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Creator of 1995 Phishing Tool 'AOHell' On Piracy, Script Kiddies, and What He Thinks of AI

In 1995's online world, AOL existed mostly beside the internet as a "walled, manicured garden," remembers Fast Company. Then along came AOHell "the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by young hackers to turn the system upside down" — built by a high school dropout cal...

Then along came AOHell "the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by young hackers to turn the system upside down" — built by a high school dropout calling himself "Da Chronic" who says he used "a computer that I couldn't even afford" using "a pirated copy of Microsoft Visual Basic. "[D]istributed throughout the teen chatrooms, the program combined a pile of tricks and pranks into a slick little control panel that sat above AOL's windows and gave even newbies an arsenal of teenage superpowers. By the time he left AOL in late 1995, his program had spawned a whole cottage industry of teenage script kiddies and hackers, and fueled a subculture where legions of young programmers and artists got their start breaking and making things, using pirated software that otherwise would have been out of reach...

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