Live data from Hacker News

History of AOL Warez

peteflow.blogspot.com

21–30 of 142 posts

Re: History of AOL Warez

#22

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.

Used to sign up for AOL using a credit card generator:

Probably one of the ones here: http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PROGRAMS/FILES.HTM

Re: History of AOL Warez

#23

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.

Re: History of AOL Warez

#24
post #19
post #10

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+ ye…

I got my family account banned for chat room ascii scripts

Me too, haha

Re: History of AOL Warez

#26
post #19
post #10

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+ ye…

I got my family account banned for chat room ascii scripts

those were the best!

Re: History of AOL Warez

#27
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.

Re: History of AOL Warez

#28

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.

My friend in high school described how his VB punter worked as “it sends them a picture the size of Rhode Island.”

I never figured out exactly what that means.

Re: History of AOL Warez

#29
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.

Re: History of AOL Warez

#30
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.

Post reply on HN