Just to add two more cents to the abbreviation fun related to HPCAV
Just to add two more cents to the abbreviation fun related to HPCAV https://www.hpcav.com/
I actually had a conversation a few months back with an old friend about what the most common form of this abbreviation is and we settled on
HPCAV.
Alrighty, then! Haha.
I actually had a conversation a few months back with an old friend about what the most common form of this abbreviation is and we settled on
HPCAV.
Really? I remember people abbreviating it further as 'hpa' so I always assumed HPAVC was the way. What do I know, though, I only got as far as making a beige box back in the day.
I'm just teasing :) but I must admit I had to check what A is... I was thinking activism.. while Internet seems to say it's Anarchy.
That mid life crisis and aging... and I lose my wits to punk rock
anymore :) Other way than sarcasm of course.. that's the only thing
that's left.
I actually had a conversation a few months back with an old friend about what the most common form of this abbreviation is and we settled on HPCAV.
Trying to remember when all this was cool some 25+ years ago, I don't remember "C" originally being there. I remember it as "HPAV" and the "C" for cracking was added later. I could be wrong, though.
Either way, you decided on one, and ultimately it doesn't really fucking matter as long as everyone else knows what you're talking about. :)
Eh. The truth is, there doesn't seem like there was ever any *actual* established acronym. I suppose we all knew what each letter stood for,
and since it's not an apronym (I just learned that work 2 seconds ago) then I suppose it doesn't really matter what order its in.
chavp
I'm sticking to chav-p. Rolls off the tongue.
I like v-chap more!
Accession wrote to jack phlash <=-
Looks like HPCAV is some kind of not for profit organization.
Trying to remember when all this was cool some 25+ years ago, I don't remember "C" originally being there. I remember it as "HPAV" and the
"C" for cracking was added later. I could be wrong, though.
jack phlash wrote to Accession <=-
on 10 Jul 2024, Accession said...
Trying to remember when all this was cool some 25+ years ago, I don't remember "C" originally being there. I remember it as "HPAV" and the "C" for cracking was added later. I could be wrong, though.
Yeah. I distinctly remember coming across mostly "H/P" and "H/P/A" originally then seeing the V and/or C tacked on later on. Perhaps hpCav
go more popular later with people who didn't come up on BBSes?
In the same way people were just "gay" in the 90s, we just hacked. It wasn't later until LBGTQA+ and HPACV came about. :)
(aside: living in San Francisco in the '90s, everything was either queer or it wasn't. Times were much simpler...)
Way back when, I could have sworn the C was for "carding". I suppose
we've had abbreviation shift over the centuries.
Yeah. I distinctly remember coming across mostly "H/P" and "H/P/A" originally then seeing the V and/or C tacked on later on. Perhaps hpCav
go more popular later with people who didn't come up on BBSes?
Yep. Now I've officially explained what it stands for (to anyone who hasn't already looked at the infopack and/or read my announcement post) you haters can go fly a kite. :P
...but I will still allow discussion of HVAC as well as decreasing violence in the High Point community. ;)
Who knows. It was probably something specific at one time. Ever since we all became PD (let's face it, as I believe you explained in another
post, there really is no "underground scene" any more, lol), people probably started misspelling it all different ways and none of them
really stuck. :)
I like v-chap more!
In the same way people were just "gay" in the 90s, we just hacked. It wasn't later until LBGTQA+ and HPACV came about. :)I was totally going to make an LBGTQA+ comparison a few posts ago but
just didn't have the energy. I'm glad someone else did it for me. :)
how do you pirate today? Most likely using
radarr and sonarr to download the video content that you don't want to
pay for - there's always a pirate, and always a sea to sail.
You still do it, I still do it and they still do it - I don't think
it'll ever be as fun, cool or important as in 1994... but ahoy, matey!
I consider the "underground scene" of yesteryear a bit different from
the 31337 warez scene of those same times, but whatever, it's not worth arguing about. There were many scenes back then, and most of them were fairly separated from each other. Over time they began to combine and by now most boards have a little bit of everything for nostalgia purposes.
BBSing might not have been a core component of H/P/A/C/V shit, but
outside of the major tech universities, the scene was certainly centered around it - distribution of texts and other files, conversations and private messages, meet-ups, etc.
