The Old-School Illegal Internet
I was recently reminiscing with my friend about how funny some of the things we used to do on the Internet were. If we tried any of that stuff today, people would laugh at us for how simple and ridiculous some of the ‘hacking’ methods were. I decided to list all of the hilarious hacking, phreaking, phishing, and other illegal activities everyone who knew anything about the Internet did back in the day (early to mid ’90s). Take a look at the list and if you have any additions please submit them through comments.
1. Anarchist Cookbook - What could be more old-school than this? This was the original tool people used to learn about how to do everything from making black boxes, to explosives. I could not find the original downloadable document, but the Wikipedia definition is given and i’m sure with a little searching you will be able to find it. This book was especially important to me because it taught me how to get free payphone calls for years (by putting a paper clip in the mouthpiece and touching the metal wire attached to the phone). That worked great until one day I electrocuted myself and never tried it again.
2. Phreaking - Just another phone-hacking method. Basically people would try every possible thing to mess with phones and phone companies. There were so many different ways to get free phone calls it was ridiculous and for years the phone companies sat back and could do nothing. Although the phone calls were free, the amount of time/money one would put in to phreaking would counteract any savings made on phone calls.
3. Phishing - Phishing is definitely still around today, however it is much more advanced. In the old days, when most people did not realize that AOL would not ask for your password, thousands of people would fall for phishing. This was so easy to do it was not even funny anymore. You literally just had to type up a semi-professional looking e-mail or IM and send it to someone and they would send you back their username/password. Today though, phishing is much more sneaky. People have learned not to give their user/pass to anyone. Hackers will setup ‘false’ sites like ebay in the hopes you will type your password in. It is very easy to fall for this so be careful where you submit your password to.
4. AOL Channels - This was the original way to download illegal software. During a time when AOL was still dominating the Internet market, all someone had to do to get their favorite software was go into one of the channels in AOL and type some simple commands and the files would start pouring in. The files didn’t always work, and it was somewhat tedious to put all the files together, but in the end it was the best way to download illegal software.
5. IRC - Yes I know this is still around and very much alive today, and no they don’t actually distribute news (I know some of you think that). The reason I decided to add this to the list is because it was just as good back in the day! It was much more difficult to find IRC channels that worked and did not have a huge line, but it was still very easy to use and very reliable. Today, the site packetnews.com
Twitter Me!
Jared Says:
Like, IRC, there’s Usenet which is still around.
Also one of my favorites was simply the warez website, you used to be able to get game rips simply by going to a webpage and downloading the split up zip files right of the site. Often they were on geocities and tripod for weeks before they got shutdown.
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Posted on October 31st, 2006 at 7:26 pm
cfpresley Says:
I can’t believe you didn’t even mention BBS’s.
Radio Shack red-boxes were easy to use, but it was cheaper just to put a quarter in the pay phone.
There were also radio scanners that picked up the old analog based cell phone and unencrypted cordless phones.
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Posted on November 1st, 2006 at 5:05 am
usucapiao Says:
the old internet is gone…
now all that we see is a insane race for drm, porn, mp3 stores and that kind of crap…
at least theres a few good sites on the 2.0 web…
irc still lives and i guess thats all that remais…
one of the good things today i guess its wikis around the world…
thats pretty cool, voip too…
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Posted on November 1st, 2006 at 5:20 am
Zeth Says:
HAHA I remember multi rar’s, take you like four days to get the whole file over a few nights on your 28.8. I was so happy when I got my unlimited account (Back when you bought internet accounts with limited hours of use, just like cell phone plans)
Internet overcharges hurt bad.
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Posted on November 1st, 2006 at 5:22 am
nebftos Says:
“For all who don’t know, IRC is where bootleg media and software is released first.”
This is incorrect. It is first released by scene groups to topsites (FTPs) where it is then distributed to other FTPs.
Down the chain is BitTorrent, Usenet, IRC, and P2P programs, usually in that order.
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Posted on November 1st, 2006 at 5:40 am
Doug Eubanks Says:
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was an early form of chatrooms, many with illegal downloads. NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol) is more commonly known as newsgroups, and many of them too contain illegal software and downloads. Both of them are still around, both can contain naughty stuff, but IRC is not the same as newgroups.
