From a former hacker, programmer, and victim of lawsuits ... I present my story

MODS you may move this as you see fit... I figured I'd start here...

I have a long history with computers, I began when I was probably 10 years old .. my first real computer was an Apple IIE that my mom found and my cousin who was an Amiga fanatic, former Apple fanatic.. gave me diskettes for .. but before that my brother had a TRS-80 and I was the one who entered in all the code from the montly magazines he had to program video games and store them on cassette tapes... I'm 35 .. not ancient.. but I was interested as early as I could talk...

Hacking? well I was naive.. I started off learning about bbs's ( I ran one for 10 years ) .. I used those quite a lot on a 300bps modem. but then using an Atari 800xl ... I eventually moved to an Amiga 500 .. my BBS experience expanded and I started a board called the city of angerls .. cnet based ... ( I had several ) but my last was The City of Angels ... no piracy, just discussion areas... I was a good boy so far... CompuServe was becoming big so I signed up for a trial under my mom's name.. saw the web! ... then it expired.. and i found alternate ways to get to the net... BAD IDEAS folks =) don't do it .. much harder now anyway I'm sure.. short of the long... I got out of highschool and by then I was into advanced topics.. namely AI .. and I had already been using ICQ and other chat clients.. so I thought, what about bridging AI with ICQ ... and I eventually did.. I came up with a crude AI engine and chat client ( reverse engineered ICQ's protocol ) and came up with icqbot.net ...

AOL eventually took my site over .. but the remains can be found by going to www.archive.org and looking up www.icqbot.net ... if you skip to August 9 2001 ( corrected ) you can see the full legal back and forth I had with AOL ..

What doesn't show is that they caught my site for using a chat room .. a free piece of software I installed on my site.. which advertised compuserve or something.. and they went full guns on me .. being a poor software developer.. I backed down.. and gave up my domain ... what I was doing was of no harm to anyone... it was entertainment... but now it's discouraged me from proceeding with that sort of work.... was this good for them? or bad for us?

correction .. august 9 .. 2001

Very interesting story.

I guess you stepped on the Illuminati's toes.

Wasn't AOL founded by Rupert Murdoch?

AOL's logo has the evil eye inside a pyramid.

reply to post by miniatus

e
Bout as far as I got into it in the late 90's early 0's was using brute force programs like Ares and Goldeneye to crack passwords to porn sites and post them on a Quake 3 forum for my friends

well youre still with us, what happened to aol?

I'm as old as you OP...

Very similar circumstances, you and I.

I remember phreaking and having free long distance no matter where I was (before cell phones), credit card generation apps, card writers you could order by mail, warez sites that you could download anything you wanted without fear of laws or infections, astalavista.box.sk when it was a search engine for cracks, hacks and warez....

Nostalgic.

Thanks for bringing me back. Kinda reminds me of the USA before it changed into what it is today.

~Namaste

I remember the 80's.

Irish BBS's, home made modems and beige boxes.

Those were the days.

reply to post by SonOfTheLawOfOne

astalavista.box.sk when it was a search engine for cracks, hacks and warez....

Yea, I miss that place the way it was then. Almost every crack site you went to, you could get a legitimate app crack.
Now those places are full of virus, malware and exploits.

Originally posted by miniatus
MODS you may move this as you see fit... I figured I'd start here...

.. so I thought, what about bridging AI with ICQ ... and I eventually did.. I came up with a crude AI engine and chat client ( reverse engineered ICQ's protocol ) and came up with icqbot.net ...

... what I was doing was of no harm to anyone... it was entertainment... but now it's discouraged me from proceeding with that sort of work.... was this good for them? or bad for us?

Just the fact that you were independently able to reverse engineer the ICQ protocol, deserves very high marks.....that is impressive. S + F

was this good for them? or bad for us? The answer is YES to both questions. I'm sure you would agree.

My question is, if you can share without putting yourself in any jeopardy, what are you doing these days? Is there a unique application or source code that interests you more than others?

Peace!! ID

Originally posted by ItDepends

Originally posted by miniatus
MODS you may move this as you see fit... I figured I'd start here...

.. so I thought, what about bridging AI with ICQ ... and I eventually did.. I came up with a crude AI engine and chat client ( reverse engineered ICQ's protocol ) and came up with icqbot.net ...

... what I was doing was of no harm to anyone... it was entertainment... but now it's discouraged me from proceeding with that sort of work.... was this good for them? or bad for us?

Just the fact that you were independently able to reverse engineer the ICQ protocol, deserves very high marks.....that is impressive. S + F

was this good for them? or bad for us? The answer is YES to both questions. I'm sure you would agree.

My question is, if you can share without putting yourself in any jeopardy, what are you doing these days? Is there a unique application or source code that interests you more than others?

Peace!! ID

edit on 17-1-2013 by ItDepends because: sentence structure

edit on 17-1-2013 by ItDepends because: structure

I'm interested now in pretty much what I was interested in then... I have working code to connect with AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, Skype and Google IM ... AOL and ICQ are virtually identical protocols now so that's a snap .. Yahoo hasn't changed much at all in years... Google is pretty much just a modified jabber protocol .. I don't mess with AI much anymore .... the only other thing I'm working on outside of my day job is a desktop instagram client for my personal use.. I just have one more nut to crack and that will be working =)

ultimately I love reverse engineering and understanding how things work...

Originally posted by OccamAssassin
I remember the 80's.

Irish BBS's, home made modems and beige boxes.

Those were the days.

I miss my BBS .. I often think about Resurrection it since I still have it as a WinUAE disk image.. ( Amiga based CNet board ) ... it's fun to fire up the emulator and login every once in while...

Originally posted by SonOfTheLawOfOne
I'm as old as you OP...

Very similar circumstances, you and I.

I remember phreaking and having free long distance no matter where I was (before cell phones), credit card generation apps, card writers you could order by mail, warez sites that you could download anything you wanted without fear of laws or infections, astalavista.box.sk when it was a search engine for cracks, hacks and warez....

Nostalgic.

Thanks for bringing me back. Kinda reminds me of the USA before it changed into what it is today.

~Namaste

No kidding ... times have changed.. if I were the person I was now, that I was then.. I'd probably have had feds busting down my door and be tried as an adult when I was 13 .. Some of what I did wasn't all great but it was extremely educational ... and in my job now, I'm more of a white hat hacker.. I use the skills I learned as a kid to help secure our network and harden our servers... I use my coding skills to develop secure software and mitigate issues before they happen.. so it's all been valuable.

Originally posted by Rikku
well youre still with us, what happened to aol?

AOL became irrelevant =) .. they gobbled up ICQ and it still exists .. but they gobbled it up basically to keep it from overtaking AIM .. and AIM is pretty well irrelevant as well ..

Originally posted by Juggernog
reply to post by miniatus

 

e
Bout as far as I got into it in the late 90's early 0's was using brute force programs like Ares and Goldeneye to crack passwords to porn sites and post them on a Quake 3 forum for my friends

Haha I'm familiar with those tools ...

Interesting followup is here:

www.abovetopsecret.com...