A follow up - Hacker, programmer and former victim of lawsuits..

I posted to this thread in January:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Ironically an alert I set up years ago and is / was running on my old company's server .. it basically checked ownership each day for icqbot.net and for years it was silent.. the other day it went off.. I was almost thinking it was junk mail because I didn't remember about my setting up that alert, and surely that server wasn't still in commission... but! it was ...

Suffice to say .. I now re-own www.icqbot.net .. read the previous link for details, as well as the last link ON the site to see what it used to contain ( thanks to archive.org )

icqbot.net was essentially my adventure into programming AI to interact with an IM protocol. ... ICQ was the first I reverse engineered.

reply to post by miniatus


Man that takes me back. ICQ was one of the programs that was always open on my machine - along with mIRC and Netscape.

I never got into the code for ICQ but I did have all of the obligatory ( and illegal ) "add ons" that one could round up if one knew the right people. Time is mixing things together in my mind - but I am pretty sure that my ICQ was also tweaked to work as either YIM Or AIM as well... though I do remember, very clearly, having my AIM account yanked for shenanigans.

My thing was innocent enough, though today it would get a person thrown in prison for about 25 years... IRC war scripts. Writing Nuke and flood scripts. Nothing fancy... but man was it fun. And all in the name of "keeping" an IRC channel - which was infinitely easier to discuss doing than to actually do.

On the one hand I really miss those more wild-west and innocent times. On the other hand? It is rather nice to be able to surf the web for hours on end without ever once getting browser jacked by BabylonX.