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Comment by maxfromua | Hacker News Reader

I recall those lessons for script-kiddies “Crack [software name here] with SoftICE” in early 2000s.

Ha! I used to be one of those 90's skiddies. Nights of struggle with SoftICE eventually allowed me to crack some stuff "real time", although i failed to write functioning cracks using it. It was along this journey however that i arrived at the point where I started to understand how a PC & OS really functions. Unknowingly, SoftICE came to co-direct my life for the better.

I remember hanging out in #cracking4newbies on EFnet a lot. It was pretty toxic if you weren't part of the in-group, but I learnt a lot.

Ah efnet. That place was the wild west since they never adopted services. I remember channel takeovers and recoveries with extreme tactics like forcing netsplits with DOS attacks on the servers. Having to run an eggdrop bot to re-op people when they join a channel. Running your own bot to keep your nick from being stolen. Good times.

Your argument is invalid. Not the absence of services but rather the fact that back then you could crash a box by means of simply sending a single well crafted TCP packet to your adversary. It was adventure among the kids, and the "elders" did not really care plus no one in their right mind dared assaulting their source of knowledge. ( And shell accounts :P )

Wow more memories. Yes it was too easy to exploit the system for personal gain which was exactly the point of services. If someone managed to take over a channel, chanserv would immediately and automatically restore ownership. It's impossible to use someone else's handle when nickserv requires auth.

My favourite was using SoftICE to crack itself, but I learned a lot about debugging and low-level coding via +fravia's writeups, amongst others.

It helped that when I was a teen one of the reasons I got interested in programming, and assembly language, wasn't so much to create new "things", as it was to cheat at games.

The first step was always removing the copy-protection stuff, so you could access the game code. Then you could explore and patch the binaries for infinite lives, health, & etc.

I've still got some printed magazines from the 90s where my POKEs were printed for ZX Spectrum games.

I don’t remember any scripting or even great tutorials or anything in the softice days. If you were using softice, you were definitely a step above a script kiddie.

I tried and failed to fully follow those, but it set me on a path to where I am today. Thank you, late 90's crack tutorial authors!

Orc+, I still have a copy of those tutorials somewhere

He passed away in Egypt on one of his travels suddenly, apparently: https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/a/2430/30837

When I first read +fravia I took it literally; these days I'm firmly of the opinion that +fravia == +orc.

Either way RIP to both of them, I was genuinely shocked when I learned of Fravia's death:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia

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