The final draft of this article is now published here.
Retro Hacking Apps
Sifting through an box of old software this past weekend (wherein I found the Schwa Screen Cleanser), I discovered a few 3.5″ disks of hacker utilities I got from the SotMESC (Spur of the Moment Elite Social Club) c. 1998 (I cannot believe the mid-90s were long ago enough to be “retro” now). I am making the disk images (imz) available here along with descriptions of the files, for historical purposes. Most of these are shareware of freeware, I think. Many are MS-DOS programs written in C or C++; a few are Visual Basic. I do not expect any of them to work properly on modern computers. Caveat hacker. (You can find most or all of these and much more in the Hacker’s Encyclopedia ’98 @ textfiles.com.)
Disk 1
download disk 1 compressed image file
| File Name | Contents | Version | Author | Date | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| analyzer.zip | A Trivial Ethernet Analyzer | ? | Vance Morrison | 6/5/90 | includes C source code |
| fh20.zip | Fuckin' Hacker | 2.0 | Hypnocosm | 6/10/87 | dial-up hacker |
| internet.hak | A Hacker's Guide to the Internet | 2.00 | The Gatsby | 7/7/91 | text file |
| jack.zip | Cracker Jack | 1.3 | Jackal | 2/5/93 | UNIX password cracker for PC |
| kc.exe | Killer Cracker | 9.11 | Doctor Dissector | 10/7/91 | UNIX /etc/passwd cracker |
| master.zip | Master Hack | 1.0 | Master Frodo | 1/1/91 | dial-up hacker |
| pkzip.exe | PKZIP file compression utility | 1.01 | Phil Katz | 7/21/89 | |
| pkunzip.exe | PKUNZIP file decompression utility | 1.01 | Phil Katz | 7/21/89 | |
| pwc.dox | Password Cracker | ? | Paul Pomes | 1986 | C source code |
| pwp.exe | Password Preprocessor | 2.00 | Doctor Dissector | 9/20/91 | mutates passwords for cracking |
| teled212.zip | TeleDisk – The Diskette Fax Machine | 2.1 | Sydex | July 1990 | converts disk contents to file |
| teledisk.doc | Docu for TeleDisk | – | – | – | text file |
| thief40.zip | Code Thief Deluxe | 4.0 | Brew Associates | ???? |
Disk 2
download disk 2 compressed image file
| File Name | Contents | Version | Author | Date | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| brute.zip | Brute force password cracker | 1.1 | Prometheus | ? | |
| fastzip.zip | Fast ZIP Cracker | 1.04 | Fernando Papa Budzyn | 1995 | |
| hackbeg.zip | – | – | – | – | |
| hades.zip | HADES Passwd Cracking Engine | 1.00 alpha | ? | 1991 | |
| hckbbs02.zip | HackBBS COM Only Version | 0.2 | Virogen | 6/29/93 | |
| hedit.zip | HEdit32 | 1.2 | Yuri Software | 1992 | hexadecimal editor |
| hex51.zip | HEX | 5.1 | Jonathan Durward | 4/12/95 | hexadecimal editor |
| ipspoof.zip | EyeDent Spoofer | ? | Royce | ? | fake user name on ident requests |
| keylog95.zip | this is actually a corrputed archive of EyeDent Spoofer (q.v.) | – | – | – | can partially fix with pkzipfix |
| keylogwn.zip | keystroke logger | ? | Mike Ellis | ? | |
| leech.zip | DELP: Delam's Elite Password Leecher | 1.00 | Dr. Delam | 5/18/91 | records keystrokes for a given program |
| newbie.zip | Newbies Handbook | N/A | Plowsk¥ Phreak | ? | text file |
| starthak.zip | The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Hacking and Phreaking | N/A | Revelation | 8/4/96 | text file |
| thc-lh10.zip | The Login Hacker | 1.0 | van Hauser/TCH (The Hacker's Choice) | 4/15/96 | |
| war2kali.zip | Warcraft 2 Over Kali Patch | ? | ? | ? | |
| winnuke_.c | Winnuke | N/A | _eci and _wfx | 5/13/97 | port attacker |
Disk 3
