Some obscure stuff from the web (1994?):
And then there was Nick.
Nick Sitko, often "mispronounced" as "Shitko" to those who know him, was quite the con artist. Under a blanket of lies and false promises, The Grim Phreaker had managed to put together a legendary board, Social Distortion. Although I first called SD looking for warez, and later became Remote Sysop in charge of the message boards, I discovered more than I probably wanted to. Rather than specializing in games and applications, his files were of two types: art packs and H/P/C/A/V. This stood for: hacking (illegally breaking into systems to obtain information, or just plain crashing systems), phreaking (illegally making free long distance phone calls, usually through hand-crafted devices), carding (using stolen or fake credit cards), anarchy (general adolescent "fuck da law" attitude), and virii (the generation and use of the computer virus). I had been exposed to some H/P when VAS (Vaginal and Anal Secretions Newsletter) was heavily circulated in my early days, but all 80+ issues of VAS was just the tip of TGP's illegal activity iceberg. This was beyond harmless piracy, it was malicious. On Social Distortion, one could find information on anything from free calls from a payphone to building a bomb. To state it that simply, though, doesn't give it justice. For example, there were hundreds of files on all the various types of bombs you could build, many of which did not need obscure materials like Plutonium and could instead be built with relatively common products. I stayed away from most of this, only getting caught up in hacking for a brief period. The Atomic Brain, who ran a board called No CaRRiER and lived a stone's throw away from me, and I did some virtually harmless hackings, with the most damage done to the Zohrob brothers' board, The Hollow World. The first time, we basically didn't do much other than make it obvious we broke in. Then they publicly taunted their hackers, daring them to try to hack into their "new improved high security" board that they had put up two weeks later. We couldn't resist, so we broke in and wiped them out. We've since apologized to the Zohrobs and left them alone, but unfortunately we had allowed ourselves to be influenced by our environment, Social Distortion and its users. The other side of Social Distortion completely changed me as a BBSer forever.
Art, specifically ANSI art, was a huge part of SD. While Social Distortion was up, the art scene exploded from being just a few groups (ACiD, iCE, CiA, TRiBE, and a few other very small ones) to dozens. People called SD from all over the world, partly because of its extensive art pack collection and variety of users heavily involved in the art scene. Interacting with all these people, I became incredibly interested in being part of the scene. Although I already enjoyed drawing VGA art, it couldn't be displayed on bulletin boards and I had to concentrate on improving my ANSI skills if I wanted to really be known as an artist. At the same time, TGP was putting together an art group of his own called Hyper. I joined in, even though I was pretty bad, and brought it down right before the launch of our first pack. Nick blatantly stole one of my drawings by simply erasing my name and putting his in its spot. Of course I was furious and went on a hunt to see if he had done this to anyone else. This is when I found out what he was really about. I found several ANSI's from well respected artists and compiled a pack myself that included all the original works and TGP's versions. Before going public with this, I discussed it with him on many occasions. He not only admitted to doing it, but encouraged me to as well! I couldn't stand for it, and uploaded the pack I had made to every board I called. This included his own board. Soon after, Nick saw a serious downfall not only in the BBS world, but in real life too. Many months later, when I had my own board and art group, I gave him a chance to make a comeback under a new alias because I felt sorry for him, but he blew that opportunity and disappeared forever.