lmfao

This isn't the first joke collection I've put together.  

     Way back in my AOL "hacking" days, like 1993 or so, I was 15 or 16. my friend BJ(who lived four houses down the street) and me would mess around on America Online.  Well, BJ was a programming prodigy and he started learning the Visual Basic programming language.  Do you remember all those punter programs and TOSer programs back in the lame AOL days(like there have been any other)?  Well, BJ learned how to make them.  I glanced over his shoulder sometimes and I got some basics down about VB. 

     One day when I was bored and looking up jokes online I had a great idea.  I thought if I went on a joke collecting spree and pick out only the good ones, because there are so many I think suck balls, that I could write a simple sendtext program that could scroll them in the chatrooms.  Question, five second delay, punchline.  I only had like 200 jokes.  Racist, sexist, dead baby, you name it.  I named it LMFAO by stu and koolaid.  Stu was my AOL leet0 haxor handle, my nickname, my alias.  BJ was koolaid.

     I really went to town with this program.  I think this is where I became a recreational-troll.  I just found it so damn amusing watching people get offended by my jokes.  It was a real hoot just going online to talk shit to random strangers who shouldn't care what I think or say about them, and triggering them.  I really upset a lot of people with my program.  I wish I still had it.

     Let me tell you some more stuff about my AOL days before I keep going.  BJ and I use to wreak havoc on AOL.  Especially me in the San Antonio chatroom.  I'll never forget Boyd(TeslaRawks).  He signed my old guestbook back in  the day, look.  

     AOL is where I was introduced to pirated software.  On AOL anyone could make a private, unlisted chatroom and there were secret ones only a select few knew about.   

     Let me tell you about private room phishy.  Phish was the term used for a compromised AOL account.  Someone had successfully guessed and "cracked" somebody's password.  So a phish was a screen name/password.  There was even a private room PHISHY where all the AOL-hackers would chat and trade phish.  There was a lot of talk about being able to crack AOL-employee accounts, overhead, or OH phish as they called them.  With OHs you could do cool stuff like not get kicked off for scrolling, so all the elite vbers made progs that would flood chatrooms by quickly scrolling pretty designs and words and stuff.  I even remember all the vbers making programs that made fun of STEVE CASE., who was like the Bill Gates of AOL.  

      There was also the private room called WAREZ.  Warez is the term used for pirated software.  They had mail servers.  You would request the server's list and it would be mailed to you, you look through and see if there was anything you wanted, send the request in the chat and before you knew it you would have the emails containing the software, which I would start downloading and go to sleep.  Flash Sessions, I think they were called.  Most files were in Winzip, Winrar file compression formats.  For a complete game or application you would have to download all the files from a group of emails, until you had all for the same program, and then unzip, extract it all together and voila!  You got something for free that most everyone else pays for, and you got away with it.  You get away with it because the companies can't afford to bust everybody, so it became an accepted-underworld.  

     I'll resurrect some of my best AOL hacks later.  I picked up the hobby of making really offensive screen names.  I could put DICK in any screen name by spelling it with a lowercase L instead of the uppercase I.  I even had the sn SUCK A DOGS DlCK, not to mention some shocking religous screen names.  I'll tell you them all eventually.  They would get reported quick and would die all the time, but I didn't care, I had plenty of phish. And it would still work on Instant Messenger.

     AOL warez was my springboard into IRC.  MIRC was the most popular client, M for Microsoft.  IRC, Internet Relay Chat is a free global chat service where you can chat with anyone in the world.  The program was also all about transferring files, so naturally a pirated software scene grew in it.                 When I first played around on IRC and I would just sit there in the server channels beholding all this modern organized crime scrolling by, talking to people who had been doing it since the birth of the internet and had never been caught, I started forming some conclusion, forming hunches.  

     

     Needless to say, I have never given AOL one red cent.  

     I became quite the proficient phisherman.  There were many ways to net phish.  

     My all-time favorite method that I mastered quite well was IM-phishing.  IM(Instant Message).  If you were ever in AOL chatrooms in the nineties you might remember getting random IMs from people claiming to be AOL employees and requesting your password.  That might have been me, hehe.

     I had a whole technique.  I would solicit lesbians.  There were many lesbian chatrooms on AOL.  On the stolen account I was on to begin with I made an AOL-official-looking screen name, like A0L AccRep, or something to that effect.  On the profile of the account I made "her' a lesbian AOL staff worker.  I would send the following text:

 "Hi, my name is Monique and I'm with AOL Security.  There is a reciprocating time-bomb virus(some bs I just made up) in our database that has compromised your account's integrity.  Please respond with your logon password so we can salvage your account.  Thank you for being an AOL member and don't forget to smile!"

