I think the one of the most interesting and overlooked stories about the AOL era, is how the warez scene used bots and AOL's mail system to host every piece of pirated content for years.
Similar to IRC channels with bots that provided lists of available content and used DCC to transfer compressed files in small chunks -- these were still the days of 9600-56k, so transfers larger than floppies were often doomed to fail -- AOL private rooms would be filled with bots that would respond to requests and send files. The difference being that the AOL bots would email a list of available content, which could be a paginated list across multiple emails, or results for a specific search query. Then you would type another command into the chat to request a specific file or release, and the bot would forward you a series of emails with <1.4MB attachments (the maximum size at the time), already stored on AOL servers and ready to download at whatever speed your modem could handle.
It took AOL a long time to catch on to this, and even then, they couldn't keep up with the sheer number of fake accounts being created -- or, as the article points out, accounts made with phished credit cards, of which there were hundreds of thousands floating around and a never-ending supply of new ones as AOL's userbase grew. They effectively hosted the warez scene throughout the 90s, until residential broadband became available and 10-100mbps was common in places like Sweden and Singapore, at which point the scene shifted to IRC and self-hosted top sites (i.e. private FTPs).
It was a remarkably simple solution to a hosting problem, and the folks who organized it all will never get enough credit for their contribution toward creating a generation of graphics experts, for example, who couldn't afford the crazy prices of Photoshop or 3ds Max, but were able to use pirated copies to develop those skills and turn them into careers.
To expand on this a bit, when you mailed an attachment on AOL, it would upload and be hosted on their servers. So when you forwarded that email to someone, the download was just a pointer to the original location on their servers. Warez groups would recruit people for positions likw uploaders with strong connections who would just send tons of mail with attachments (to themselves I think). Then the progz/bots, called Mass Mailers (MMers) would sit in a private chat and wait for commands.
Sending the `/list` command in chat would result in one or more emails with lists of software, usually split up to reduce file size. If I were looking for PhotoShop, I might see something like:
[400] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 1/4
[401] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 2/4
[402] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 3/4
[403] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 4/4
I'd then send `/send 400-403` in the chat and in a few minutes I'd have four forwarded emails containing a portion of an archive. You'd do this for a bunch of stuff and then when going to bed, let AOL's download manager download everything overnight. AOL did more for the WaReZ scene than anyone else in the mid-to-late 90s.
Actually the most overlooked things about AOL is about how their internal network (Merlin) got breeched through social engineering by a 14 yr old and did not have a clue about it for 5 years. Merlin is their tool that they use internally for their entire customer database and had a RAT installed that allowed people to create admin accounts, view peoples credit card, addresses, names and also allowed people to terminate accounts. AOL had 34 million paying users at this time.
Phished credit cards? For a long time a silly credit card generator got past whatever simple
check was performed when an account was created, allowing you access for a week or so until I guess an actual charge attempt was made. (This must have been around 1994 or 1995).
I never used AOL. It just seemed dumb to have that abstraction layer to the internet when other providers just went straight to the web. AOL keywords drove me crazy hearing radio ads "use AOL Keyword _____".
Instead of this bot driven email, I made use of the alt.binary.mac.applications and similar newsgroups.
But this email system you describe sounds exactly AOLish version of newsgroups. A way of holding someone's hand while the powerusers just went straight to the source.
> 10-100mbps was common in places like Sweden and Singapore
Oh yeah, I remember sometime in the 90s talking to a Dutch guy that had a 6/6 SDSL connection and ran a server in their own home. I thought he must have been a billionaire but was blown away to discover they worked on assembly line.
The year was 2003 and I was in my second year of CS undergrad. I saw a cool utility in AOL instant messenger that recorded the username of every user that looked at your profile. I cloned it and added it to my profile. A few of my dorm mates liked it and asked me to put it in their profile. Even more people came asking and I made a simple website (buddytracker.us) where you could add the utility to your profile. I did no marketing but every profile using buddytracker had a hotmail like link to get your own profile tracker. The first month I had 30 users, the second 500, the third 5000, then 50000. The following year 3 million people had added a profile tracker. It was a life changing experience allowing me to pay off my student loans, travel and take a non-traditional career path. I work on side projects to this day and AOL is where I got my start.
If anyone is interested, I have an archive of a lot of AOL progs[0].
These got me into programming and I made a couple of my own that are now completely lost to time.
ccoms (chat commands) were my favorite. The program would scan the chat and when you sent a command, it'd do whatever you asked and send a response back to the chat for everyone to see. Basically turning the AOL chat into a public command line. One of the more popular things people used it for was for playing pirated music. You'd send `play rammstein` to the chat, and it'd start playing a random Rammstein song from your mp3 collection.
