111–120 of 142 posts
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…
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…
Agh, I wish I could list off all the channels I was in without outing myself lol. Those were sick times. :) Best group of hackers I've ever met. Curious how many people still keep up with their old groups? Did any of you become lifelong friends?
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…
Here’s an example: https://defacto2.net/file/detail/a74c1
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we most likely know each other.. 2.7 for life.
One more from that scene! I still use the same nick. :)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/doxed-how-sabu-w...
From the comments of the post: http://justinakapaste.com/category/aol-progs/ 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.
Holy hell this is awesome. AoHades was the shit: http://justinakapaste.com/aohades/
Mac users had the privilege of a less-popular platform, Hotline -- see an article on it here https://www.macworld.com/article/2031816/hotline-revisited.h...
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 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
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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.
The 1IM punt HTML tag that overloaded AOL’s own buffer and fill the 9's to the end of the IM window. I believe there was even a more effective one that was something like .