http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=121653


in reply to Name Space

DISCLAIMER: I no longer encourage or practice any of the following activities.
I have never related this story to anyone.


For those of you with a positive opinion of me, you may want to skip this entry

Zecho (prop noun):
a derivative of zydeco. and here's how it happened.

When I was first introduced to the new internet it was with America Online. The cost of which was well over $4 US per hour.
When signing up for this new world, I happened to be listening to an early song by Buckwheat Zydeco, and decided to find a new handle (nick) for this new experience. I was somewhat known as 'radical' on a few BBSs back in the days. Zydeco was the first thing that came to my mind, but it had already been taken. So I added the "h" and became Zydecho. This was fine for a while, untill my first telephone bill came in. $700.00 Jeez!. I had already fallen into a crowd known as the "Gods of AOL" and they taught me a way around this phonebill problem (which I will not relate due to self-implication), the problem with this was it was a temporary fix. Any time we did something that stood out, the "Community Action Team" known as "CAT" would spot us, our accounts (which were borrowed) were deleted. So this meant having to change handles frequently. There were a lot of derivatives and morphisms of the original handle Zydecho to follow, and I soon ran out of alternatives. Thus Zecho was born.... and soon deleted. The group I was in had decided to mimick the "CAT" members whose names all ended in Cat ie: 'SpiderCat' so I was now ZechoGod.

ZechoGod's most infamous achievement was to set up an autoresponder for his AOL inbox, and noticing how quickly it would reply to messages he sent to himself, got together with about 20 of the group members and started emailing each other with the autoresponders enabled. Soon, there were thousands and thousands of emails bouncing back and forth at amazing speed on the AOL servers. An infinate loop, and the original documented DOS attack.(AOL was offline for over 24 hours)

Needless to say, the "Gods of AOL" made the front page of AOL news rather frequently. The AOL Offer (aka Aol4free) was another infamous attribution.

The name Zecho is still to this day banned from AOL.

UPDATE: no I have not used aol in years.