
History of AOL Warez - nimz
http://peteflow.blogspot.com/2007/04/history-of-aol-warez.html
======
paulie_a
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.

~~~
lowglow
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?

~~~
0898
I logged into a channel on Dalnet I used to frequent when I was 16 in 1998
recently. Some of the SAME people were there. Nearly 20 years later.

~~~
erikbye
Have had the same experience on an EFnet channel, wasn't much talking anymore,
though. I also used to frequent QuakeNet.

------
dplgk
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!

~~~
inuhj
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.

~~~
grkvlt
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...

~~~
inuhj
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.

~~~
grkvlt
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.

------
Eclyps
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.

~~~
platz
I got my family account banned for chat room ascii scripts

~~~
mrpound
Me too, haha

------
Eclyps
From the comments of the post: [http://justinakapaste.com/category/aol-
progs/](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.

~~~
allcentury
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/](http://justinakapaste.com/fate-x-3-0/)

~~~
artificial
An interesting blog post about those graphics and the cipher they used and how
the developer was revealed. [http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/05/03/cracking-
magus-fate-zero-...](http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/05/03/cracking-magus-fate-
zero-encryption/)

~~~
allcentury
Really great find!

------
tbrock
People don’t even know.

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.

~~~
birdmanrad
we most likely know each other.. 2.7 for life.

~~~
sneak
One more from that scene! I still use the same nick. :)

~~~
mirimir
That reminds me. Sabu's long-ago friends on EFnet doxed him. They kept logs.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/doxed-how-
sabu-w...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/doxed-how-sabu-was-
outed-by-former-anons-long-before-his-arrest/)

------
joshstrange
If you find this stuff interesting, as I do, I would check out
[http://www.welcometothescene.com/](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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_\(miniseries\))

~~~
wybiral
Archived episodes:
[https://archive.org/search.php?query=welcome%20to%20the%20sc...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=welcome%20to%20the%20scene)

~~~
jameskegel
Thank you!

------
aolhistorian
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

~~~
nwellinghoff
Haaaa, YES!

------
allcentury
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.

~~~
strictnein
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](http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PROGRAMS/FILES.HTM)

~~~
jlgaddis
Ditto. "CardMaster" (or something like that) allowed me to get online for
quite a while.

~~~
jaequery
ah memories, CCMASTER, had a lot of fun with that one :)

------
amatecha
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...](https://www.macworld.com/article/2031816/hotline-
revisited.html)

~~~
nemo44x
Hotline was pretty good. I ran a banner server there for a bit to make some
cash since I was pretty broke in college at the time.

A better version of Hotline was Carracho in my opinion. More open communities
and a better experience overall. Super nostalgic for those days right now. It
was about a lot more than the files, at least after a new users initial
frenzy. Great discussion groups, etc.

Any Carracho users here from back then?

~~~
amatecha
Carracho was alright, but I found KDX quickly took its place -- still quite a
few servers running too!

~~~
nemo44x
Wasn’t a huge fan of KDX, probably because of the community I was engaged with
on Carracho at the time. But good to hear it is still running. Might download
the client and have a look!

------
exabrial
I tried to punt Steve Case with Firetools once. It ended with our account
suspended and I had to explain to my dad why AOL was calling us.

Ah, good times.

------
matt_wulfeck
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!

~~~
grifter
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.

~~~
el_duderino
The 1IM punt HTML tag that overloaded AOL’s own buffer <font
size="199999999999…"> 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 <font
size="¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿...">.

~~~
gech
That was it? So simple

------
staticautomatic
Related: I have fond memories of middle school me mercilessly booting people
out of AOL chat rooms with SubZero and other "progs."

~~~
rdudek
These “progs” are main reason I learned Visual Basic and then C/C++

------
lloyddobbler
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.

~~~
mynewtb
Jason Scott's BBS documentary has an episode on the artscene.

------
strictnein
I thINk EvERyonE Is foRGEttiNG to wRITe in AOL L33t.

This brings back tons of memories. Including the first time I infected a
computer with a virus and lost everything. Lesson learned.

------
platz
Facebook needs it's AOHell and Da Chronic. Absolutely no subculture

~~~
ianhawes
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.

------
notthegov
Here is a short history on the early hacking groups (#pain)-

[http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-
Side-131812/](http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/)

------
marpstar
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.

~~~
_e
You could add '^' to the modem string to silence the modem sound.

~~~
loopbit
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.

------
oh_sigh
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.

------
noahdesu
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.

~~~
deepakhj
A lot of the scene reports are still archived online.

Here’s an example:
[https://defacto2.net/file/detail/a74c1](https://defacto2.net/file/detail/a74c1)

~~~
noahdesu
Wow. I found myself! It's all there. Thanks so much :)

------
NuSkooler
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.

~~~
inuhj
NetZero.

------
borne0
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....

Ahh, good times...

------
mentos
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.

