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Comment by allcentury | Hacker News Reader

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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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

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

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

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

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

> … 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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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