I started writing one later[1], although I haven't touched it since 2016. It'd connect to your spotify account, instead.
Also, it seems Mark Zuckerberg was in the scene. He apparently wrote Darth Phader (a fader.) A fader would make your text in chats fade colors by injecting html to change the text color between each character. So, your text would start blue and fade to red further along in the message, then maybe go back to blue, it was all configurable in most of them.
Edit: I can't believe I left this out, but there's also a facebook group[2], Justin has a site with a lot of content about progs[3], and I recently stumbled on the AOL Underground Podcast[4].
My first "hacking" success was with an ad-supported ISP called NetZero. The app logged you on to the web and had a persistent ad-banner on the screen. If you opened a full-screen app - in my case Starcraft - it would kick you off the internet.
However, I discovered that if you killed the NetZero application at just the right time (after connecting to the network but before the ad banner was initialized), you could stay online with no ad-banner and pwn some Zerg.
Even better was that if you looked at the logs it would show the hidden credentials for dialing in. You could copy those and create your own dial up connection without using the app at all
I used NetZero for a summer by setting up a dumb dialer machine that shared its network connection to the rest of the house. The dumb dialer autoconnected to NetZero when outbound traffic was detected and since there was no monitor plugged in no one ever saw the ads. Was a pretty simple solution for a couple broke college guys.
There was a related service around this time that basically paid you to use the internet. But they only paid you if you were actively running their banner ads. Of course, this was rife for abuse through scripts that faked your activity. I ended up writing some of my own before they went bankrupt.
I think even more than mailtools/fileservs and punters, my favorite thing about AOL progz was just being more expressive. When you hung out in TeenPoolParty13, you could be extra cool by sending text that was wavy, or mixed colors, or different sizes, fonts, etc when the actual UI didn't let you use that many options. But it let you embed HTML (and I guess UTF) so with a prog you could be more expressive, or just plain weird.
I've never forgotten how progz, Geocities, and MySpace all showed that people want to express their individuality and experiment if you give them the chance. But the boring commercialism of the 2010s internet killed the user's ability to be special.
This could have been written about me. I remember going to a friends house one night and seeing FateX for the first time. We spent a night mass mailing people and causing general chaos online. I went home and got my hands on Hellraiser, AO Korn, Pepsi, Havok, MIB, and a slew of other progz which I cant remember their names.
One day I asked my dad how they were made and he said he had some vague idea. So he took me to CompUSA and we left with a Learn Visual Basic in 24 hours book and Visual Basic software box. I went off and started writing my own programs and hanging out in various AOL related programming chat rooms. I made IRL friends from people that were part of that scene and that I met in those chat rooms. I have very fond memories of the internet back then.
I was 13 at the time I started coding AOL progz and went on to have a career in software development because of it.
Methodus Toolz + Shit Talker Version 1.2 By Jaundice back when you could make free Skype calls to land lines. People still answered the phone and couldn’t fathom that they were talking with a computer.
I have described this world to a few people in my life recently, and look back on it very fondly.
Everyone was anonymous, everyone was crazy motivated, and it was a wild west of credit card theft, software theft, and more.
I wrote a few prolific mass mailers and servers, was pretty well known in the scene, and was only 12/13 years old.
I learned to program, create great user experiences, and more.
My servers were the first to have plain text search: /server send photoshop instead of /server send 26-40
It also hosted the lists via a PHP webapp, tracked metrics on the web across users of the app, and connected to IRC.
It was a wonderful time of chaos, rapid learnings, and intrinsic motivation that shaped my life forever. If not for this period of time in my life, I dont know where Id find myself.
A more interesting bit of AOL era ephemera was that we used away messages as people use Twitter today. In the AOL client you could set a short message (just a few hundred characters) as an away message that others would see if they had you in their contacts. People started to constantly set themselves 'away' with messages about what they were up to, how they were feeling, etc. I'm sure this likely influenced Jack Dorsey and the other early folks at Twitter since they were growing up and using AOL at the same time.
Good to see an article around this era of "hacking" (writing punters in VB). I haven't seen too much about it and I'd love to know if there are others.
