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Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy Culture
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- x______________ 1mo agoGet ready, a 300 page pdf, not just your average run of the mill story. Marked for later...
- milchek 1mo agoThis is dense. I skimmed through hoping to see examples of the “aesthetics” with screenshots of old school installers (like the ones from Razor 1911, Class, Deviance etc) - it looks like these are scattered around the web, though. If anyone wants to relive some of the old chiptunes from these installers there’s https://archive.org/details/codex-installer-music-5-2018-03-192kbit-aac https://archive.org/details/codex-installer-music-5-2018-03-...
- 9dev 1mo agoRazor 1911! Now here’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time, but teenage me was very grateful to. The .nfo files alone, distributed with most releases, carrying the most elaborate of ASCII art. I distinctly remember the aesthetics you mention.
- nikanj 1mo agoRemember realizing it’s 0x777, one better than 666?
- th1234987 1mo ago> The .nfo files alone, distributed with most releases, carrying the most elaborate of ASCII art. I distinctly remember the aesthetics you mention. See their 40 year retrospective demo for a lot more of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dybkLM-1eQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dybkLM-1eQo :)
- bitwize 1mo agoI still refer to 1:37 pm (13:37) as "l33t o'clock" and 7:11 pm (19:11) as "Razor o'clock". They seem to come up remarkably often when I glance at the time, like 11:11 for normies, but I think all of these are some sort of pareidolic/selection-bias effect wherein your brain is just more likely to remember/notice times that it considers significant.
- 5-0 1mo agoIf you ever need to scratch that ASCII art itch: https://asciiarena.se/ https://asciiarena.se/
- suburban_strike 1mo agoSome of the chiptune musicians are still active. Dubmood made it onto the Hotline Miami (2012) soundtrack.
- gravitronic 1mo agoBe sure to check out keygen music, still updated https://keygenmusic.tk/ https://keygenmusic.tk/
- ValdikSS 1mo agoThere used to be a large site called keygenmusic.org, but it's closed now. There's a dump of all of its tracks on web archive: https://archive.org/details/key-gen-music-music-pack-2020-03-full.-7z_202403 https://archive.org/details/key-gen-music-music-pack-2020-03...
- kristofferR 1mo agoCool, will be spending hours today listening to it! Frankly .tk domain is as much of a nostalgia hit as the music, weren't aware it is still around.
- 0123456789ABCDE 1mo ago> I skimmed through hoping to see examples of the “aesthetics” […] aesthetics is an umbrella term for the "[…] norms and rules of participation, […] forms of sociality, and […] artistic outputs." — think: sociology, culture, customs, and less visuals. reading chapter five (aesthetics), perhaps unsurprisingly the chapter where the author dives deeper into the topic, is certainly advised.
- hobofan 1mo agoNFO files (both image and text) for current releases and ones going way back can still be found on xrel.to
- ChrisArchitect 1mo agoBook site with info and other links: https://punctumbooks.com/catalog/10.53288/0339.1.00 https://punctumbooks.com/catalog/10.53288/0339.1.00
- ckozlowski 1mo agoThanks!
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- dang 1mo agoDiscussed a bit at the time: Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29633143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29633143 - Dec 2021 (13 comments)
- thebeardisred 1mo agoI own the physical book. I really wanted to like it but I found the style of prose grating and the overuse of "ibid" in the citations peeving.
- MPSimmons 1mo agoI still remember the day, circa 1997, that I found an anonymous-enabled FTP site on a uunet domain that had been used as a drop site by various couriers, and let me tell you, this high schooler's 540MB hard drive was not large enough.
- nickdothutton 1mo agoftp.uu.net was a bit of a wild west for a while before it was eventually pulled.
- spjt 1mo agoI bought the print edition, which is a bit ironic.
- simmons 1mo agoI'm always a little surprised when I don't see mentions of FSP [1] in works like this. For a short time, it seemed to be the warez transfer means of choice for those looking to fly under the radar and avoid detection. (So I'm told.) But maybe it wasn't much more than a footnote in the grand scheme of things. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Service_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Service_Protocol
- nikanj 1mo agoI always thought FXP was a much more common tool, as you could move releases between beefy servers without having to download them first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol
- lm411 1mo agoI was in a small courier group way back when. FXP was definitely common. We could copy a lot of software in a small amount of time.
- bitwize 1mo agoI'm old enough to remember when IRC DCC fservs were a popular distribution channel.
- ozozozd 1mo agoPhrozen Crew and UCF on Efnet, right?
- slyall 1mo agoMy impression was that FSP was when you had an account on a Unix server at a University and wanted to slowly move files without attracting attention When people had their own internet connected machine other protocols were much better choices.
