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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> … 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.
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 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.
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/
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/
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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....
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadhttp://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/
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.
I did help a friend with his AOL app when they added a spce to the title and it broke sendkeys
I am happy I never did anything too stupid but from a CS perspective I learned a lot very quickly.
Probably one of the ones here: http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PROGRAMS/FILES.HTM
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.
I never figured out exactly what that means.
This brings back tons of memories. Including the first time I infected a computer with a virus and lost everything. Lesson learned.
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.
AoHades was the shit: http://justinakapaste.com/aohades/
Ah, good times.
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.
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.
#emacs is usually very helpful and friendly.
Curious how many people still keep up with their old groups? Did any of you become lifelong friends?
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/
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.
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.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/doxed-how-sabu-w...
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.
Ahh, good times...
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...
Of course, I was running Linux on a UMSDOS partition by the time I found out about it. :(
Definitely catalyzed my interest in engineering.