download disk 3 compressed image file
| File Name | Contents | Version | Author | Date | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| amex.zip | American Express Card Generator | 1 beta | WaReZ | ? | |
| apex10.zip | Apex | 1.00 | Ed T. Toton III | 10/8/91 | hoax; simulates hacking NORAD |
| attccgen.zip | AT&T Calling Card Number Generator | 0.1 beta | Agon | 1994 | |
| ccmaker.zip | ChaSeR's Credit Card Generator | 1 beta | ChaSeR | ? | |
| claym.zip | Claymore brute force cracker | ? | The Grenadier | ? | |
| cmaster4.zip | CreditMaster | 4.0 | MPI [Micropirates Inc.] Development Labs | 10/31/95 | |
| cprobe.zip | Credit Probe | 1.0 | BlooDLuST | credit card number generator | |
| glide.zip | Glide file cracker | ? | ? | ? | includes C++ source code |
| ipspoof.zip | ipspoof C code | ? | ? | ? | not same as "ipspoof" on disk 2 |
| ircbnc.zip | IRC bouncer C code | ? | Mark | 8/31/93 | |
| ircwar.zip | five IRC utilities: FLASH, FLOODBOT, LL, MCB, and SUMO | ? | ? | ? | |
| jill20.zip | utility for DOS version of CrackerJack (q.v.) | ? | The Scorpion | 11/25/95 | |
| linklook.zip | link looker for IRC | ? | ? | ? | cf., ll++ for Linux |
| omnibox.zip | OmniBox telephone tone generator | 1.1 | The Phantom | ? | |
| phmas.zip | PhreakMaster Lite | 1.0 | Elroy of ECR | 1992 | tone generator and phonebook |
| rahk-bbs.zip | Remote Access BBS Hacking Tools | ? | Skywalker | ? | |
| thugsvip.zip | THUGS IRC utilities, VIP ed. | 2 | B|zZyBoNe | 11/10/96 | |
| wardial.zip | Scavenger-Dialer | 0.61 | The Scavenger | 1995 |
who programs you
who programs you
who decides what tapes play back in present time
who plays back your old humiliations and defeats holding you in prerecorded preset time
you don’t have to listen to that sound
you can program your own playback
you can decide what tapes you want played back in present time
—William S. Burroughs, “The Invisible Generation”
Electronic Revolution
The more disempowered people are, the more they long for magic, which explains why magic becomes the province of women in a sexist society. And what are most spells about? Usually procuring love, with the hexing of enemies running a close second.
// Erica Jong, Witches
One of the first books to turn me on to technomancy was William S. Burroughs’s The Electronic Revolution, wherein the author explains his ideas about the word virus and how to exploit it via manipulating and playing back media including photographs and audio tape recordings. Below is an excerpt from the text, which describes an essentially sorcerous operation against a small business that had offended Burroughs; seems petty, but the final paragraph maps the technique onto ‘the arena of politics’. As you read the excerpt, compare ‘tape recorder 2’ to a magical link.
Hungry for more? Here is the complete text (pdf).
See also: Cursing (and Hacking) Up
SCHWA Screen Cleanser
I discovered the Schwa Corporation in 1994 at a Tower Records on Beach Boulevard. Over the next couple of years I collected as much of Bill’s books, stickers, keychains, and other merchandise as I could find, including a Windows screensaver program called the Schwa Corporation Screen Cleanser. I recently came across the 3.5″ disk containing the installation files, and installed the Cleanser on a Windows 98 virtual machine I keep for, er, nostalgic reasons.
Here are the installation files, to which I make no claim whatsoever.
DO WHAT THEY WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE SCHWA