I don't think any of these scenes are necessarily all in one these days THEMSELVES, but I do agree with what I think your overall premise is though, that, at least as the BBS scene is concerned, there's not much
of an "underground" anymore, period. Everything has been democratized to the point where, apart from comparing the most elite modded, decked out BBS with a stock board run by some boring stereotypical PD SysOp, its
hard to even get a sense of the lines these days.
how do you pirate today? Most likely using
radarr and sonarr to download the video content that you don't want t pay for - there's always a pirate, and always a sea to sail.
I did not know radarr/sonnar/other arrs... thanks for pointing.
- For Books z/lib or anna's archive
- For magazines I use magazinelib
- For movies, yify/yts + vpn, but rarely these days. I have 300+ movies digitalized from BRs I once had access to at no limit, and I haven't watched half of them, they compete with Netflix for my time
By underground, I guess I always considered the hpavc scene to be more "underground" than anything else. I don't remember the hpavc scene ever having much to do with the warez scene. At least not in my area. The
warez scene was it's own beast, whereas the art/lit/hpavc kids tended to mingle quite a bit more together. Most warez guys back then didn't give
a flying fuck about much else. :)
At this point, I think we're just mostly hung up on keeping what's left
of the scene, whether it be any genre, alive.
You still do it, I still do it and they still do it - I don't think it'll ever be as fun, cool or important as in 1994... but ahoy, matey!
I consider the "underground scene" of yesteryear a bit different from
the 31337 warez scene of those same times, but whatever, it's not worth arguing about. There were many scenes back then, and most of them were fairly separated from each other. Over time they began to combine and by now most boards have a little bit of everything for nostalgia purposes.
Either way, I wasn't referring to pirating whatsoever. :)
Yeah this sounds like my area code back in the day, but admittedly I
wasn't super deep into any of those worlds anyway *shrug*
Yeah, more or less. It's funny, this is my hobby with the least amount
of wider participation (other hobbies are vintage computer stuff, gaming stuff, cars, music, more "mainstream" things) but this is the one I
spend the most time on. Even if it all dies I'll probably still be here trying to make some daydream releases :P
By underground, I guess I always considered the hpavc scene to be more "underground" than anything else. I don't remember the hpavc scene ever having much to do with the warez scene. At least not in my area. The
warez scene was it's own beast, whereas the art/lit/hpavc kids tended to mingle quite a bit more together. Most warez guys back then didn't give
a flying fuck about much else. :)
Fair. In my local scene I saw them as fairly co-mingled, but it was less of about elite H/P dudes fucking with warez, and more of a "kids think
ALL this shit is cool and are drawn to it." I couldn't really classify
any of these systems as *real* H/P boards (whatever that means) but were instead more just systems ran by middle school to college student kids that were oriented with the wider computer "underground". To be fair though, to my knowledge, there was no real "hacking" scene in my area,
and if there were it was in and around the local college (and I was in high school) and perhaps ACTUALLY underground. Instead, the H/P "scene" (if you can call it that) was, again, kiddies like me who at best red boxed and read way too many old issues of Phrack. :P
that were oriented with the wider computer "underground". To be fair though, to my knowledge, there was no real "hacking" scene in my area,
and if there were it was in and around the local college (and I was in high school) and perhaps ACTUALLY underground. Instead, the H/P "scene" (if you can call it that) was, again, kiddies like me who at best red boxed and read way too many old issues of Phrack. :P
I did get into some carding, but more on the CC side of things -
phreaking was just too long in the tooth by the time I came around. I
did get into some 'phreaking' hustles; but they involved more social engineering and exploiting ma-bells security holes than buzzing my box @ 2600... I did get DOZENS of refund checks, shhhhhhh. ma-bell bought all the weed in my junior year.
Maybe it was a little more profound in my area. We passed around the latest zines and text files, had some pretty good crackers, passed
around 800 numbers for our BBSs that would last about 6 months at a
time, used those wierd sets of numbers for calling long distance for
free, and some even had lists of credit card numbers to try out, etc.