~~~
allcentury
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

------
linkmotif
I really miss the word “warez” and appreciate all usages and references.

~~~
mpg515
but you gotta say it wrong like "wah-rez"

------
tyoma
Matt Mazur maintains an archive of aol-files.com, which has a lot of old AOL
content: [https://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files-
com/](https://mattmazur.com/projects/aol-files-com/)

------
Overtonwindow
This article is from 2007. Might be good to add that to the title.

------
jonnathanson
My god, this brings back some formative memories. Memories of AOHell. Memories
of HappyHardcore, the self-styled hacker who claimed authorship of it.
Memories of hanging out in Warez chat rooms, where everyone showed up in
phished accounts to trade 'warez' and conspire to troll various AOL
communities. Memories of taking apart System 7 shareware games with ResEdit
and, in so doing, learning how they worked.

Those were the days, man.

------
jlgaddis
Not AOL but

    
    
      /ctcp username ping +++ATH0
    

gave me many hours of enjoyment on IRC.

(Forgive me if I've gotten the syntax wrong, it's been a long time.)

~~~
dustinls
worked in channels too, everyone with a linksys router would get disconnected.
also it was just +ATH0

~~~
jlgaddis
We might be thinking of different things then. This was specifically aimed at
dial-up modems. Cable internet and DSL didnn't really exist. @Home had just
launched their cable service around this time, if memory serves.

------
mpg515
Ancient articles such as this one always bring kiddos out of the woodwork. I'm
happy for that because it totally validates all the time I spent on that
wretched network.

Fun fact: Da Chronic is a cool dude (shout out #pain) and also wrote this fun
thing about phishing:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4692](https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4692)

------
jjordan
There's a Facebook group for you if this triggers the warm fuzzies:
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/297526060414740/)

I also got started in programming during the "AOL Prog" era. Good times.

------
distantsounds
I spent so many hours writing AOL 'progs' as they were, I had a decompiled
Fate X 2.5 thanks to DoDi's decompiler. The server and MM rooms were always
full of pirated stuff, and punting people offline was always a blast. So many
good memories of this growing up.

------
deepakhj
I was in the upper echelon in the scene and the mid 90s-late 90s were the
golden days.

------
berberous
There was one of these AOL progs that, in addition to all the scripts and AOL
tools, had a picture of Jenna Jameson in some menu item. Anyone remember which
one that was? Lol, sort of embarrassing what you remember...

------
lwerdna
It was magic seeing all this on AOL as a kid. Free programs? AOHell, Fate X,
proggies, I had to learn how these "gods" did all this. I warez'd VB and the
rest is history.

Looks like I'm in good company.

~~~
mljoe
All this makes me wonder what will inspire the current school generation to
get into computing.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Games have been the main draw since year dot. In that regard, nothing has
changed.

------
chisleu
YES! AOL, where you could store tons of email and move it around without even
downloading until you wanted it. Glorious days.

Of course, I was running Linux on a UMSDOS partition by the time I found out
about it. :(

------
nirav72
I remember downloading my first version of visual basic and also turbo Pascal
from AOL warez scene. This article brought back a lot of memories.

------
cdubzzz
The only reason I know anything about Adobe Photoshop and am able to use it
professionally today is because of AOL warez. Thanks, zelifcam!

------
mpg515
SuKiYaKi invited me into Allied and I made some of the best friends I ever
made in my life at that time. This was the wild west for me

------
chauzer
Wow, brings back memories. I remember it was cool to have an all lowercase or
3 letter or less screen name on AOL.

------
albeebe1
Back in the day we used to called people lamers. Damn i feel like grandpa
Simpson, and i'm only 35

------
dsnuh
GuideDEW has entered the room.

Anyone have a list of the old q codes?

------
mpg515
DoDi's Visual Basic "Discompiler"

------
krisives
Ah the days of FTP ratios long before BitTorrent

------
zomg
amazing article, wow was that nostalgic.

i was unpuntable on aol (still am!) and will never give away my secret! ;)

------
ProAm
orange-tubber

------
draw_down
I used to mirror warez on an FTP server I ran on my PC on the university
network. There are so many ways that wouldn’t happen today (it was dumb then,
too).

I remember when Napster came around; that was the beginning of the end of
“anything goes” on a university residential network.

------
bearbearbear
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 lister bots that indicated they were about to either dump a list of warez or offer to forward their list. The list parser would either read the list from the chat room and present a list of packages you could request with checkboxes and then automatically request all the necessary parts of the package for you, or it would request an email with the package list, open your inbox, parse the list and then do the same. Later on, list parsers gained the ability to scan your inbox to see if you already had some chunks of a package and only request the missing chunks.

------
rjurney
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.