- chadgpt5 1mo agoWarez isn't a single network, so some sites may have used other protocols. One day I realised bittorrent is a part of the warez scene
- ryandrake 1mo agoI remember warez being the sole driver of my modem upgrade path from 9600 to 14,400 to 28,800, finally to very unstable 33,600 bps, then to trying to convince my parents to order a second phone line for... uh... modem... stuff... And then, suddenly it was off to undergrad where, lo and behold there were these two weird looking "RJ45 jacks" in each dorm room, and I soon realized I'd never have to worry about modem speed again...
- havaloc 1mo agoBeing of that age, hearing about and then using ethernet in the dorms was sort of like discovering Oz after living in Kansas. I had so many questions! How did they manage all that traffic? It was like having a firehose after using an eye dropper all your life.
- leptons 1mo agoI remember going from modem to internet and feeling like it was a "multitasking communication line" compared to the single-point connection the modem was capable of. With the internet I could contact many different servers at the same time. It was like having a thousand modems. My head exploded.
- chadgpt5 1mo agoSometimes I'm sad I missed the "connect to one thing at a time" era of networking. Email and news over UUCP with delivery measured in days.
- gct 1mo agoAhhh mIRC, jolt cola and an EDU connection at 3AM...
- sbseitz 1mo agoThe real OGs did not use mIRC.
- fractal618 1mo agoI remember and miss the golden days. Although it was probably glitter and not actually gold. Still, it was exciting. 3v3n 4 teh sc1pt kidd14s sti77 learnin’ ta sh4ve.
- havaloc 1mo agoAuthor authorized epub available here: https://github.com/gfscott/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aesthetics-of-piracy https://github.com/gfscott/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aest...
- lioeters 1mo agoDirect link to the file: https://github.com/gfscott/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aesthetics-of-piracy/releases/download/v1.0.1/warez-1.0.1.epub https://github.com/gfscott/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aest... (EPUB)
- lm411 1mo agoThe Warez scene was an absolute blast. I made some of the best friends of my early teenage years there, both online and online/offline. Unfortunately it came to a sudden end after I got a little too cocky and persistently took and re-took control of a smallish US telecom companies network, and the RCMP came knocking on my door for the FBI. That was largely unrelated to Warez but the advice given to me was that I should probably stop that as well. Thankfully I was too young to be charged with any of it at that time. I do regret the massive headaches I must have caused the system administrators at the telecom company. Sorry guys. I have repaid my bad karma many times.
- shevy-java 1mo agoThe question is whether you find it ok that the FBI comes sniffing after you. Personally I don't find it ok at all. I don't see any of that as a crime either. The legislation is clearly written by corporations and lobbyists acting as lawyers. That's another reason why I think open source is preferrable - that way they are replaced indirectly by not depending on them in the first place, meaning, as a trade-off towards how the society is currently structured. Hopefully it will become more sane again in the future. Back then, though, say in the 1990s or early 2000s, the "vibe" of warez also was "look how great ILLEGAL can be".
- enneff 1mo agoYou don’t think it should be illegal to hack a telecom network and take control of it?
- ExoticPearTree 1mo agoNope. It means the people running it did not do a good job configuring and securing it.
- rapidaneurism 1mo agoAnd most people do not have guards and dogs walking around the perimeter, but we still blame the burglars for breaking in their houses.
- jbrooks84 1mo agoGood times
- shevy-java 1mo agoI feel that the name "Piracy" or "Pirate" no longer applies. I call them more like Freedom Fighters. Like Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart.
- _superposition_ 1mo agoWarez irc channels were the best social media ever
- vaylian 1mo agoIRC is not social media. But otherwise agree.
- 0123456789ABCDE 1mo ago> IRC is not social media. what is it then? specifically: what is the medium in which IRC exists, or operates in? are the people using IRC networking with each other, perhaps socializing?
- chadgpt5 1mo agoSocial media implies a central algorithm is broadcasting
- bdhcuidbebe 1mo ago[dead]
- _superposition_ 1mo agoThat was certainly not my implication. Although there were plenty of bots!