My fondest recollection was that there was a Pokemon battling type game (Pokemon Platinum, I think?) where you could battle Pokemon over chat. The creator had hard-coded his AOL username into the binary to unlock a bunch of moves and skills. We figured out you could load the binary into a hex editing app and change the screen name - only problem was, it had to be the same length as the creator's: 9 characters. So made a new screen name, the one that stuck with me for the next 10-15 years, so I could unlock some pointless features in an AOL program. But it introduced me to Visual Basic, hex editing, and generally being interested in tinkering with computers and software.
Those literally got me started programming back in the day. The developers name was GerbilFan, I believe. There was a few different versions of the Pokemon battler app - some of them were Gym-editions (meant to be used by friends of theirs I guess?) that, if I'm remembering correctly, let their team have powerful Pokemon guaranteed. I actually learned how gradients work because of the gym-themed background gradients in the program (blueish for water, redish for fire, etc).
The punter/proggie scene definitely got me into programming. Articles like this bring such a special kind of nostalgia. It was both educational and for me at the time, it was very rebellious. My parents did not want me downloading any of these things on our family computer. My friends and I would share floppy disks of punters as contraband.
Learning Visual Basic and the open source community of .bas files was ahead of its time. The tutorials and programming guides, the general willingness to share information.
I learned how to write C++ from a random guy who went by LostSideDead. If you happen to be reading this sir, thank you for spending so much time teaching a kid how to write code. I’ve made a long career of it and I love it.
Not really hacking AOL, but I found that you could get the passwords in plain text from the Filesystem, which meant I could get around the parental controls and use it when I wanted!
Submitted it to “happy hacker” and it got in the newsletter, I was super chuffed as a 13? yr old!
Edit: I had a thing called “aol admin tools” which I have no idea if it was legit or not but could see lots more than I could normally lol
1. 25 years ago a 28.8k modem and Cyrix 486 with 8mb ram on AOL had better end-user performance than today’s most popular web apps. There is still no mass-market equivalent to the appeal of those chat rooms. Technology will never defeat latency bloat of tracking hooks.
2. The anonymous or weakly pseudonymous internet was a superior user experience. It felt like an escape to freedom, similar to traveling to another country with chosen friends. The strong identity internet feels like surveillance more than escape. It leads me to believe that ‘the metaverse’ will always suck, not matter how good the technology gets.
3. What killed AOL? They had two separate generations of internet dominance, first the entire stack, and then with messenger after the ISP disruption. A company that can lead a massive growth industry, and then pivot to a successful product after their own disruption seems like a solid blue chip. I know what happened, they started focusing on old incompetent subscribers by giving them a familiar interface poorly replicated on the browser. But how? Who thought this was a good idea?
DSL and cable killed them. I had aol until the cable company offered high speed and by that time I wasn’t really using AOL as a client as I had moved to Linux. My parents still used windows and had no problem just using Netscape/IE or whatever since the browser had by then become the killer app.
If someone built the same featureset as AOL had, I bet it would be faster today. I remember massive annoying delays, computers freezing and crashing, not to say anything about download speeds.
I think our memories of the past are rosy, plus they are not making a direct comparison. IRC chat programs are pretty snappy when they have feature parity; Slack is bloated because it does a whole lot more than AOL Chat.
Whether you like the features or want to pay for them with the decreased performance, that's a different issue that I have no opinion on.
If I recall correctly, the primary method of "punting" was to send an instant message with a bunch of unclosed HTML tags, which the client's renderer wouldn't be able to handle and would crash the AOL application.
The unclosed tags were one method, and the other was applying a different formatting to every character. Even one or two messages of maximum length was enough to crash the client.
An IM with repeating <h1><br> tags until you hit the character limit was good for about 30 seconds of lag/freezing on the Mac client. 10 of those in fast succession would pretty much make you have to restart your computer.
I looked further and found each cipher was simply doing a
character offset, meaning each cipher was a Caesar Cipher.
The offsets were 70, 97, 116 and 101, respectively. If you
look up the corresponding ASCII code for those numbers, you
get the word “Fate”. I tried out this new decoding strategy
and was able to successfully decode a directory of MaGuS’
files. I had broken the code! MaGuS was using what is known
as the Vigenere Cipher, and for that particular directory,
“Fate” was the pass-phrase.
I recently rewrote the code in Javascript just for fun. I'll have to post it somewhere someday.
---
Tangentially related, I once stole a 4-character AIM screenname from someone who infected a computer at my school with some backdoor. I found his IP address via `netstat`, and then was able to access his C: drive because Windows File Sharing was turned on with anonymous access. I guess he didn't even have a firewall to block the port. I copied his registry database, and decrypted the AIM password and changed it. He got it back by using AOL's password reset by email tool.
