History of AOL Warez

Re:History of AOL Warez by allcentury on Friday November 10, 2017 @08:57PM (#15674573)

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.

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Re:History of AOL Warez by strictnein on Friday November 10, 2017 @09:27PM (#15674668)

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

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Re:History of AOL Warez by jlgaddis on Saturday November 11, 2017 @12:26AM (#15675125)

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

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Re:History of AOL Warez by jaequery on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:44AM (#15675277)

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

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Re:History of AOL Warez by allcentury on Friday November 10, 2017 @10:07PM (#15674784)

Oh my - of course, how could I forget...

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Re:History of AOL Warez by krisives on Saturday November 11, 2017 @06:09AM (#15675862)

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

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Re:History of AOL Warez by alsetmusic on Friday November 10, 2017 @09:31PM (#15674684)

> … 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.

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Re:History of AOL Warez by bearbearbear on Friday November 10, 2017 @10:19PM (#15674826)

We used to trade overhead accounts.

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.

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Re:History of AOL Warez by ryanmerket on Saturday November 11, 2017 @12:27AM (#15675128)

Same. But I got my parents account banned for phishing OH accounts on sub-account. Those were the days.

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Re:History of AOL Warez by strictnein on Friday November 10, 2017 @10:21PM (#15674830)

Really interesting. What's a "catcwatch" account?

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Re:History of AOL Warez by distantsounds on Friday November 10, 2017 @11:40PM (#15675019)

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.

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Re:History of AOL Warez by gre on Friday November 10, 2017 @09:49PM (#15674728)

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.

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Re:History of AOL Warez by todd3834 on Friday November 10, 2017 @11:33PM (#15675005)

I think I remember that bug if you send an image with too large of a resolution it would crash the AOL app and therefore kick people off line.

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Re:History of AOL Warez by bearbearbear on Friday November 10, 2017 @10:11PM (#15674794)

You could call up AOL's customer service line and tell them you were a teacher and they'd mail you a box of 100 CD-ROMs.

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Re:History of AOL Warez by toast0 on Friday November 10, 2017 @10:46PM (#15674887)

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.

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