AOTurkey

When I was a youth, I was a bit of a troublemaker. I don't think that's out of the ordinary. My particular flavor of trouble happened online - specifically on AOL. It was the mid-90s, I was a young teenager and, frankly, the stakes were pretty low. I ran around with a group of folks that considered themselves hackers - which is a laughable label in contrast to an actual black hat engineer but, again, it was the mid-90s and I was a young teenager.

In that same era was a piece of software called AOHell - a kind of sidekick tool that assisted in exploiting bugs in the AOL software, harassing chat rooms and phishing other customers for account credentials. Apparently it's also the first recorded use of the word phishing. The creator - another teenager - claims his motivation behind the software was driven by AOL policies that would shutdown warez chat rooms but would not shutdown pedophilia rooms.

Despite that altruistic motivation, it was a tool that enabled a lot of kids to exploit a lot of users news to the AOL version of the Internet. It also made those kids have power trips of their own, bringing plenty of chaos to a service that, by and large, was for chatting with people with similar interests.

Inspired by AOHell and the power trip it brought, myself and two very close friends - TheMeth and SAiNT - set forth on our own piece of software called AOTurkey. To be released on Thanksgiving day, it would provide ways to ridiculously troll chat rooms with a giant ASCII turkey drawing and, we claimed, do a lot of incredibly powerful exploits to the AOL software. If the name "AOTurkey" didn't give it away, it was really just a big joke. It could do very little. But it could scroll a giant ASCII turkey whenever you wanted. Still an entertaining visual to me, to this day.

There was a second version of the software that had even more jokes but, over time, the project got away from us, we moved on, we got offline, etc. AOTurkey 3.0 was made by other people and it was legitimate malware - a true exploitative virus. Unfortunately, that's all the Internet seems to remember about it. If you search for AOTurkey the only thing that comes back is that it's a virus.. that's a shame.

Added to that, TheMeth, one of the founders of the program recently passed away. I haven't talked to Vic in decades but our time as teens making such a silly joke was unforgettable. He was my same age and, clearly, a similar person in many regards. It's tragic he is gone.

So, in tribute to Vic and in an attempt to unsully the good name of AOTurkey, I've registered the AOTurkey.com domain and provided the history of the software - courtesy of The Full Wiki (another resource lost to Internet Time). There's a button to copy a giant ASCII turkey to your clipboard there too. I don't know when you'd need it but you never know when it might come in handy.