This one is definitely a nostalgia blast. As a 15 year old kid, it was very empowering to discover what you could do to programmatically bypass rules that were apparently in place for everyone else to adhere to.
There's still mirrors of AOL-Files on the web somewhere. I was looking at my profile I submitted to their "AOL People" directory back in '98 not too long ago
I was expelled from school for having a website where I listed downloads of all the AOL tools I could possibly find. There were thousands... The school network administrator somehow found my website and decided that these AOL tools were being used "to hack the Macintosh network and slow it down". I protested to the school principal that they were completely unrelated, but as a 13 year old interested in hacking, I didn't have any credibility. That followed me around on my permanent record and other schools treated me like a criminal.
Joke's on them, though. I learned to teach myself everything (since they refused to), dropped out of school, and got a job at a start-up. Don't stay in school, kids - hack for fun and profit!
This reminds me of how ignorant most adults & teachers were back then about the internet.
When I was in 10th grade (~1995) my high school had a new class called "U.S. History with Internet". Kudos to my school for trying to include the internet in the curriculum, but what it amounted to was 3 days a week of normal history class and 2 days spent in the computer lab. Ostensibly we were supposed to be doing history research on the internet, but of course we did anything but. The best part was they had the shop teacher teach for the internet days. He knew less about computers than most of us 15 year-olds. He'd slowly read directions off a paper - "Type in the U R L bar..." and we'd already be 5 steps ahead of him.
My friend got in trouble for looking at homemade bongs, but the hilarious part is that the teacher was convinced he was actually looking up bomb making instructions and that "bong" was some sort of obfuscation.
Oh to reminisce about the adventures from the days when it all began. One could power on the PC and go make breakfast all the while a script executes after boot to "dial up" the wan. From the kitchen one listened to the audible feedback of the process as the spinning disk clattered and then the dopamine rush hits as the modem is dialing up, hoping the modem pool was not overloaded. Bbs, Irc, war dialing, AOL hax, NetZero punts and all the great fun is where several nerds found their calling, this nerd included. Some things have changed for the better while some things have changed for the worse yet here we are connecting everything, secure or not.
Maybe I should write an article titled "How Lotus123 macros got me interested in programming".
I wrote such a complicated program that I found out Bill Gates was wrong: 640K was not enough for everyone. But I realized that I could divide my mess of macros into categories, save them in separate files, and then selectively import only those that were being used at the time with a "root" set of macros. I was 18 or 19 at the time. It was many moons later when I learned about virtual memory and swap space, I realized I'd implement my own version of virtual memory/swap. In a very caveman like fashion. All without messing with someone else.
[+] [-] bryans|4 years ago|reply
Similar to IRC channels with bots that provided lists of available content and used DCC to transfer compressed files in small chunks -- these were still the days of 9600-56k, so transfers larger than floppies were often doomed to fail -- AOL private rooms would be filled with bots that would respond to requests and send files. The difference being that the AOL bots would email a list of available content, which could be a paginated list across multiple emails, or results for a specific search query. Then you would type another command into the chat to request a specific file or release, and the bot would forward you a series of emails with <1.4MB attachments (the maximum size at the time), already stored on AOL servers and ready to download at whatever speed your modem could handle.
It took AOL a long time to catch on to this, and even then, they couldn't keep up with the sheer number of fake accounts being created -- or, as the article points out, accounts made with phished credit cards, of which there were hundreds of thousands floating around and a never-ending supply of new ones as AOL's userbase grew. They effectively hosted the warez scene throughout the 90s, until residential broadband became available and 10-100mbps was common in places like Sweden and Singapore, at which point the scene shifted to IRC and self-hosted top sites (i.e. private FTPs).
It was a remarkably simple solution to a hosting problem, and the folks who organized it all will never get enough credit for their contribution toward creating a generation of graphics experts, for example, who couldn't afford the crazy prices of Photoshop or 3ds Max, but were able to use pirated copies to develop those skills and turn them into careers.
[+] [-] notadev|4 years ago|reply
Sending the `/list` command in chat would result in one or more emails with lists of software, usually split up to reduce file size. If I were looking for PhotoShop, I might see something like:
[400] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 1/4
[401] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 2/4
[402] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 3/4
[403] PhotoShop 4.0 (cracked by Foo) 4/4
I'd then send `/send 400-403` in the chat and in a few minutes I'd have four forwarded emails containing a portion of an archive. You'd do this for a bunch of stuff and then when going to bed, let AOL's download manager download everything overnight. AOL did more for the WaReZ scene than anyone else in the mid-to-late 90s.