For a good amount of time, my BBS was getting the latest artpacks, zines and text files. I never really called the bigger warez boards in the
area (there was only a few that I recall) because I never had anything
to upload in order to keep any kind of ratio to be able to download. I'd just ask for games for xmas, and own them legally. :)
For a good amount of time, my BBS was getting the latest artpacks, zines and text files. I never really called the bigger warez boards in the
area (there was only a few that I recall) because I never had anything
to upload in order to keep any kind of ratio to be able to download. I'd just ask for games for xmas, and own them legally. :)
I did a lot of beige boxing back in the day, and we red boxed a lot, but it was always just for the novelty and not for any practical purpose.
Some minor scamming combined with prank calls was more of our thing. PLA were big inspirations. :)
I remember trying to explain to my dad once why the phone bill was so
high was because I was downloading software without paying for it and immediately realizing the flaws in my logic.
I remember trying to explain to my dad once why the phone bill was so
high was because I was downloading software without paying for it and immediately realizing the flaws in my logic.
Beige boxing was fun. I was a little terror with my clamshell phone in my backpack.
Which was the red box, again?
Ha! I'd say those phone bills were less expensive than buying retail software though. We complain about prices now, but some of that stuff
was ridiculous back then too.
It always felt a bit more "espionage" than most other phreaking related activities, which I was into as a kid. I'm surprised I don't have some kind of intense voyeurism fetish as an adult. Ha! Of course, it was typically also waaaay more risky (in terms of getting caught, not necessarily punishment.)
That was the one that simply allowed you to produce the tones made when inserting change into a pay phone on demand, so you could make free pay phone calls. Definitely a useful tool to have in your toolbelt.
There was hell to pay the month I ran up a $300 bill lol
I think in that month I downloaded Doom.
Yeah, real warez boards were *definitely* a different breed than the the kind of "a little bit of everything" underground systems I described.
I did a lot of beige boxing back in the day, and we red boxed a lot, but it was always just for the novelty and not for any practical purpose.
Some minor scamming combined with prank calls was more of our thing. PLA were big inspirations. :)
Beige boxing was fun. I was a little terror with my clamshell phone in my backpack.
Which was the red box, again?
Which was the red box, again?
That was the one that simply allowed you to produce the tones made when inserting change into a pay phone on demand, so you could make free pay phone calls. Definitely a useful tool to have in your toolbelt.
We had a couple here that you needed someone on the system already to vouch for you. These things were basically a BBS version of the Pirate Bay. 2-3 nodes, one or two of them always taken up by couriers that were constantly uploading. Pretty crazy to see back when you're running
486dx2 66mhz's. :)
jack phlash wrote to esc <=-
That was the one that simply allowed you to produce the tones made when inserting change into a pay phone on demand, so you could make free pay phone calls. Definitely a useful tool to have in your toolbelt.
esc wrote to jack phlash <=-
Ha! I'd say those phone bills were less expensive than buying retail software though. We complain about prices now, but some of that stuff
was ridiculous back then too.
There was hell to pay the month I ran up a $300 bill lol
I think in that month I downloaded Doom.
esc wrote to jack phlash <=-
Oh yeah I had a friend who made one of those. Nobody ever did anything useful with it, because from pay phones, we were usually just calling
our parents anyway, so we called collect.
PLA was really cool until they started hurting people. Yes, I still think hurting corporate can equate to hurting people...
2oFB has a huge PLA File Conference - with many of the great recordings that aren't easily found... I don't hold much against them; most were
kids like I was, but looking back I don't know how funny [lots of] their pranks were. :P
Still, I belly laugh when reliving them!
Am I the only one who misses the days of pagers and pay phones? someone paging you meant that they needed to be awake and involved in what they were paging you for, instead of sending a half-baked email at oh-dark hundred and expecting that you were working on it immediately.
Fun pager tip - when you want to meet up, just send your friend the telephone number of the bar you're at. They'll *probably* have an idea who's paging them at 10:45 on a Friday night. They'll call, the
bartender will answer, then hang up and head on over.
I loved when they started with the automated prompts for collect calls.
You have a collect call from
I'mAtTheAirportAtTerminalCCouldYouPickMeUP?"
Will you accept the charges?
"No."
<gets in the car...>
Being in my 20s and never having heard the word COVID made pay phones viable. I couldn't imagine using pay phones regularly now...
$160 for downloading Microsoft C at 1200 baud. I could have bought it
for less!