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Posted on November 1st, 2006 at 5:47 am
Michael Skelton Says:
Back in the day we got an employee number for Telstra’s staff line (1800 050 051 for you Australian people - this still works)… We would do a ringback test and watch the people looking oddly at the ringing payphone
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Posted on November 1st, 2006 at 6:09 am
CS Says:
Win Nuke was always a fun pasttime.
BSOD via your friend. ICQ however never liked it.
Reboot, good as new.
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Posted on November 1st, 2006 at 6:23 am
Null Society Says:
Wardialing! Before there was local internet access me and my boys would wardial 1-800 numbers to find one’s with multiple nodes so we could chat. These numbers would be distributed via Bark BBS (another 1-800 number) to the other 800 kids. It was a scene.
We hacked telnet access from the VA’s 800 BBS and we would get porn and warez. Those were the days. Good old upload/download ratios.
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Posted on November 1st, 2006 at 9:54 pm
Html Says:
IRC was so awsome. Bless the undernet for life.
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Posted on November 1st, 2006 at 9:59 pm
Metnick Sucks Says:
First of Phreaking was around long before the internet.
Black Boxing, PBX, and WATTS lines were the shit.
Metnick wasn’t/isnt a true cracker. (Hacking is the wrong term) He was a wanna be sell out who only reason he became famous is because he ran from the FBI.
Please dont lump the pioneers of phreaking/cracking/hacking into youe 90’s internet generation. It started in the 70’s and had nothing to do with the internet.
Damn 20’s year olds go and think they are the leet when all they are is wanna be’s.
2600 Will always own you.
Phoneman 6.9 forever!
T$i
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Posted on November 2nd, 2006 at 12:37 am
port Says:
Memory lane, man. I remember being involved in or using everything but #2. Well, a friend built me a tone dialer from Rat Shack in 97, but that was it. But yeah… godawful warez sites with 40-50 parts made to fit on floppies, private rooms on AOL, and IRC for everything. I remember getting a 75 gig HD my junior year of college, and filling it up in a month with the most inane crap. Good times.
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Posted on November 2nd, 2006 at 12:40 am
Metnick Sucks Says:
75 gig HD in 1997? Unlikely maybe 5gig.
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Posted on November 2nd, 2006 at 12:46 am
Ryan Says:
AOL PUNTERS/PINTERS!
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Veng - Zelifcam reply on September 29, 2007 1:24 am:
Punters/Pinters! Those were the days. I would stay up all night thinking of new pays to freeze someones computer.
Good times!
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Posted on November 2nd, 2006 at 1:22 am
p01s0ned 1nf0rmat10n Says:
Ahh… BBS’s I’m older school though and can remember back when we had to hand swap warez - when the 300bps modems came out, many of my friends could get ‘em because of the money they saved on software.
Phreaking was fun too… I remember coding $5.00 in qtones and my buddy’s phone # into a song in FastTracker, but only on the left channel. Wrote a techno tune in the right and taped it. Then walked up to a pay phone wearing my walkman, rewound the song, switched the headphones to mono, and played it into the mouthpiece. Good times.
Big shout out to all the underground ‘zines and Mr. John Draper! Blow that whistle @ 2600, man!
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Posted on November 2nd, 2006 at 2:59 am
Internet Business Daily » Blog Archive What The Fark?!? (and other Digg-like sites) » Says:
[...] To give you an idea of what does well on which sites, I will use my articles as example. This article about a simple Windows XP hack that my friend wrote did amazingly well on Digg and Reddit. They happened to both hit the homepage at the same time, which resulted in my site being down for an entire day. Simple cool tricks like this tend to do well on a lot of Digg-like sites. On Fark however, it did not get approved simply because it wasn’t funny in any way. This story was another big hit. It reached the homepage of Digg to later get buried (guess Diggers don’t like stuff like this) but did extremely well on Fark generating upwards of 6000 unique clicks. [...]
Posted on November 7th, 2006 at 8:30 pm
hiutopor Says:
Hi
Very interesting information! Thanks!
Bye
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Posted on September 16th, 2007 at 11:35 pm