[+] [-] freefolks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dls2016|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
Instead of this bot driven email, I made use of the alt.binary.mac.applications and similar newsgroups.
But this email system you describe sounds exactly AOLish version of newsgroups. A way of holding someone's hand while the powerusers just went straight to the source.
[+] [-] Scoundreller|4 years ago|reply
Oh yeah, I remember sometime in the 90s talking to a Dutch guy that had a 6/6 SDSL connection and ran a server in their own home. I thought he must have been a billionaire but was blown away to discover they worked on assembly line.
[+] [-] tppiotrowski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fyrefestival|4 years ago|reply
2. added a "get your own" link
3. ????
4. pay off your student loans!!!
what was your step 3, the monetization?
[+] [-] mattymurph|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RexM|4 years ago|reply
These got me into programming and I made a couple of my own that are now completely lost to time.
ccoms (chat commands) were my favorite. The program would scan the chat and when you sent a command, it'd do whatever you asked and send a response back to the chat for everyone to see. Basically turning the AOL chat into a public command line. One of the more popular things people used it for was for playing pirated music. You'd send `play rammstein` to the chat, and it'd start playing a random Rammstein song from your mp3 collection.
I started writing one later[1], although I haven't touched it since 2016. It'd connect to your spotify account, instead.
Also, it seems Mark Zuckerberg was in the scene. He apparently wrote Darth Phader (a fader.) A fader would make your text in chats fade colors by injecting html to change the text color between each character. So, your text would start blue and fade to red further along in the message, then maybe go back to blue, it was all configurable in most of them.
Edit: I can't believe I left this out, but there's also a facebook group[2], Justin has a site with a lot of content about progs[3], and I recently stumbled on the AOL Underground Podcast[4].
[0]: https://progs.rexflex.net/
[1]: https://github.com/RexMorgan/qwik-tools
[2]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/
[3]: https://justinakapaste.com/
[4]: https://aolunderground.com/
[+] [-] _justinfunk|4 years ago|reply
However, I discovered that if you killed the NetZero application at just the right time (after connecting to the network but before the ad banner was initialized), you could stay online with no ad-banner and pwn some Zerg.
[+] [-] todd3834|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taddevries|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomc1985|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gxqoz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arrath|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway787544|4 years ago|reply
I've never forgotten how progz, Geocities, and MySpace all showed that people want to express their individuality and experiment if you give them the chance. But the boring commercialism of the 2010s internet killed the user's ability to be special.
[+] [-] agotterer|4 years ago|reply
One day I asked my dad how they were made and he said he had some vague idea. So he took me to CompUSA and we left with a Learn Visual Basic in 24 hours book and Visual Basic software box. I went off and started writing my own programs and hanging out in various AOL related programming chat rooms. I made IRL friends from people that were part of that scene and that I met in those chat rooms. I have very fond memories of the internet back then.
I was 13 at the time I started coding AOL progz and went on to have a career in software development because of it.
[+] [-] fourstar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanp2k2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Duhck|4 years ago|reply
Everyone was anonymous, everyone was crazy motivated, and it was a wild west of credit card theft, software theft, and more.
I wrote a few prolific mass mailers and servers, was pretty well known in the scene, and was only 12/13 years old.
I learned to program, create great user experiences, and more.
My servers were the first to have plain text search: /server send photoshop instead of /server send 26-40
It also hosted the lists via a PHP webapp, tracked metrics on the web across users of the app, and connected to IRC.
It was a wonderful time of chaos, rapid learnings, and intrinsic motivation that shaped my life forever. If not for this period of time in my life, I dont know where Id find myself.
[+] [-] qbasic_forever|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeplay|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soupfordummies|4 years ago|reply
Gonna have to go download some ZZT files now. I’ve heard there’s somewhat of a community around it again.
[+] [-] anthk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turdnagel|4 years ago|reply
My fondest recollection was that there was a Pokemon battling type game (Pokemon Platinum, I think?) where you could battle Pokemon over chat. The creator had hard-coded his AOL username into the binary to unlock a bunch of moves and skills. We figured out you could load the binary into a hex editing app and change the screen name - only problem was, it had to be the same length as the creator's: 9 characters. So made a new screen name, the one that stuck with me for the next 10-15 years, so I could unlock some pointless features in an AOL program. But it introduced me to Visual Basic, hex editing, and generally being interested in tinkering with computers and software.
