Well it’s been awhile

Wow, it’s been awhile since my last rant, 6 years to be exact.  The amount of feedback and submissions I receive from everyone is amazing.  Honestly though I’ve never thought I’d be writing or having a site dedicated to the old scene I thought it would go on forever. 

But yeah 6 years since my last rant god damn.  I remember when you were lucky enough to keep your site up for a few months with constantly changing hosting providers (because you were on a carded server, your friend just got you unlimited ftp space that would probably be active for a few months).  Or you just registered a new free shorter redirect and needed to update everyone with the new URL so you busted out HyperLinker.

HyperLinker or whatever chat spammer you used back then would ‘spam’ your website in whatever chatrooms you wanted so you could drive traffic to your site.  Then sitting there for hours updating the URL of your new site to all of the topsites your website was registered on. (I’ve talked about topsites before).  Yeah it was a pain in the ass and would be considered annoying today but it got the job done. 

AOLForever/JustinAkaPaste was started in 2014 so it’s 10 years old as of writing this post in 2024.  I remember being home and sick in 2014.  My first daughter was just about to be born and I was just looking up some old AOL sites and thought man it’d be cool just to be able to view everything easier without loading up a virtual Windows 98 client and getting everything to run correctly.  I also had a huge archive of stuff saved because I was just a file hoarder and hated losing files (before the cloud). I even to this day still have floppy disks that still operate from 1998.  Kevin/Pad also hooked me up with a TON of content. 

I’m always actively looking for more content so if you would like to save me some time you can submit anything to my e-mail.  Justinakapaste@gmail.com

Alots changed the last 6 years from my last post, 10 years from this blog being online,  9,372 days or 26 years since being a kid and cracking lobby chatroom users with common passwords like red123, password, abc123, flowers, 12346 (yes they actually let you use this).  So you could have a ton of <>< (Phish). 

Phish or other people’s accounts were used in a variety of reasons.  Free AOL for your friends or yourself and you could make sub screen names as long as you cracked the (Master) account basically the parent or owner of the account.  You had these because if you did anything wrong you didn’t care because it wasn’t your account.  A lot of the ao warez scene needed crackers and Phish so they could run their mmers.  So you could illegally download files through AOLs file sharing library.  You can read more about Warez on here.

It’s crazy how fast time goes and the tech scene is just constantly evolving.  I find myself constantly going back in time now and cherishing all of the past and all of my childhood even if it wasmostly  malicious.  

My father passed away last December in  2023 and he’s the main reason why I was always in the tech scene.  He owned and operated a TV repair shop which also sold new Televisions (Sylvania, Magnavox, RCA).  He also installed those huge satellite dishes before the Direct TV/Dish Network.  He never told me until I got older but he would hack or clone the chips and resolder them to the board.  You’d have free everything.  Just like the burning the old DirectTV cards and getting every channel for free then they’d get zapped because they were connected over a phone line and you’d have to reburn the card. 

I just sit and think how we all had it made.  Signing online when you got home from school and wreaking so much havoc on AOL, the endless amounts of shit talking, no bills to be paid taking everything for granted, not even caring how much a 2nd phone line was so you didn’t get disconnected when someone picked up the line.  My parents always made sure I had everything as a kid growing and now raising 2 daughters of my own 8 & 10 now it makes you appreciate everything a lot more.

I laugh now thinking of my dad and how many times he would be like Justin what the fuck did you do now on the internet?  Asking them constantly to call AOL to get my accounts reactivated because on my “permie” account as we called it basically means the account that you actually paid for.  So someone could get on an internal and pull your info “doxing” you.  Sucked because I had accounts like h4k,r0b,b0x,t0y all on my permanent account.  Those were made one day when AOL did a screen name dump.  They would rerelease screen names back to the public for registration. 

How about the time my neighbor got busted for credit card theft and I was in question.  I remember my old man calling me up in the summer of 9th grade saying Justin whatever the fuck is on that computer better be gone I’m on the way to the house with the cops and told me he managed to get a few cars behind them. 

Or when I was 13 years old and managed to make thousands of dollar spamming a sex dialer site they made me give it back.  Or running my own dialer exe and getting charged hundreds of dollars while the phone line dialed another country for adult entertainment. 

I miss my dad like hell and he admired how advanced I’ve became in the tech scene, he always took interest to everything I was creating or wiring up; he would always say “chip off the old block”. 

I think he knew as you get older you start getting a little less passionate about everything.  I remember him waking up in the mornings when I was a kid and he’s like damn were you on that thing all night ?  He saw how much time and research I’ve spent.  When I got older we would sit and I would tell him stories of the old hacking days.  Crazy though a guy that spent 40 years with old tube TVs trying to learn a Smart TV.  He was amazed by the new technology.

Miss ya like hell.  Thanks everyone for listening to the rant I just wanted to give a little update and I was feeling very nostalgic tonight.  ✌️