- deepakhj 1mo agoCrazy to find my old handle listed in the appendix. I was staff on a couple of the top-ranked FTP sites in the US and Europe at the time. Seeing this sent me down a rabbit hole through the old Net Monkey Weekly Reports. I found interviews, arguments, and stories I had completely forgotten about. My memory of that period is pretty hazy now, but competing at that level was a lot of fun. I never really did it for the software. I eventually had to quit so I could finish school, and unfortunately I lost touch with almost everyone. [dee]
- 0123456789ABCDE 1mo agothat handle shows up in the siteops line of site.nfos/TG-the.gateway.XXXX.XX.00.nfo from warez.scene.nfo.collection.v1.0.24351.shroo.ms.zip (https://defacto2.net/g/shrooms-ftp https://defacto2.net/g/shrooms-ftp) .sS$ tHE $$Ss. $$$$ $Ss,`$$$$ $$$$ $$$$ $$$$ ,$$$$ $$$$ $$$$. .sS$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$: $$$$.""""²$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$Ss. $$$$' `²$²'.,sSSSSS$s`$',ss#SSS#ss.`$$$""""' $²"",ss#SSSSs`$$$²"S$$$$ $$$$ $s._ `$$$$ |$$$$$ $$$$$ |$$$$ $$$ $ _.s$ $$$$ $$$$$|'.s$`$$$$ $$$',$$$$',$$$| :$$$$ $#$szsmzs$$$$ $$$ $ `$$$$ $$$$ |$$$$ $$$$.`$$$ $$',$$$$' $$$$: $$$$ $$$$$ $$$$ $$$ $Ss`$$$$.`$$ :$$$$ `$$$$.`$$ $$ $$$$; `╙S$$S²'$$$ |$$$$ :$$$$ $$$ $$$ l$$$$ $`²S$$²' :$$$$ $$ $$.`$$$$ |S$$ $$$$$ |$$$$ $$$ `²' $$$$',$ $$$S',$$ $$$s.²╙S$S#$s$#S$S╜²' S$$$$#s#S$S²',$$$S#$S$S╜²'`²╙S$S#$s#S$S╜²'.s$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ P R E M i E R E $$$$$ $$$$$ A T O M i C X U S H Q $$$$$ $$$$$ P A R A D i G M R E L E A S E H Q $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ `²S$$$SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS$$$S²' `$' | SiteOps: X, Dee, Hazzy, Phiber : Staff: Dream, BasecW, Sting, Tinywulf, Gal ,$s Special Thanks: ADDiCTiON `²'
- swozey 1mo agoWas thinking the other day how I hadn't heard/seen the word 'warez' in a LONG time. Can't believe the stuff I used to download. Want sims 2? Here's a sketch russian site with 900 .rar files that you hope won't infect your parents pc.. Oops, looks like files 35-90 are corrupt or missing. I've seen that people (probably reddit teens) still install those "Windows Black Version" warezed Windows that come full of crap. I wonder how fruitful those have been for getting peoples data/money. Teen me was never stupid enough to install a not only cracked but probably malware/virus packed OS thankfully. Windows XP BlacK! < Pirateshipskull_wallpaper.png > The big Sims cracker I believe is still that womans name, ladyfit or something? I forget. I tried to dig into who/what that was a decade ago out of curiosity if she/they were someone whose software you would want to install and could find nothing, but every person playing a cracked version uses it..
- imthias404 1mo agoNot from your era, never experienced such a time, but pit of curiosity does this ladyfit have something to do with current fitgirl right now?
- swozey 1mo agofitgirl is who I meant, thanks. I forgot about that until this week when that voices38 game cracker was targeted by Denuvo for cracking it. I saw some reddit posts pop up from a fitgirl subreddit talking about it in solidarity. I remember fitgirl being the sims packer from a decade or more ago.
- charcircuit 1mo agoI personally don't understand how the government hasn't solved taking down piracy sites yet. Piracy sites are easy to track and obviously break the law. US ISPs should easily be able to null route their IP and CDNs should be able to easily block the domain from being served.
- mitxela 1mo agoThere are different types of piracy sites. The public ones have a short shelf-life. It's more difficult for the government to prove that a site that requires invites to access actually exists, and the extremely closed sites last until someone narcs.
- charcircuit 1mo ago>The public ones have a short shelf-life Their shelf life is more than 5 minutes. If we can't even get public sites under control there is no hope for more private ones.
- mitxela 1mo agoItaly tried to get the path from complaint to takedown to under 30 minutes which necessarily involves absolutely no judicial oversight. This resulted in them taking down things like Cloudflare, Google Drive, and the Italian government.
- charcircuit 1mo ago>which necessarily involves absolutely no judicial oversight ISPs already have policies that you can't use them for piracy and it is trivial for an ISP to see that a site is being used for piracy. A manual check can be done within 30 minutes. >This resulted in them taking down things like Cloudflare, Google Drive, and the Italian government. This sounds more like Cloudflare and Google Drive are harboring pirates. There should be similar takedown processes and having suspicious accounts separated onto distinct IPs from higher trusted ones to avoid actions like this affecting non pirates.
- ExoticPearTree 1mo agoI grew up in a country where every kind of software was availbale on a CD - usually a collection of whatever could fit on a CD. And paying for software was a considered a blasphemy. My first software purchase was I think after 2015, and it still felt weird compared to the usual process of finding a keygen somewhere.
