the original "walled garden."
- imglorp 4y agoOne might argue before that was CompuServ. Text only, dialup, massive BBS basically. Messaging, shopping, airline reservations and other connections. I wish someone could rescue the whole thing from tape and host it.
- fsckboy 4y agoI wish someone could rescue the whole thing from tape and host it... on a PDP-10
- guessbest 4y agoIt wasn't really a walled garden, though. I remember using the AOL client software to connect to the internet and then opening IE to browse internet sites like yahoo, geocities and slashdot. When the computer owner who let me borrow his computer saw me do this he was stunned. He didn't realize he was connected to the internet this whole time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 4y ago
- vehemenz 4y agoThis is great. Now I can finally pursue my true life's calling: making AOL proggies.
- legalcorrection 4y agoNot to be a negative nancy, but in all likelihood there’s serious vulnerabilities in the AOL client. If you connect to this, anyone else connected to it can probably pwn you. So maybe run it in a VM or something.
- dontbenebby 4y ago
- franga2000 4y agoMaybe the parent post was edited since, but your response seems entirely disproportionate here. Running old proprietary software which connects to untrusted servers in a secure environment like a VM is very good advice. Saying you shouldn't do it because hacking is a crime is even worse than saying you shouldn't lock your doors because stealing is a crime. I say worse because in that case at least your point about deadly force could possibly apply - you can physically stop a robber if you happen to be home. Good luck beating up a 12 year old script kiddie stealing your e-banking creds through a Tor reverse shell you aren't even aware is installed on your computer because you ran what is essentially a web browser from before sandboxing was invented on your primary computer.
- dontbenebby 4y ago>Maybe the parent post was edited since, but your response seems entirely disproportionate here. Maybe it was, I don't know. What law in PA requires a proportionate response? If you don't like the laws of PA, register to vote and work to change them. >Running old proprietary software which connects to untrusted servers in a secure environment like a VM is very good advice. Yes, but the problem is most people don't know how to do that, so it's not useful to the types of people who have the freedom and time to experiment... the newbies... who are often quite young. >Saying you shouldn't do it because hacking is a crime is even worse than saying you shouldn't lock your doors because stealing is a crime. There's a difference between "lock your doors" and "lock your doors, get bars on your windows, set up an alarm, live on the third floor with no elevator, and keep a phone and a weapon next to a bed behindn a locked door" (which seems to be the level of "reasonable" security some folks here seem to want, to draw analogies from the physical world. >Good luck beating up a 12 year old script kiddie stealing your e-banking creds through a Tor reverse shell you aren't even aware is installed on your computer because you ran what is essentially a web browser from before sandboxing was invented on your primary computer. I'll just get a new credit card number or report the ach as fraudulent. I have MFA on my bank accounts plus code words. (I changed to a different one for each entity after a tour Dachau.) It sounds like in the scenario you describe, we should give that 12 year old a job, rather than invent ever creative ways to punish them for not wanting to be a low level minimum wage customer service representative because from ages 12 to 18ish they responded to adults like an adult would, while they weren't thankful the kid only acted out electronically in cheeky, playful ways.
- shortformblog 4y agoMaybe this is a silly question, but: Does this support the GeoWorks version of AOL?
- svnpenn 4y ago
- pbear2k21 4y agoYeah livejournal is pretty bad. I only use it because of the 1 character username "g" I cracked 20+ years ago. It's an ad trap.
- hydr0 4y agohaha <3 this response. Ah man I wish I still had all my old 3chr screen names...'pot' 'gat' 'xtc' Not to mention the endless <><
- hoppyhoppy2 4y ago>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- atlgator 4y agoCan you make it simulate the modem handshake sounds on sign on?
- pbear2k21 4y agoYes. That was done with an internal test build.
- Chazprime 4y agoA Livejournal link? Feels like the 90s in here today!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- havblue 4y agoAfter all these years we can finally hack aol to get unlimited hours.
