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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] paulie_a|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] erikbye|8 years ago|reply
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).
https://files.scene.org/browse/parties/
[+] [-] dplgk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inuhj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grifter|8 years ago|reply
Definitely catalyzed my interest in engineering.
[+] [-] dsnuh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpg515|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ph4|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] albeebe1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eclyps|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vogt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] platz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allcentury|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|8 years ago|reply
I did help a friend with his AOL app when they added a spce to the title and it broke sendkeys
[+] [-] cdiamand|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eclyps|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] txt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allcentury|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strictnein|8 years ago|reply
AoHades was the shit: http://justinakapaste.com/aohades/
[+] [-] tbrock|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joshstrange|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wybiral|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Answerawake|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aolhistorian|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allcentury|8 years ago|reply
I am happy I never did anything too stupid but from a CS perspective I learned a lot very quickly.
[+] [-] strictnein|8 years ago|reply
Probably one of the ones here: http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PROGRAMS/FILES.HTM
[+] [-] krisives|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alsetmusic|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gre|8 years ago|reply
I never figured out exactly what that means.
[+] [-] bearbearbear|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatecha|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|8 years ago|reply
Ah, good times.
[+] [-] matt_wulfeck|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staticautomatic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lloyddobbler|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] strictnein|8 years ago|reply
This brings back tons of memories. Including the first time I infected a computer with a virus and lost everything. Lesson learned.
[+] [-] platz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianhawes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marpstar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allcentury|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _e|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyoma|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noahdesu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepakhj|8 years ago|reply
Here’s an example: https://defacto2.net/file/detail/a74c1
[+] [-] NuSkooler|8 years ago|reply
* 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|8 years ago|reply