     Now, on every single IM you send on AOL it says in big red capital letters: AOL STAFF WILL NEVER ASK YOUR FOR YOUR PASSWORD OR BILLING INFORMATION.

      The idiots would still fall for it, though.  This is how I'd like to think happens.  The lesbian gets the IM, doubts it, checks the profile, sees that I'm a lesbian too, which builds just enough trust and familiarity to fall for it and cough up her info.  

     It's all a number's game and this was one of the earliest lessons I had which prompted me to wonder a lot of things about humanity and it's need to learn way more than it knows.

      I was getting passwords like crazy.  Now, the vbers had figured out how to write a program that would send the IMs for you, but I didn't like them.  They were too easy.  I wanted a challenge.  With my adept proficiency using keyboard shortcuts and with the help of just a simple text file containing the phrase, I was able to pump out IM's automatically without setting a finger on the mouse.  I would often get rate limited, but I had a good feeling what speed to keep it under after a while.  I could go faster than the programs with only my keyboard.  

     They had VB password cracker programs where you load up a list of screen names and a list of random words and the program automatically tries each combination until it gets one right.  I remember always leaving a cracker running before I went to sleep and waking up to a big harvest. 

     With their password one could sign onto their account, read their emails, chat on their screen name,etc.  You could basically assume someone's virtual chatroom identity.  AOL hacking was kind of in the same league as pirated software, ignored because it would cost too much to address it.

The following four paragraphs added 5-16-23

     Hehe, let me tell you what else I was able to do after having a big list of phish at my disposable.  They called it TOSsing.  TOS(terms of service).  This is the main reason I became such a legend in the San Antonio chatroom.  

     Anytime any random punk would dare talk any shit to me I would warn them first.  "If you don't stop with your shit-talking on your own, I will make sure you do," I would say.  Everyone always doubted me and kept right on talking shit.

      What I would do then is copy their screen name, open up a notepad text file, paste it and add a password-solicitation phrase to make it look like he was breaking the AOL Terms of Service.  I would then sign on a phish and report the phrase I created with the punk's email attached to AOL.  I would quickly sign off the phish and jump right on to the next phish in my list, and do the same exact thing.  I would continue this process and make it seem to AOL that all these different people were making the same exact report about a certain screen name.  It usually only took about ten or fifteen reports, and bam, I would try and locate the punk and he'd be offline!  Strike!

    The leet vbers also wrote programs to work the TOSsing process for you, but a lot like IM-Phishing, I was able to do it faster with just my keyboard shortcuts I've mastered.  

     Ahh, memories.

  

     Let me tell you about my best AOL hack.  

     One night, I think I was like 19, at the time and living in an apartment with roommates in Medical Center, not that long after head injury #1.  1997, I wanna say. I was bored that night and reading this lesbian's emails I stumbled onto her phone number.  It was a 1-888 number that's toll free to anyone who calls it, but she had to pay for every call.  Since I was so bored that night I diligently emailed her phone number to hundreds of people on AOL.  In the mail that I sent with the number I said HELP ME I'M GOING TO KILL MYSELF!  I NEED SOMEBODY TO TALK TO!  

     Doing that gave me a good chuckle and I got off the computer.  A couple of hours later I go and try and get on this lesbian's account, but couldn't, she was on it.  A smile came over my face.  I quickly jump on a different stolen account and send her an IM.  In it I said, "Hi, I'm the one who was on your account earlier.  I'm the one who passed out your phone number."  This lesbian started yelling at me and telling me off.  I sat there and told her, "Listen, I'm going to explain to you every single way people get passwords on AOL.  You will not get fucked over this bad by anybody else.  I'll be the only person to ever get your password, from now on."  She totally denied giving up her password, people always did when I came clean, so  I showed her a copy if the IM where she volunteered her password. 

     I used to copy and save all my IMs so I wouldn't have to remember anyone.  I could just re-read the conversations.   I made my computer remember for me so I wouldn't have to.

     After a while she calmed down and started talking to me.  It turns out that the EMS, the police, the fire department, all were dispatched to her office for that "suicide threat." To top it off, people from all over the world called this lady and she had to pay for every single call.  Did I mention it was a company phone number?

     If I would've been busted I'd probably still be in jail, but absolutely nothing happened to me afterwards, which proved to me how the internet did not play by the real world rules.  

     That made me want to find a loophole in the web for disseminating information to an audience who's potential population could be worldwide!  The lessons have been plenty for me.

     That's the closest I've ever gotten to committing a hack.