About Lithium Node
It all started back in June of 1996. Some guy in a chat room gave me my first prefix, 4019-1, and I used that to sign on AOL for free. I soon got a list of invokes, which were the “in” thing at the time. One of the invokes at the bottom of the list (40-13 785) led to an area which contained a message board, called Anthony 1, which had been taken over by AOL hackers. The first time I saw this board I must’ve spent 5 hours reading all the stuff inside. I was fascinated by it all. I stayed on this board, occa sionally posting about things I found, but eventually many “lamers” found out about the place and filled up the board with requests for overhead accounts and other nonsense. During the time spent at Anthony 1, I met with 5 people who I could tell were def initely not lame, and who would eventually become part of our group. These people were SkLpZ (still around), Robo (still around), BaK (left AOL), Ramones (long gone), and MiTe (rarely on AOL, but still there).
My greatest invoke find came on July 6th, 1996, when I founded the Karros Kronikles at 40-20213. I stupidly posted at Anthony 1 about this new board, but still for a while things were great at Karros and there were no lamers. Our little group of 5 met up with another guy named MeSSiaH, and we were just having a good time. We traded all sorts of stuff, from invokes to demo accounts, but eventually, the lamers took over that board too. This time around, I found another board (40-21266) but I didn’t tell any one about it except the 5 people I was friendly with. So the 6 of us quietly moved to 40-21266, not saying a word to the people at Karros. Sometime while here, SkLpZ invited SiN to the board, and he in turn invited Bmbr. So it was 8 of us trading our “lee t” info. Mad Misery also stopped by here once to tell us about “tokens”, and how Keyword: JADE, which had disappeared from 32-2326, was now located on some t1 token. One day MiTe happened to be scanning 40-26xxx invokes and came upon a little board made b y Mute. We saw some of Mute’s posts at his board, 40-26032, and we decided to invite him along for the ride too. Eventually some of our posts at 40-21266 were being deleted by AOL, so we decided it was time to move boards. And thus became the routine that we still follow today: move boards when AOL finds us, or when some lamers find the board.
From 40-21266 we moved to 40-1500, which was very short-lived. Then we moved to what would turn out to be the greatest hacker board in the history of AOL: 40-2229. As usual, we traded our invokes and our certs, and on November 12th, 1996, I posted an arti cle called “The Real Motley Fool Staff Area”. It contained a URL I found to, obviously, the MF Staff Area. In there was a file library that contained a program called Visual Publisher. I don’t even remember why, since I’m not one to mess with these things , but me and a few others downloaded and installed this program. The next day came around and Mute posted “Hey, I think I’ve found a way to invoke t1 tokens with this thing”. At the same time, I was looking at how to invoke other kinds of tokens besides t 1’s with it, and the excitement level was building. By the end of the day, we had figured out how to invoke any type of token using the VRMFORMS.INI file that Visual Publisher installed. This discovery would come to be a major turning point in the history of AOL “hack-dom”, and would only rival Mad Misery’s “debut” of Master.AOL as the greatest accomplishment of all time (IMO, of course). No one knew about this board until some Macintosh-lover, Opus, found out about it and dissed us all, saying “Mac peopl e have known about this shit for the past 3 years”. We pointed out that he was right, but that 90% of the world uses PCs, and that the Mac and MAOL were so unsecure it would be easy to find the token exploit. WE were the ones the figured out how to token on the PC, not anyone else. We moved boards again, one invoke away, to 40-2228 (which still exists almost a year after it was started in December 1996). At the 40-2228 board, we picked up a few more members, the most notable being GZ (still around), Capta in Murd0c (sort of around), and Thrash (now gone).
We continued posting and moving to different boards, sharing all the new cool info we found on tokens. None of the boards we moved to were notable really, and I’ve forgotten some, but there were about 10. Then we moved to the board at Keyword: MIXMEX, a n o-access keyword located at 40-11971. This board still exists too, and contains some very cool information. MixMex is “big” because we had it for about 2.5 months, which was a record for us at the time (our record now is 5 months). Then ill, owner of the Inside-AOL site, found that board and started dissing us so we decided to move to token boards from then on (as opposed to invoke boards). We figured no one would find us, because very few people knew how to token, compared to how many knew how to invoke. The plan worked, as the only people to ever find us was AOL itself, who just deleted our messages and made us move. Our first two token boards were XX XXXXX (can’t say because we’re now located there again…hehe) and bE 1980. Sometime around bE 1980 we decided to finally give a name to our group. Someone (BaK?) had the first suggestion with the name “Diverse Monotony”, and he made some art with that name just to see how it looked. Then someone else (Bmbr?) simply suggested “node”, and some of us suggest ed that it was good, but we needed a word in front of it. Then I suggested “Lithium” as that word, seeing how “Silicon Toad” had used the name of a chemical element for his name. That, and “Toad” rhymed with “Node” so it worked out nicely. In a way, Silic on Toad is indirectly responsible for what our group name is, so “thanks” go to him…hehe.
People have come and gone with the boards: Mad Misery, Thrash, CooLzie, Cherie, Grinch (a.k.a. HiLo), Blah-Hipo, Fubar, KroK, and some others I’ve probably forgotten. Some of these people just dropped off AOL, and some were kicked out due to either lamene ss (Fubar, etc.) or divulging group secrets (MeSSiaH).
Currently, Lithium Node consists of: Mute, Bmbr, Benoit, HDs, SkLpZ, Robo, Red Menace, and GZ.
I guess we just did it for the sake of “something to do”, and not for popularity. Just like the other “groups” at the time, we didn’t share information because we didn’t care about the majority of the AOL hacker population, who thinks that re-finding the old Jade invoke is what hacking is all about. We didn’t do it so we could call ourselves “elite” or “old school” or “NAC” for that matter. We’ve been called by many “the real AOL hackers”, ones who go out and find new methods, new concepts, and new “secre t” and staff areas. Then, it came to our attention that people were getting pissed at us, saying we thought we were too good for them and that we should share our info. So we didn’t. Because, frankly, we were better, most of us are older than you (average age 19 I estimate), more mature, and don’t have flaming egos. Why would we want to deal with yours after all this time? But alas, some people who shall remain nameless (you know who you are) were making websites, posting shit people like us have known fo r years and even posting shit we discovered without the proper recognition, so we decided go to public.
Eventually, most of us came to a point where we just felt it wasn’t worth it anymore to continue doing what we were doing, and as a result, the boards stopped being posted on as frequently and things started to die down. Which was another reason to go pub lic about it. You’re all welcome to read what we have to say. In fact, AOL had gotten so “blah” to us, we’re revealing stuff now, pretty much as soon as we find out about it. Case in point, is the FDO text. Go check it out at the AOL Page. Why did we grow sick of AOL? Because, hard as it is to believe, we have lives outside of AOL. All of us either go to highschool, college, or have jobs. AOL was always someplace we could just go to talk to our friends . We were sick of the popularity shit, and dead sick of some people taking it all too seriously. All these people that have since learned how to do tokens that are coming to us and trying to start shit saying how big and bad they are, when everything they are trying to talk to us about old news and a waste of time to us. Like I said, we’re older than most of you and more mature.
In the recent times (I’m writing this on November 16th, 1997), we’ve all “gotten our lives back in order” and we’ve realized that we all miss screwing around on AOL and just talking with each other. Thanks to the help from TACD, we decided to re-start our website once again. Also because of the people asking us where our new website was, and because of all the pups on AOL running around and talking trash, when they don’t have a clue for the most part.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re not saying your all immature lamers, but on AOL, the lame people sure outweigh the truly “elite”.
- Benoit, with help from Mute