That was my introduction into local toll calling areas - the BBS was 3 cities north of me!
I loved when they started with the automated prompts for collect calls.
You have a collect call from
I'mAtTheAirportAtTerminalCCouldYouPickMeUP?"
Will you accept the charges?
"No."
I made the same mistake assuming that anyone in my AC was local. oops.
I had that problem too. I lived in an area called the "tri-cities" (I swear, half of the states in the country have a "tri-cities" don't
they?) where I was on the outskirts of the biggest, coolest of the
cities, but the other two? Charges! I also used to call King Jamez's BBS Zyklon B (one of my all time favorite boards) a metric fuckton back
then, and it was in a small city not too far away from the tri-cities. Charges!
Never mind the various times I impulsively YOLO'd all night long
distance BBS calling sprees. My parents almost literally murdered me at least a couple of times due to phone bills. Man, just typing that first part gave me a visceral flashback to staying up until like 4 am on those humid Southern summer nights talking to girls, friends, hanging out on confs talking to... anybody? fucking around on IRC, modding or coding, whatever. Major nostalgia hit.
I'm very curious about how you think they started hurting people. I'm not arguing with you, its just you might just have something specific in
mind that I'm not aware of or simply forgot.
Quite a lot of PLA's shit was fairly exploitive. They did a lot of shady shit like charging calls to random people, stealing random people's
credit cards, and much of that was done via scamming (AKA good ol'
social engineering.) Many old H/P/A text files that came long before PLA touched on this kind of thing with a similar kind nihilistic shoulder shrug regarding how it could impact their targets. Morally, I always had
a hard time with this myself. Even prank calls could be a less harmless than we like to imagine.
jack phlash wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
My boss at that job paged me once just "911". I was confused as hell
and after talking to everyone else, checking emails, etc. eventually
ended up reaching out to him, quickly finding out that he was trying to tell me there was an emergency. Cool. Use your words, dude. :P
esc wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
OT but I was in the UK last week and am always disgusted by the
tourists taking photos in those red phone booths which are not used to make phone calls any more, but instead used as toilets.
esc wrote to jack phlash <=-
Yep same here man. Modding sure was fun back then. Turns out it still
is when I get the chance! But for some reason I can't sit for like 8
hours straight just modding constantly. In my youth I could do it all night.
They showed me one of their pages which had the latitude, longitude and magnitude of earthquakes recorded by their instruments. An incredible
use of technology.
As someone on my Instagram feed commented, "It's the same size on the inside!"
I've always appreciated free time, moreso now. I remember having entire weekends to myself, not hearing from anyone, and spending the weekend walking, hanging out at a local pub, and tweaking the BBS until the
early morning, going to sleep and starting the cycle again.
I'm still a caffeine-head. My morning routine is still downloading QWK packets with a cup of coffee. Work can wait a few minutes...
My first major artscene BBS was called Alderaan and was a slick modded OBV/2 setup. It was in my AC but alas was long distance. It took one
month of me calling and marveling at that board before the phone bill
came and I nearly lost my computer privileges at all.
Yep same here man. Modding sure was fun back then. Turns out it still is when I get the chance! But for some reason I can't sit for like 8 hours straight just modding constantly. In my youth I could do it all night.
Well - convincing a restaurant manager and her husband sexually violate a worker... when they convinced people to do damage to companies -
throwing the television through a window at a hotel; while SOME of that could be trumped up to only hurting the corporation (minus the FEW+
sexual things they were involved in, that I totally disagree with) could be made - but how many people were hurt financially by small corps that didn't just eat the loss? I'd guess many many times.
YES, I LOLed - I spit my milk up and felt like a bad human WHILE LISTENING... but looking back, it got way out of line after the group
got rolling down the hill. It snowballed into something it WASN'T in the early days. YES, I still take a listen every few years and its fun...
but it wasn't all 'good fun'. Some of it was, literally, very criminal
and created real victims.
Imagine if you were the worker who stripped naked in front of a managers husband - was spanked... or, if you were one of the workers who stripped all their clothes off and waited in the parking lot for 30 mins for the police to show up; started cool and funny, ended up really shitty and
not what we were all LOLing to at the beginning.
