First some background. Most of you won't remember me, but I once ran a fairly large worms website called "Joe's Worms Page for Dummies". This was a pretty big deal to me in my pre-adolescent non-existent life. I looked at the site's stats compulsively every day, and almost considered myself some kind of worms celebrity. I specialized in providing worms programs - everything you could think of - grave changers, a HL2 mod, up to and including full versions of Worms 2, WWP, and the Korean/Chinese/Japanese Worms games. I was on an obsessive all-consuming mission to collect everything, public and private.
Over the years I've done a lot of things in service of that mission which I am not proud of. Basically everyone who was my friend I betrayed in some way. To everyone I was an asshole to, I am very sorry. This was all at least 10-15 years ago, but I have never forgotten. I feel that these things should be added to the history books.
In no particular order:
-I sent Deadcode a program I 'wrote' in visual basic which had a hidden freeware component that i downloaded from a website for 'script kiddies'. That free script let you browse a target's hard drive and download things. The visible part that I wrote was a simple form where you click on a gif of a fat kid repeatedly to make him dance. My goal was to steal WA's source code. This was when I had access to various beta builds via the alpha testing group and spoke with DC regularly. DC was too smart to heed my repeated advice to leave the program open (and download winsock dll's), but I am certain he knew (or later discovered) what was up. Good thing I was unsuccessful - probably would have released it and destroyed WA. I never really spoke to DC again after that.
-I sent the above program to TonY (author of RRkit) and stole his private build of 'batty ropes' back when it was still exclusive. I shared his copy with a friend and that friend distributed it widely. TonY got blamed and basically disappeared from WN after that.
-Using above program also stole good buddy (S.K.)'s private copy of Silkworm 4.13f (very powerful cheating abilities) which had "For XXXX" (buddy's name) plastered in the popup. I shared his copy with one or two people. Somehow fortunately it didn't get spread much beyond that. Shortly after this guy disappeared from WN forever. The real shitty thing is I had my own private watermarked versions of both batty ropes and silkworm, but I didn't want to risk sharing my copies.
-Me and above friend tried to trick totomds into sending us his private build which enabled global SDET mode and some other goodies. We posed as a fake webhosting company selling dedicated servers, offering one to totomds in exchange for the build. I pressured this friend to give toto his phone number (mother's house phone #) as the 'sales rep' because i had a squeaky child voice still at that point - lol. Toto played along for a while and then called us out on it - i guess it was too obvious!
-I extracted the database from my former worms site to get all the hashed passwords. I recovered some of those passwords, using them to gain access to admin accounts on other worms sites, from which i downloaded the databases/hashed passwords. I also stole the databases from a few sites which I hosted on my web server. RRkit, and Syc0's Anubis/Deano/Mini/Chicken23's short-lived league called AL, and maybe a small forum or two. Had a list of over 2000 people's decoded passwords at one point. Ultimately gained admin access to cl2k with a friend's help, got the database, and friend deleted the whole site. Cl2k never really came back after that. That sucks - cl2k was a great site. We very nearly did the same thing to blamethepixel.
-After meeting qp`Pure/Magic IRL decided i was too "cool" for my good online worms buddy Lex (who we had both also met previously), since he had a bunch of programming books and stuff at his house. Badmouthed him to Magic and worse still i told a bunch of people that Lex was weird and uncool (which was completely and objectively not true). Reading the above, was i cool? f@#! no, i was a pale faced geek/nerd/insecure asshole, 100%.
-Long after the above events Lex put his neck on the line to share a very exclusive gamebreakingly-powerful (now defunct) WA mod with me. I broke his trust once again and shared it with someone. Luckily this was a better person than me because afaik he never shared it or even used it.
This was back in a time when I only had a few real life friends. Worms and most of these people were all disproportionately big parts of my life. I have never talked about most of these things or apologized to any of these people. Too late now - just adding it in case people find it interesting.
Forums
