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.
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.
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.
I'm still sore about losing the local channel to IM (particularly MSN Messenger, thanks to MS' aggressive bundling) and early gen social networking sites.
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.
Ah, LightWave, where I first learned 3D modeling and VFX. By the way, the core group behind LightWave went on to make Modo, which is now my favorite package for modeling and baking.
Just the term "warez" elicits nostalgia, now add "couriers" and "BBS." Those were the days.
Another thing I happened upon recently was scene.org, pleasantly surprised it's still up. I first visited it back in '96, I think, it was one of the first sites I was eager to visit when I first got online (quite possible I was online as early as '93, but I can't be sure).
Efnet (Eris-free Network). I am not correcting because I am an asshole but because I think there is a notable difference in how people used to name things in 90s vs now.
I used to spend so much time on this topic, never really used IRC though. Or maybe .. I can't recall..
fun anecdote: some guy offered me an access to its ftp, full of tutorials. I didn't know how to use ftp, so he told me to install vnc so he could set it up for me. I didn't know VNC either but the second my mouse moved without my will my hand grabbed the modem cable.
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!
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.
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...
It's not about learning about technology. It provided a creative and social outlet for an ostracized, emotionally neglected kid to create. I look at my own 10yo daughter today and her life is planned out for her. Kids don't ride bikes after school, climb trees, or do other activities where they're in charge. Instead they go to whatever extracurricular activities their parents signed them up for. In her case that's choir, piano, and tennis. There is a lack of self-directed outlets where they can explore their boundaries until later in life.
Her life is planned out by whom, though - she's your daughter, if you think she wants to be out riding her bike, why are you signing her up for and sending her to extracurricular activities? And there are plenty of self-directed outlets on the Internet that aren't illegal.
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.
Super nostaglic here as well. My first experience with programming was writing a mass mailer in WhaleScript. Taking the free trial CDs from the magazine racks and then using a cardgen to defeat Mod10 verification. $70 phone bills that my parents asked about. Good times.
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.
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)
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.
Awesome link! I found one of my programs from back then! It was a 'baiter'. It would login to a few aol accounts, collect screennames from whos chatting lists. Then send them all instant messages with IMS_OFF setting off so a normal user wouldn't be able to respond back, only a aol employee. Then we would crack those screennames and do whatever it is we did back then lol. Mostly people used this for spamming though, it was one of the first released instant message spammer that could login multiple names. Hehe I miss those days!
check out the intro art and interface.
http://justinakapaste.com/sharkbait-v2/
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/
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.
If you find this stuff interesting, as I do, I would check out 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)
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.
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
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.
For a while Best Buy paid you $20 to sign up. I signed up 3 times with my friends and cancelled daily when I was 12. I bought a Godsmack CD with it lol
> … 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.
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.
CATwatch accounts were employees that specifically trolled around the system looking for problematic users and activity. Trying to get their accounts in trouble is like attempting to call the cops, on the cops themselves.
I called and asked for a box of 100 floppies to "distribute around the workplace," I wanted to keep them to use for whatever I needed floppies for, but my mom made me give them out at school.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.