I was at a pub in 1994 speaking with some seismologists from UC
Berkeley, talking about pagers (since we both had those big alphanumeric pagers and they were a rarity).
They showed me one of their pages which had the latitude, longitude and magnitude of earthquakes recorded by their instruments. An incredible
use of technology.
Mine?
"Got Any Pliers?" (sent from the paging console with no sender info)
I don't remember the sexual/sexual violence shit, but maybe those just weren't stories that suck with me.
esc wrote to jack phlash <=-
I'm still a caffeine-head. My morning routine is still downloading
QWK packets with a cup of coffee. Work can wait a few
minutes...
Dude, I remember Alderaan. Wasn't that Minecrime from Blade's board, or was this a different one?
In all seriousness, yeah, but it's probably better for me that I don't stay up until 4 am every day and then sleep until the goddamn afternoon. Then again, if I didn't have to work, that's probably exactly what I'd
do. I find that I eventually just kind of slip into that kind of rhythm
if I don't have any other obligations.
Damn, I got another weird nostalgia hit just thinking about those nights again while replying to you. Such strong memories.
esc wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
Then I discovered girls and my BBS hobby took a backseat for...a long time.
When I caught COVID a while ago I lost my taste for coffee. I just couldn't stand it. I used to be a total caffeine addict. In fact, in
the military I had to go to survival training and we weren't allowed to have caffeine, so the entire time, I had a headache.
I don't advocate for most people to try this, but it has worked well
for me :)
Tiny wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
This is why I miss this place for 7 months of the year when I can not
get access. (Besides this tin can has no insulation so I'd freeze in
the winter even if I could get here.)
I don't remember the sexual/sexual violence shit, but maybe those pa> jp> jus
weren't stories that suck with me.
That was kinda the pinnacle point of PLA - the Arbys, Wendys and other fast food 'pranks'.
Sounds like you need to login to the bbS and download and listen!!! :P
I think it was! But wasn't it "mindcrime"?
I have obligations and I slip into this anyway. I blame ADHD.
Or is it an acid flashback? hehe
(aside: someone made a COVID tracker that used Amazon reviews for
candles. When people wrote poor reviews of candles claiming they that
they couldn't smell the advertised scent, that was a data point. It was
alarmingly accurate...)
That said, just reading your descriptions makes the spanking one sound jp> fake or at least incredibly embellished. Of course, one of the jp> interesting things about PLA is that they *do* have recordings of most of jp> their shit, even the really early stuff. Receipts!
I got lucky - I discovered girls at our BBS gettogethers. :)
My wife lost the taste for red wine for years after having a baby. It's
weird to see tastes that we think of as ingrained just going away.
Did you lose all taste or just for coffee?
(aside: someone made a COVID tracker that used Amazon reviews for
candles. When people wrote poor reviews of candles claiming they that
they couldn't smell the advertised scent, that was a data point. It was
alarmingly accurate...)
Yes. Goddamn, I was apparently full of typos during that posting session, though the mind reels thinking about what "mine crimes" could be.
dude, I don't really think you have anything resembling a normal sleep schedule, so I'm not sure you're allowed to participate in this conversation anymore. ;)
My first major artscene BBS was called Alderaan and was a slick modded OBV/2 setup. It was in my AC but alas was long distance. It took one
month of me calling and marveling at that board before the phone bill
came and I nearly lost my computer privileges at all.
Come download @ 2oFB - we're infamous for the receipts... but I'm not gonna go find them for you... or maybe I will - it was, literally, disgusting stuff.
That's hilarious. That reminds me of the time of one of the quakes up in NorCal like 10 years or so ago there was data from Apple Watches showing when people briefly woke up in the middle of the night. If you animate
all the people that woke up, it looks like shockwaves spreading outward from the epicenter. Pretty neat.
Eyyyy! That was ran by Mindcrime, and Blade WHQ. Lots of Chromatik art
to gawk over. I called there long distance a lot back then, as I was a member and later senior staff for awhile. Longest run I ever had with an art group. :)
Come download @ 2oFB - we're infamous for the receipts... but I'm not gonna go find them for you... or maybe I will - it was, literally, disgusting stuff.
Sorry! No need to dig anything up. I'm just saying that I literally have all of their file archives locally - I was just wondering if you remembered where or when they were released given the variety of PLA related stuff put out post the original zine years.
