The 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.

I 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...

I 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.

Author authorized epub available here: https://github.com/gfscott/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aest...

This 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-...

Crazy 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]

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

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 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.

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

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

AOL 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.

I'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

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.

Warez irc channels were the best social media ever

Book site with info and other links: https://punctumbooks.com/catalog/10.53288/0339.1.00

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.

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

i used to love these back then, thanks for this

I feel that the name "Piracy" or "Pirate" no longer applies.

I call them more like Freedom Fighters. Like Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart.

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> 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 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.

Was 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..

Good times

I 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.

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