Get ready, a 300 page pdf, not just your average run of the mill story. Marked for later...

That's 777 octal tho

6-7 had yet to be discovered.

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 :)

I 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.

If you ever need to scratch that ASCII art itch: https://asciiarena.se/

Some of the chiptune musicians are still active. Dubmood made it onto the Hotline Miami (2012) soundtrack.

There 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...

Cool, 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.

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.

NFO files (both image and text) for current releases and ones going way back can still be found on xrel.to

Thanks!

Discussed a bit at the time:

Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29633143 - Dec 2021 (13 comments)

I 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.

ftp.uu.net was a bit of a wild west for a while before it was eventually pulled.

I bought the print edition, which is a bit ironic.

I 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.

Phrozen Crew and UCF on Efnet, right?

My 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.

Warez 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

I remember FSP seeming to have a more "underground" vibe to it. This was right after migrating from BBS to "Shell Account". Shortly after every noob was told: "FtP to 127.0.0.1 for l33t w4R3Z!", and then the gobsmacked horror as you were loooking at your own home directory. laf.

Sometimes 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.

BitchX from a shell with a vanity hostname was a hard flex for sure

I remember being contracted to build an XDCC search engine that would connect to IRC servers, get XDCC lists from bots and then put that list up on the web to make everything searchable in one place... it was my first "we don't host anything" defense and people did not know what to do with me

Porting windows stuff to Linux would've been useful

Yup: https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~rootd/catdoc/guide/TheGuide_226.ht...

I always was testing the different transfer protocols, always appreciating sysops who installed rather obscure protocols like jmodem, MPT110, zmodem-mobyturbo and god now I can't remember some of the weirder ones. ymodem-G had a soft spot because well it was gangstah lol.

I 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.

Direct link to the file: https://github.com/gfscott/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aest... (EPUB)

The diff is that owner is responsible for their own shit where a telco has everyone's things in there and is exposed to the whole world instead of just one street.

It is like a bank that has sloppy security and exposes you to the whole world, including adversaries from Russia china NK etc.

Things like Telco cloud banks should absolutely be thrashed for having bad security. Responsible disclosure should also be a thing but we all know these companies sue people for that too.

I don’t care in that scenario, it is the bank’s fault, not mine. It is on them to make it right.

And most people do not have guards and dogs walking around the perimeter, but we still blame the burglars for breaking in their houses.

It’s an interesting view. In this case you are claiming the victims are bound to the creator/vendor of the software/service, not the hacker?

Maybe you should think through the consequences of living in a society where anything a person can do is allowed lmao

I have this view when it comes to computers and software, not physical property or people.

You're presenting a false dilemma, there are more options than "all hacking is completely illegal" and "all hacking is a free-for-all".

We're in a thread that starts from the notion that it should not be illegal to "hack a telecom network and take control of it", because "the people running it did not do a good job configuring and securing it." That's essentially the free-for-all position, and defending it by claiming that the opposite extreme is the only other option is a false choice. Nuance and compromise exist, and our world is made of them.

Also, your argument about burglars can be applied to "hackers", too. Police can find and arrest people domestically and beyond. Consequences deter people from all sorts of illegal activity. On the other hand, nation states are not necessarily deterred by laws from kidnapping and killing people inside the territory of other countries. You've probably seen the news.

What's different is the ease of access to digitical, internet-connected systems, and the scale of abuse that affords. That's a reason to think differently about _how_ to shape the rules and laws around "hacking", but not a reason to have no rules or laws at all.

I really don’t understand the urge or need to compare software security with physical security.

Both are about preventing harm in many different forms. Software famously has effects in the physical world, that's the reason why a lot of it exists, and why people get paid that deal with software because it makes their brains feel good.

I also notice that you haven't really answered my questions around that.

if you get hacked, it is on you. The attacker was smarter than you, simple as that.

From your perspective, what makes "smarter" different from "stronger", or "more resourceful" here? Or do you think that if your door gets bashed in, it's your fault, because your door was too weak? Or your head? What if someone outsmarts your physical security arrangements to wander around in your house? Where's your boundary here?

I think physical and "cyber" security are not so dissimilar in the need to back them up with rules and laws at some point. Still, there are differences, so I don't think the rules and laws need to be the same. You seem to be advocating to have none at all for the software case, and I'm trying to find out about that.

Oh...

If those RCMP folks came knocking on your door around January 22nd 1999. Hi there. Long time. It was fun chasing you, but I didn't enjoy the rm -rf.

Good times

Always has been.

Social media implies a central algorithm is broadcasting

that 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)

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         |   SiteOps: X, Dee, Hazzy, Phiber
         :   Staff: Dream, BasecW, Sting, Tinywulf, Gal
        ,$s  Special Thanks: ADDiCTiON
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fitgirl 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.

There 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.

I 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.

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 ; )

i used to love these back then, thanks for this

The 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.

Folks 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)

Episode one: https://youtu.be/ImLy5mqj8WI

Some IRC networks K-line (IP ban) you if you join #warez

Kinda 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.

See also: Copyright Does Not Exist <http://svenskefaen.no/cdne/>