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Comment by pcdoodle | Hacker News Reader

Back in the day AOL parsed HTML for it's instant messages, a <font size=9999999999999999999999> would blue screen any client running windows. It was quite easy to empty chat room(s) using this.

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Some AVs would monitor for certain IRC commands and kill the connection because it looked like your computer was talking to a c&c server.

But you could also write the same code into any IRC chat room and anyone running that AV would get booted.

DCC SEND startkeylogger 0 0 0

Hahaha on Yahoo we called it booting.

On AOL we called it "punting", and the apps that facilitated it were the first reason I ever wanted to code.

Strange nostalgic memories of "AOHell" and "LuciferX" come to mind... If I remember, a lot of them were visual basic apps that would use SendKeys() to control AOL via keyboard shortcuts. A little like the wild west back then...

Anyone recall the "SubZer0" proggie? (and who else recalls calling apps "proggies" in our kitchy chat rooms?)

I remember Sub-7 and its modules, including those that forced the user to play (and win) a game of tic-tac-toe, could melt the screen, flip the screen upside down and misc destructive things.

I recall a few, FaTe, AoLazy, and others being shared in island55. Also memories of Master AOL & Internal/Overhead accounts that allowed infinite scrolling in chat.

Man, I wish I knew what I was doing back then. Major service providers allowing unsanitized inputs like that? Sounds like a lot of low hanging fruit! And this was before blogging was popular so communicating advanced techniques wasn't as easy back then either.

Those must've been some scary code bases.

Ditto. I got into VB because of this "exploit," and that kicked off my inadvertent career choice. Punters were all the rage.

By the time AOL 3.0 rolled around, it wasn't bluescreening the machine, rather just ending the AOL process and disconnecting.

I downloaded VB4 from an AOL mail server when I was 11. I made the mistake of forwarding the email, which AOL considered making a pirated copy of the software. Came home from school the next day and our AOL account was terminated.

my little secret to not getting punted on aol was to remove the aolrich.dll which was responsible for parsing all the html the client received. those were great days!

Not to beat my own drum but I did not agree with the ethics of booting, and while I was too lazy to code back then, I rooted for defensive apps that armored you against getting booted :D. Yahelite on Yahoo was the best.

Same, this is how I got started with coding as a teenager.

Easier way to boot a group of people off of Yahoo Games back in the day when you wanted to clear up a room...

Just post in the general chat area.

“Hey, to speed up Yahoo Games, press alt-f4.”

Iirc the social engineering script was to “hold the alt key and repeatedly tap f4”. That has the two keys far enough from each other in prose to trick more people.

I always heard "hold down alt and press each f key one at a time", people forget about alt f4 if you don't specifically say f4

Even today Twitch chat is full of "Hold CTRL and type "WTF" for ℱ𝓪𝓷𝓬𝔂 𝓦𝓣ℱ" and people end up pressing ctrl+w, which closes the tab.

MSN Messenger did a similar thing.

I learned that you could evade their swear word filters in your screen name by using ASCII codes.

So I looked up a table. Beep didn’t work, but NULL would boot everyone on your contact list out.

Doesn't that date back to IRC?

irc has kicking / banning and kickbanning.. not necessarily booting (unless you used it as lingo) and certainly not HTML parsing.

/ping +++ATH0

There's supposed to be a delay in the Hayes protocol to prevent this kind of thing, but many "Hayes compatible" implementations didn't implement that part (through ignorance? working around a patent?), so this trick would work pretty well . . .

Patent issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Independent_Escape_Sequen...

Hayes themselves would even insert the sequence in press releases posted to Usenet. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.dcom.modems/Vr2...

IRC totally did have "booters" back in the old day, that would cause mass disconnects.

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