What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers

Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by bennyp101 on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @09:03AM (#31002077)

Not really hacking AOL, but I found that you could get the passwords in plain text from the Filesystem, which meant I could get around the parental controls and use it when I wanted!

Submitted it to “happy hacker” and it got in the newsletter, I was super chuffed as a 13? yr old!

Edit: I had a thing called “aol admin tools” which I have no idea if it was legit or not but could see lots more than I could normally lol

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Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by ottoludd on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @10:14AM (#31003013)

The "modal tool" I think they called it. It was accessed from a asterisk-marked drop-down menu.

T4nk by Kai, empee3 player by freeza and A.S.S. (AOL spamming system) by Mikey were my favorite AOL proggies. I remember hanging out in the private room "vb" a lot, with all the crackers and spammers chatsending their rates

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Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by notadev on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @10:55AM (#31003562)

For lame progz, I loved Gothic Nightmares by Masta. Every time it opened it'd play the intro to ICP's Great Milenko and just made you feel like you were some cool hacker dude lol. Mikey's VIP spammer was pretty awesome too, except he inserted his own affiliate links in every n message so he was probably making a lot of money from a lot of unsuspecting IM spammers.

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Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by ottoludd on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @08:48PM (#31009967)

I remember carding hosting, creating a site, calling it dk-online and uploading every spammer and email harvester we had, then posting a bunch of affiliate links. I think I made like $800 in AdultRevenueService webmaster referrals before the site was taken down.. good times..

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Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by mostlysimilar on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @12:28PM (#31004833)

> empee3 player by freeza

Wow, what a blast from the past this is.

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Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by TeKxNiPP on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @07:40PM (#31009563)

* Master Aol

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Re:What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers by kevstev on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @09:48AM (#31002691)

Happy Hacker- that's a blast from the past I had nearly forgotten about. Do you happen to know if any culture like this still exists today? I am sure there is something somewhere, but it was a fairly significant part of the early internet, these days, I am sure it still exists, but it seems to be in far more obscure corners of the internet. I wouldn't even know where to start, but I would suspect discord might be hosting a lot of this type of discussion.

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