[+] [-] ronald_dregan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] todd3834|4 years ago|reply
Learning Visual Basic and the open source community of .bas files was ahead of its time. The tutorials and programming guides, the general willingness to share information.
I learned how to write C++ from a random guy who went by LostSideDead. If you happen to be reading this sir, thank you for spending so much time teaching a kid how to write code. I’ve made a long career of it and I love it.
[+] [-] bennyp101|4 years ago|reply
Submitted it to “happy hacker” and it got in the newsletter, I was super chuffed as a 13? yr old!
Edit: I had a thing called “aol admin tools” which I have no idea if it was legit or not but could see lots more than I could normally lol
[+] [-] jl2718|4 years ago|reply
2. The anonymous or weakly pseudonymous internet was a superior user experience. It felt like an escape to freedom, similar to traveling to another country with chosen friends. The strong identity internet feels like surveillance more than escape. It leads me to believe that ‘the metaverse’ will always suck, not matter how good the technology gets.
3. What killed AOL? They had two separate generations of internet dominance, first the entire stack, and then with messenger after the ISP disruption. A company that can lead a massive growth industry, and then pivot to a successful product after their own disruption seems like a solid blue chip. I know what happened, they started focusing on old incompetent subscribers by giving them a familiar interface poorly replicated on the browser. But how? Who thought this was a good idea?
[+] [-] driverdan|4 years ago|reply
This is untrue for most sites. A browser could take 10-20 sec to open. Loading a page often took 5-30 sec, depending on if it had any images.
I always kept solitaire open and would switch between it and the browser while I waited for things to load.
[+] [-] flatiron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edmundsauto|4 years ago|reply
I think our memories of the past are rosy, plus they are not making a direct comparison. IRC chat programs are pretty snappy when they have feature parity; Slack is bloated because it does a whole lot more than AOL Chat.
Whether you like the features or want to pay for them with the decreased performance, that's a different issue that I have no opinion on.
[+] [-] benburton|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryans|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillyF|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcpham2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|4 years ago|reply
You could use swear words by substituting the ascii equivalent for a letter.
So looking at the ascii chart, I was wondering if BELL would do anything but it didn’t.
However, NULL would boot all my friends offline and re-boot them off as they auto-re-logged in except myself.
[+] [-] valgaze|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrBoring|4 years ago|reply
Ctrl+F "AIM PW Decrypter" @ http://patorjk.com/programming/vb6examples.htm
I recently rewrote the code in Javascript just for fun. I'll have to post it somewhere someday.
---
Tangentially related, I once stole a 4-character AIM screenname from someone who infected a computer at my school with some backdoor. I found his IP address via `netstat`, and then was able to access his C: drive because Windows File Sharing was turned on with anonymous access. I guess he didn't even have a firewall to block the port. I copied his registry database, and decrypted the AIM password and changed it. He got it back by using AOL's password reset by email tool.
I wonder if whoever it was (he or she) reads HN.
[+] [-] booleanbetrayal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ottoludd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|4 years ago|reply
Joke's on them, though. I learned to teach myself everything (since they refused to), dropped out of school, and got a job at a start-up. Don't stay in school, kids - hack for fun and profit!
[+] [-] stripline|4 years ago|reply
When I was in 10th grade (~1995) my high school had a new class called "U.S. History with Internet". Kudos to my school for trying to include the internet in the curriculum, but what it amounted to was 3 days a week of normal history class and 2 days spent in the computer lab. Ostensibly we were supposed to be doing history research on the internet, but of course we did anything but. The best part was they had the shop teacher teach for the internet days. He knew less about computers than most of us 15 year-olds. He'd slowly read directions off a paper - "Type in the U R L bar..." and we'd already be 5 steps ahead of him.
My friend got in trouble for looking at homemade bongs, but the hilarious part is that the teacher was convinced he was actually looking up bomb making instructions and that "bong" was some sort of obfuscation.
[+] [-] bokohut|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] travisgriggs|4 years ago|reply
I wrote such a complicated program that I found out Bill Gates was wrong: 640K was not enough for everyone. But I realized that I could divide my mess of macros into categories, save them in separate files, and then selectively import only those that were being used at the time with a "root" set of macros. I was 18 or 19 at the time. It was many moons later when I learned about virtual memory and swap space, I realized I'd implement my own version of virtual memory/swap. In a very caveman like fashion. All without messing with someone else.
[+] [-] derevaunseraun|4 years ago|reply
https://searchids.com/user/described/1
[+] [-] 0des|4 years ago|reply