- samstave 4y agoWhats your mailing address, I have a bunch of KiloBytes I'd like to send you FREE on CD-Roms. [Microplastics]
- egypturnash 4y ago“Please allow ads on our site or create an account. Looks like you're using an ad blocker. We rely on advertising to help fund our site.” Ah, LJ, how far you’ve fallen. My lifetime membership lies fallow after you ended up sold to a Russian company that eventually made any mention of The Gay illegal. Once you promised you’d never have ads. But here we are with a pop up begging me to turn off my and blocker. I miss what LJ was. Perhaps I mostly just miss all my friends having the time in their lives to create longer, thoughtful posts.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- theyeenzbeanz 4y agoThere’s a back button hijacker too, I couldn’t get back out of the link.
- techwiz137 4y agoThe website hijacked my mobile Firefox browser and did not allow me to go back no matter how many times I pressed back.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jeroenhd 4y agoHold the back button, you'll get a list of previous URLs to jump back to. Works similar to right-clicking the back button on desktop. Still pretty annoying, though.
- karaterobot 4y ago"I can't press the back button... hmm, might as well register for an account and become a loyal user."
- exabrial 4y agoAOL was like "The Matrix". The system was full of casual, blissfully ignorant users... meanwhile there was an underground set of hackers and script kiddies having a blast while being chased down by moderators. Ah yes, I remember the first time I got my family's account shutdown for "punting" a moderator and crashing a bunch of servers. My dad was like "what?" when AOL _called us_.
- MarcoZavala 4y ago
- scroot 4y agoDude, we got banned from AOL for life after I popped into a mod chat room and started pretending I was one of them. Stupid! But I wanted to play a dangerous game...
- cyanydeez 4y agoI remember making 2500$ spamming porn links
- nickstinemates 4y agoi just wrote about this. https://keeb.dev/2022/05/28/The-beginning/ https://keeb.dev/2022/05/28/The-beginning/
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoI’m sorry for your loss. I enjoyed reading this even though I am probably 15 years older, I have a similar story with the predecessors to AOL (BBS systems).
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoI had the privilege of dining with an ex-CEO of AOL around 2017 or so (long after his retirement). I was prepared to rail him for taking advantage of Americans, but he was such a humble and fascinating guy… no.
- 101008 4y agoGood for those nostalgics like me. My experience with something similar was Escargot, a similar project but for MSN Messenger[1]: I created a new account (old accounts do not work), I made my friends to do the same and we used it for a few hours (sharing emoticons, nudges, etc) but then the novely went away. Software alone cannot capture/reproduce the old days, unfortunately. [1]https://escargot.chat/ https://escargot.chat/
- jbay808 4y agoMSN Messenger was the best chat software I ever used. Its abandonment was a huge loss. Thanks for sharing!
- Bilal_io 4y agohttps://youtu.be/nqGJUKaaLU4 https://youtu.be/nqGJUKaaLU4
- frostwarrior 4y agoThat's the thing about nostalgia. We don't miss a thing by itself, but the whole context in that given time. I don't miss Windows 98. I miss being a child using that, browsing the old internet, the old terrible "web design" and having my friends on the same page
- q-big 4y ago> I don't miss Windows 98. I miss being a child using that, browsing the old internet, the old terrible "web design" and having my friends on the same page I do miss it - having a Windows 98 (or Windows 95) VM is so useful for running some old beloved games.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoYou can never really go home.
- frostwarrior 4y ago
- notadev 4y agoPad keeping AOL and apparently LJ alive, nice! This has been a dream side project of mine for a long time just to bring back the golden years of the Internet so happy to see it’s been done.