- TacticalCoder 1mo ago> which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers (“topsites”) in the mid- to late-1990s. Yeah! I was a bit connected in that we'd write "intro" for a BBS and in return we had unlimited download (whereas on many BBSes there were seeder / "leecher" ratio and unless you were providing stuff, you'd be hindered by your leecher ratio). > The “Scene,” as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations. But the "intro" pirates would put in front of cracked games (or sometimes on BBSes to advertize the BBS), later renamed "cracktros" (for that term wasn't used at first) eventually did spawn full-on "demos" and "musicdisk" / diskzines etc. and those weren't illegal. In my Commodore Amiga days about half of my 5"1/4 floppies (because we were hacking 5"1/4 external drives to our Amiga and pretend to the computer they were the internal 3"1/2 disk so that we could buy shitload of much cheaper 5"1/4 floppies [1]) were demos (from Sanity, Scoopex, State of the Art, Lemon, Razor 1911, etc.). Piracy definitely had aesthetics to it and I'd say the fully legal demos were, weirdly enough, the biggest manifestation of the aesthetics of piracy. [1] in the early days I remember that after having something ridiculous like 3 boxes of 10 5"1/4 floppies, compared to 3 boxes of 3"1/2 floppies, you had already fully paid the 5"1/4 external floppy drive reader. I still have that external 5"1/4 drive for the Commodore Amiga just as I still have my chinese pirate SNES copying device. These two are prized possessions of mine ; )
- nenadg 1mo agoi used to love these back then, thanks for this
- leptons 1mo agoThe 80's were even better than the 90's for Warez, the real golden age. Modems were slow, and you had to really want to transfer the warez, overnight, for as long as it took. I quickly racked up a $300 phone bill one month (early 80's, so it was expensive), and got in trouble with my parents. So phone phreaking was also part of the early warez scene. I built a box that could generate 64 tones that could put the phone line into all kinds of states to allow various kinds of mayhem on the phone lines. This led to me being on the radar of some interesting individuals in the warez/phreak scene. In the late 80's/early 90's I once received a phone call from a "party line" with dozens of hacker types from all over the world just being obnoxious, it was kind of hilarious. I stayed on it for like 10 minutes and hung up, it was just a lot of noise. A couple months later my mother was visited by the FBI (I had just turned 18 and had already moved out), and she told me I needed to call them. Well it turns out that party-line call was started from a PBX at a top secret military facility. Apparently someone who had my contact info had hacked around the phone system and stumbled upon this PBX, not knowing where it was located. After telling me this the FBI agents wanted me to teach them all about "the underground" and they asked me about "warez" and "phone phreaks". I just had to say I didn't know what any of that was about, I was just a kid and I picked up the phone when it rang one day. That's the last I heard about it. The warez group FBR was legendary. I was somewhat involved with them in the late 80's. I remember hearing a story where they social engineered a secretary at a video game company. Someone mailed a modem to her (at her work) and instructed how to set it up as if they were working an IT job for the games company. They were able to transfer an upcoming game release over that modem, before the game was out. I don't remember all the details, but it was something along those lines, probably a lot more hilarious than I can remember now.
- phrotoma 1mo agoFolks enjoying this book and discussion may also enjoy this miniseries which predates youtube. "The Scene" is a fictional dramatization about a warez release group told entirely through the perspective of group members by way of screencasts of their online interactions. I recall thinking it was a cool and novel way to tell a story at the time it was released, but admittedly I haven't revisitted it in a couple decades so it may seem tame by todays standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries) Episode one: https://youtu.be/ImLy5mqj8WI https://youtu.be/ImLy5mqj8WI
- ethagnawl 1mo agoAOL was my internet gateway until 98 or so. I seem to remember a rumor that your account would instantly be suspended if you visited the "WAREZ" chatroom. Does anyone know if that's true? Neither answer would surprise me. Also, I wish I could remember the intricacies but there was some way to visit other chatrooms and request files (progz, mp3, etc.) from a manifest which would then be emailed to you.
- chadgpt5 1mo agoSome IRC networks K-line (IP ban) you if you join #warez
- desolved 1mo agoKinda true. AOL would send moderators into known private warez rooms, and if you wandered into one while a moderator was there, you’d likely get suspended. The moderators were easy to spot because they all had “CatWatch” in their handles. The room names were always changing, so AOL was always playing cat and mouse. 11 year old me encountered them many times. My Dad would continuously have to call to get the account reactivated. Sorry Dad.
- teddyh 1mo agoSee also: Copyright Does Not Exist <http://svenskefaen.no/cdne/ http://svenskefaen.no/cdne/>