History
This is for those who want to know what exactly happened and why did it happen. The dates are taken from Kaitnieks' very inaccurate and partially destroyed mIRC logs.
The idea was born a year before the first AutoRune version came out. Kaitnieks had 2 computers in his room but only one was directly connected to the internet, so he found a tool that redirected all outgoing connections to socks. kaitnieks then connected the computer and accessed internet from the other computer through it.
Then Kaitnieks made RS connect to modified socks and it saved all outgoing and incoming data to files. He figured he could send his own data to make it walk and do other actions but then other things came and it was forgotten about until a year later.
Aivars Kaitnieks
There is no exact data for when the first version was created, but according kaitnieks mIRC logs - September 22, 2002 Kaitnieks and cow were talking about advertising AutoRune on his site.
The sample script included with AR 1.0 mined iron at Varrock southeast mines, smelted it at Lumbridge, smithed at Varrock and banked in Varrock east bank. Meaning that even the first version was very powerful already.
The famous AutoRune interface was created by Kaitnieks' real life friend Rapids. The first testers were Alex, Vincent and Heppu.
AutoRune was very unique and new back then. It was acting as socket between game server and client, it was analyzing outgoing and incoming data and injecting data if needed. It was the very first scriptable RS cheat and it used authorization server - a mechanism to prevent uncontrolled distribution of the cheat. Later someone got a brilliant idea - it can be sold.
The very first purchaser of AutoRune was Olympus (Olee). He was impatient and offered money if Rapids creates the account for him. Rapids accepted. It was September 20, 2002.
Later Rapids convinced kaitnieks, that AutoRune should be sold. It was priced $10 at first, later the price varied. Kaitnieks didn't earn much because AutoRune was not as well known as it is nowadays after duping and autocatching.
There was a trial version of AutoRune and many people believed that Jagex used it to examine how AutoRune worked and take it down.
Generally these were happy times for all AutoRuners because their number was small and they had some great scripters and for Kaitnieks, because he enjoyed coding and making AutoRune better and better, but he really hated wasting his time making AR authorization accounts for those who purchased them and explaining newcomers how to use AR.
Coran purchased AutoRune authorization at November 01, 2002. In the very first day he had interest in selling AR authorization accounts.
Kaitnieks offered to sell AutoRune source code for $500. First two guys who got interested were rejected because one of them was a well known scammer (James) but the other one was too young (SixPack). Coran decided to purchase it. At December 05, 2002 he was the new owner of AutoRune including source code and copyrights.
December 13, 2002. Friday. We all got banned. Well, almost all of us.
So how did they detect us? It's not easy to explain and understand if you haven't used AutoRune, so don't try to understand it. Basically they made RS client send a useless command to server after 45 clicks on rock, fishing spot, tree or NPC. AutoRune didn't send that command when script was running so server could tell - hmmm, 45 rocks were mined but the secret command was not sent, must be AutoRune. We didn't know what was the cause back then. I was quite shocked, I just left. Before that we did the famous banker killing.
We also must mention that other bots, including some private ones were affected by this and banned along with AutoRuners.
April, 2003 cow returned with Bovine Labs. At April 09, 2003 after almost 4 months AutoRune was fixed. AutoRune 2.3 was modified to send the secret commands like the real RS client did.
This was the time when RS cheating exploded. Suddenly people came from everywhere, all willing to cheat. Not only that, Vee came with a fixed RuneBot version. The forums swarmed of people and it was clear that this can't last. Indeed, RuneBot survived for about a week, AutoRune had a longer life, only because it came before RuneBot.
This time there was no mass ban. They just effectively disabled AutoRune, RuneBot and probably other cheats by changing RS communication protocol. The commands sent to server/received from server were now encrypted.
A new cheat was created by Kaitnieks. The name was SCAR and it means Shit Compared to AutoRune. It's a color clicker and you can read more about it in SCAR section. This was for the community.
Meanwhile AutoRune was fixed but it was nowhere announced. Date - unknown (no data about this in Kaitnieks mIRC logs). Only few people knew about this and only few AutoRune users existed (so called ARC - AutoRune Crew). A private channel was made and a private forum was created. Only intelligent and useful people were invited in, we exchanged ideas and created scripts. This was a good time for those lucky ones who had AutoRune. And we existed for a very long time.
November 06, 2003. After release of AutoRune with autotrading support, SixFeetUnder discovered that it can be used for duping. He was trying to trade one of the holiday items with AutoRune by giving server invalid parameters. Ironically, anything could be duped except holiday items and stackable items (money, certificates etc). And the best thing is - you didn't even need the item you wanted to duplicate, so it was more like item creating.
That was a big fun day. The RS economy had to suffer. Hundreds of hats were created, other items worth billions in GP. Not all accounts were banned, some AutoRuners made quite a fortune. After many hours it took for Jagex to discover and fix the bug, the main dupers got banned. Items were not deleted, the game was not rolled back. That is why majority of ALL party hats in existance even in RS2 came from AutoRune.
Coran sold AutoRune source code and rights to Josh (RaW), who is still today the head of AutoRune, most people experienced AutoRune while under RaW's AutoRune releases, RaW didn't code himself but had people such as evo working for him on AutoRune, during all this time - Kaitnieks also still secretly worked on/off on AutoRune.
When Josh(RaW) purchased source code, his computer got keylogged and AutoRune source(2.80) code stolen. Many people have it now. One of people who got AutoRune source code is Buckna. He decided to fix and sell AutoRune under a different name - AsheyRune. He tried for some time but Jagex killed it and he gave up.
- After RuneScape 2 release
AutoRune continued being a private community for TARC members and where only intelligent and useful people were invited in to join, thousands of Auths were sold, and AR kept being updated by evo under Josh's management.
A crack was released under the name of ARhax by h4x4phun, anyone could now use AutoRune with this crack - a 6 hour window was created that forced re-auth and closed cracked AR users bot so they could not bot for long.
Josh(RaW) released new version after a Jagex udate that contained a ver sophisticated auth system using keys. Which stopped the ARhax from working.
Josh started selling AR2 Auths for RuneScape 2 - but didn't deliver a bot as promised, lots turned away from AutoRune at this point sometime during 2007.
The AutoRune Crew kept being loyal towards AutoRune and are still today active and proud of being TARC members.
Josh comes back to Classic every once in a while(once a year) and pays to have AutoRune fixed, for private use only by Josh himself and Axel.
Currently AutoRune is not working for the 2011 Jagex update where any changes to the mudclient would result in ban. The last time AutoRune was in function was December 2009.
source by Kaitnieks and The AutoRune Crew