- _the_inflator 4y ago> P.S. My Screen Name is "God" so don't forget to add me to your Buddy List and send me an IM So if you ever wanted to talk to god via AOL, here is the chance. ;)
- sejje 4y agoWell, people used to use me for the same thing. I had "Christ"
- bitshiffed 4y agoToo bad the journal entry doesn't have more details (and I'm too lazy to do further digging on my own). Is this a RE based on actual server binaries that somebody managed to get copies of? Or is it a RE of the client end of the protocol, just being fed new data?
- tyingq 4y agoI distinctly remember "AOL Keywords" as a signal that corporations were going to find a way to ruin the internet with their walled gardens. And while that idea didn't pan out, the general idea seems to be roughly what happened. The internet is now mostly a grouping of separate spaces like Facebook, Apple's store, TikTok, IG, etc.
- puglr 4y agoAs a former AOL user, it was truly a walled garden. For hordes of less tech-savvy users like myself, AOL was the internet. Many of us had little concept of an internet "beyond" AOL. The current situation might be referred to as "windowed gardens". We get to look around and choose the fiefdom we hate the least. ...progress?
- chrisco255 4y agoPart of the reason AOL was successful was the limitations of dial-up and the inclusion of high quality art assets on AOL CDs, that made it more fun and visually interesting to be on AOL vs the WWW in the mid-90s. Browsers were pretty bad (AOL's own internal browser included), HTML was quite limited, etc. Broadband is what killed AOL. The moderation was pretty loose on the forums and chat rooms, and it felt like a pretty free place to be.
- a-dub 4y agoi once worked on a team that was working closely with aol to develop an aol set top box. as an integration engineer i interfaced with aol quite a bit and on occasion, i'd get sent fascinating threads from their ops teams. all sorts of weird and scary sounding things like "access rotors" that were probably developed custom in the early 90s.
- accrual 4y agoI would love to read more about your experiences. I grew up with AOL and learning about its internals years later is fascinating.
- a-dub 4y agosadly that's about all that i remember. that and all the aol ops people used aol screennames. i'm sure that there are some old school aol ops staff who hang out on here, no?
- edf13 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tibbydudeza 4y agoI recall the backend ran on some odd hardware for the time ???.
- classichasclass 4y agoAt least for awhile, it was Stratus VOS. This was true for its ancestors QuantumLink and PlayNET as well.
- tibbydudeza 4y agoOh I remember that - they were in competition with Tandem Non Stop systems using MIPS processors. I used to program for those machines for a bank using TAL (Tandem Application Language) running their Guardian OS.
- tibbydudeza 4y agoAnd Microsoft's answer - Project Blackbird - fortunately sanity prevailed and Microsoft "embraced" the WWW
- tibbydudeza 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoYeah, and they gave us IE6.
- tibbydudeza 4y agoNow now and also XMLHttpRequest no thanks to the OWA (Outlook Web) team.
- nirav72 4y agoPeople like to crap on iE'- but XMLHttpRequest gave rise to the whole Ajax trend around 2005.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoIt was a little earlier than that… IIRC I was using it in 2001 but it certainly was not called Ajax yet. But then IE just stagnated.
- erickhill 4y agoI was not an AOL user. In the 90s my colleagues and friends used "AOL User" as a slight on folks who didn't understand tech. My dad was an AOL user and I had to show him how to use it. Often. I raged at its expensive walled garden (especially when I needed to show him how to access an actual website) but he liked it. Regardless, I love this project.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoSimilar experiences and attitudes for me. Looking back, we were harsh on them. I’m sorry for my disdain especially after reading how many children went into programming or an IT career because of various AOL hacks.
- thebeardisred 4y agoEvery time I listen to "The Chronic" by Dr Dre I'm reminded of how impressed I was by the "AOHell" installer. It was the perfect mix of BBS/demoscene culture and an introduction to larger online communities of hackers. edit: Also, I'm very pleased to hear someone else talking about "rainman" ;)
- rootw0rm 4y agoAnd here I only remember AOHell's Nine Inch Nails references...