I always forget you were a Blade member. This is why you and I are
mortal enemies. So it must be.
CiA for lyfe!!#@$354
So I did start to go down the rabbit hole - and I *didn't* quickly find the calls I was talking about. I think I might be thinking of ANOTHER 1990s group...
That being said, there was one - and all the calls are on 2oFB... and
they were similar to PLA; when I find them I'll make another post - but they did go down a bad road of not-funny, damaging 'pranks'.
I don't remember if I was ever on the Blade vs. CiA shit talking train
or not. At the time I was like 15 years old and was just happy to have been accepted into a notable art group. :)
Imagine if the two had merged at some point. O.O
Agreed! I was never really involved. I had friends in Blade too back then. Rivalries like that could be fun, but when they went beyond fun, they were just stupid.
Imagine if the two had merged at some point. O.O
There *were* rumors at times, though I don't know how serious any of them actually were.
I wonder if that was more of an IRC thing at the time. Granted, I
haven't looked at any old Blade or CiA art in quite some time now, so don't remember if they did a lot of shit talking on the actual ansis themselves.
I wonder if that was more of an IRC thing at the time. Granted, I
haven't looked at any old Blade or CiA art in quite some time now, so don't remember if they did a lot of shit talking on the actual ansis themselves.
General internet do not recognize both these days. What's the story
behind these groups? What CiA stands for in this context?
Both of these were large 90s art scene groups. CiA ("Creators of Intense Art" but let's be honest, acronyms were just excuses to use cool, short words that you could play around with) was often regarded as the #3 big, blended art groups behind ACiD and iCE. Blade ("The Blade Nation"
whatever that means, heh) was another big ass group. Both groups had
some *great* artists over the years. They had something of a friendly
(?) rivalry, which is what we were joking about.
https://16colo.rs/group/cia
https://16colo.rs/group/blade
So I did start to go down the rabbit hole - and I *didn't* quickly fi the calls I was talking about. I think I might be thinking of ANOTHER 1990s group...
Hmmm, well, I have no idea who that could have been. PLA was really the only H/P related group that did a lot of prank calls that I followed closely. Before PLA I never associated prank calls with phreaking, even though social engineering and pranking are kind of different shades of
the same color at the end of the day.
It was PrankNet. Another group of phone hackers - that could have went a different route, but didn't.
Dunno how I got them mixed up for PLA, but I've had crazier things happen... at any rate, its not a group to be lauded - but if you ever
have time to investigate it is a story...
I do host a thousand or more expamples on 2oFB - there are some laughs
in the early days.. but it turned south quicker than it didn't.
Ahhh, okay cool. Yeah, I'm actually entirely unfamiliar with PrankNet. They probably blew up in the time where I decided I was totally over
prank calls (as mentioned.) But you definitely have me curious, so I'll likely do some digging one of these days. I don't think I have any of their shit either, so I'll have to hit up 2oFB.
/shamelesstheir shit either, so I'll have to hit up 2oFB.
With the new 2oFB NAS, I am looking at more current ways of sharing
files - like an opendir setup, or an FTP server...
PLUG<<
their shit either, so I'll have to hit up 2oFB.
With the new 2oFB NAS, I am looking at more current ways of sharing files - like an opendir setup, or an FTP server...
/shamelessPLUG<<
Just added another File Conference compromising of DOOM 1 & 2 WADs,
PK3s, KFs and maps - some 70GB of legacy awesomeness... and LOTS more
File Conferences for the shameless consumption by any users who love
this stupid ish too!
paulie420 wrote to Lux <=-
Just added another File Conference compromising of DOOM 1 & 2 WADs,
PK3s, KFs and maps - some 70GB of legacy awesomeness... and LOTS more
File Conferences for the shameless consumption by any users who love
this stupid ish too!
Woah! That's nuts.
Did you ever play the House.WAD? I didn't, but I watched a video of it being played. I thought it was brilliantly done.
| Sysop: | Kurt Weiske |
|---|---|
| Location: | Aptos, CA |
| Users: | 132 |
| Nodes: | 6 (0 / 6) |
| Uptime: | 124:42:06 |
| Calls: | 9,712 |
| Files: | 12,028 |
| Messages: | 124,052 |