- cfeduke 4y agoYes, Remote Automated INformation MANager... my sort of introduction to "programming" as it was. Almost two decades later, my co-worker at a startup was one of the original engineers at AOL (after the name change) and worked on RAINMAN among other things. Anytime someone brings it up, I have fond memories.
- nirav72 4y agoMy favorite feature in AOHell was the chatroom text spoofing .where you could make it appear as if someone else had typed something. Later when I got access to the VB source for AOhell , I found out how it was done. The dev had figured out a clever trick to exploit the way the chatroom window did line wrapping. Also who can forget the ASCII middle finger that one could scroll across the chatroom. Those were fun days. I had a decent local dial isp. But still logged onto AOL for the 'warez'. It seemed like AOL provided unlimited email attachment storage. So warez files were traded over email in AOL via multipart RAR file attachments.
- throw457 4y agoFaking AOL is what started my interest in hacking with the absurd pricing of internet access in germany at the time.
- InvaderFizz 4y agoI never used AOL, but as a kid, receiving the 3.5" floppy in the mail was really nice. Saved me having to buy one!
- asveikau 4y agoI forget. Did they remove the little plastic square thing to make it read-only? For youngins, 3.5" floppies had a "write protect" switch. If it was a solid plastic bit, you could write, but if the switch showed a hole, it would be treated as read only. Here's the first Google result I found: https://electronicstechnician.tpub.com/14091/css/Write-Protect-Write-Enable-Slide-262.htm https://electronicstechnician.tpub.com/14091/css/Write-Prote...
- classichasclass 4y agoNone of the ones I got ever did. They were immediately repurposed (along with all those free Computer City floppies). Reusing the CDs was a little harder. ;)
- nirav72 4y agoAOL CDs made great coasters.
- notadev 4y agoYou could just cover the hole with a piece of scotch tape and voila, writeable!
- asveikau 4y agoScotch tape, huh? I would have figured electrical tape, for opacity. I don't think I ever had to do this though.
- command_tab 4y agoAll the floppy drives I've ever seen had a little mechanical arm attached to a microswitch that detected the presence or absence of the write protect notch. VHS cassettes worked similarly.
- sys_64738 4y agoBack when AOL was what the cool kids used. I never did and was stuck with the internet during the 90s.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- b8 4y agoI wonder if any legal difficulties will arise from this. Since Yahoo owns AOL/AIM, and this violates their IP/copyright I presume. Though I'm very happy that this was created.
- IntelMiner 4y agoSince none of the server software exists anymore, this is effectively all clean-room reverse engineering. Writing the entire backend from scratch and guesswork based on what the client software wants
- layer8 4y agoNever used AOL, but I wish “the internet” had such a structured 90’s user interface.
- silisili 4y agoDid use AOL, and think it was way ahead of its time. One portal where you could access email, chat, IM, news, stocks, etc. Worked fast and rather seemlessly, especially for dialup. Portals today are still not as slick or functional. See MS or Google's attempts. Really wish someone would create something similar in Electron or something.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoAnd no obtrusive ads, especially video!
- wolpoli 4y agoI agree. This was the era when buttons look like button instead of plaintext or text on rectangle, contents are shown in grids instead of cards, and different areas of the interface are separated by visual dividers rather than white margins.
- layer8 4y agoThat’s correct, but what I was getting at besides the UI style is that I wish most of the UI was in the client (browser) rather than in the content (web site).
- Dwedit 4y agoI wouldn't want to mess with outdated software that communicates over a network, especially not from AOL given their record with AOL Instant Messenger. Did you know that the original way that AOL checked that you were using a genuine version of AIM was to send a buffer overflow attack to you? It would then execute some code that checked process memory for signs that it was the genuine AIM executable.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 4oo4 4y agoThis makes me really happy. I think one of my first internet experiences was in an AOL chatroom, and someone told me to do Alt + F4 to fix something, and I was really mad that they tricked me when I realized what it did, but I think it's hilarious now.