Everything is wired insanely to a single ISDN line. After a coffee, Phil boots up and skims his email. Twenty minutes later he has ceased to be Phil.
For the next week, he will pretend to be a trader, a courier, a cracker, a newbie, a lamer, a lurker, a leecher. He is an undercover Internet detective, a "technical investigator. This is a story about a universe with two parallel, overlapping worlds. One is the familiar, dull world of the software industry, with its development costs, marketing teams, profit, and loss.
Phil's world, at least part of the day. And then there is warez world, the Mad Hatter's world, a strange place of IRC channels and Usenet groups, of thrills, prestige, and fear. A world of expert crackers who strip the protection from expensive new software and upload copies onto the Net within days of its release.
A world of wannabes and collectors, whose hard drives are stuffed like stamp albums, with programs they'll never use. And a world of profit pirates, who do exactly what the software makers say: rip off other people's stuff and sell it for their own benefit. But in Mad Hatter's world, those sticker prices means nothing - except inasmuch as more expensive programs are harder to crack, and that makes them the most desirable, spectacular trophies of all.
Filthy lucre Phil's world is full of nasty numbers. A lot of that is garden-variety unlicensed copying and Far East-style counterfeiting. But an estimated one-third leaks out through warez world, which can be anywhere there's a computer, a phone, and a modem. This is bad news for the business. Think of the lost revenue! The lost customers! He's not being paranoid: look at the thousands of messages that pour through alt.
All this plus impossibly early betas and alphas. Add a smattering of mundane Web tools, Net apps, registered shareware, games, and utilities, and you have everything for the forward-looking computer user. Warez world's volumes are impressive, too - a good 65 Mbytes a day of freshly cracked, quality new releases, chopped into disk-sized portions to make it from one hop to the next without clogging the servers , compressed, and uploaded.
Postings can vary from a few bytes for a crack to hundreds of megabytes. The nine main warez sites alone account for 30 to 40 percent of the traffic on Usenet, an average of more than Mbytes in downloads every 24 hours, according to OpNet.
Bad news indeed for Phil and his friends, gazing at those endless dollar signs. But warez world's leading citizens say that filthy lucre is beside the point - at least for them and the hungry collectors they supply.
You give what you have, get something you need. No money needed," adds Clickety. I would never sell something I got from warez," California Red reiterates. Warez crackers, traders, and collectors don't pirate software to make a living: they pirate software because they can. The more the manufacturers harden a product, with tricky serial numbers and anticopy systems, the more fun it becomes to break. No: it's a game, a pissing contest; a bunch of dicks and a ruler.
It's a hobby, an act of bloodless terrorism. It's "Fuck you, Microsoft. It's about telling him that you have something he doesn't and forcing him to trade something he has for something you don't. In other words, it's an addiction. Listen to a typical dialog on an IRC warez trading channel:. Warez traders scour the newsgroups every night, planting requests, downloading file parts they don't need.
Warezheads feel unfulfilled unless they've swelled their coffers by at least one application a day. They don't need this Java Development Kit tool, or that Photoshop plug-in - the thrill is in creating the new subdirectory and placing the tightly packed and zipped file cleanly, reverently, into the collection.
They may even install it. Then toy absentmindedly with its toolbars and palettes before tucking it away and never running it again. Look at Michael, an year-old warez junkie who's also into weight lifting. In the evenings, while his friends pursue women, he's either at the gym or home at his machine, combing the planet for the latest dot releases of 3D Studio MAX.
The SoftImage rip is 20 disks. It took me three months to get the entire set. The more high-end and toolbar-tastic the app, the better. Without technical support or manuals, he hasn't a clue how to use most of it. But it's there and will stay there. Just so you can say, 'I've got this or I've got that. Mad Hatter knows the feeling. We see it every day - people begging for something to 'finish their collection.
But Mad Hatter - who runs the semi-tongue-in-cheek, semi-poker-faced discussion group alt. For Joe Warez Addict at the end of the cracked software food chain, membership in a group like the Inner Circle is the ultimate collectible.
A way to legitimize their addiction, work for the common good, and, of course, get a nice fresh supply of warez. The drug addict becomes dealer. A sizable chunk of Mad Hatter's daily mail is begging letters. But can I join the Inner Circle? I mean, I respect the Inner Circle I was just wondering, can I? Please mail me back ASAP. Needless to say, this lone obsessive didn't get his chance. Joining the Inner Circle is nigh on impossible.
Reaching its members, though, is easy enough. They keep a high profile, both in posting files on Usenet and flaming lamers. When I first tried to contact them I thought that they weren't so good at answering email, but it turned out their provider had just been taken offline for illegal spamming. They relocated en masse, and my mail had been lost in transit. So I posted a message to one of their newsgroups, made sure it was correctly labeled, politely worded, and not crossposted a cardinal sin anywhere on Usenet.
A reply arrived within eight hours. Mad Hatter was more than happy to talk, but not on the phone, not in person, and not on conventional IRC. He and six other Inner Circle members set up their own IRC server, configured a secret channel, and arranged a mutually convenient time for a live interview.
We met and talked for nine hours, in the bizarre overlapping conversational style of IRC. They were frank and open, friendly and articulate - and, like any new start-up, flattered by the attention.
A strong force, the Inner Circle has its own iconography and its own ideals. Its members are warez gods. They preach, police, advise, flame.
Their commandments? Good manners, good use of bandwidth, and good warez. Give unto others as you would have them give unto you.
When the Inner Circle is not sourcing warez from secret sites, its members are hunting and gathering from more conventional sources. Clickety borrows fresh stuff from his clients. A few have attended Microsoft Solution seminars. These are not pimply teenagers devoid of social life and graces, little ferrets who talk in bIFF text and make napalm out of soap and lightbulbs; they're not downloading porn or being careful not to wake their parents or spelling "cool" as "kewl.
Most are plus. Champion uploader Digital has been happily married for 22 of his 46 years. Most are well-adjusted white males with day jobs and thoroughly nuclear families.
Founding member Abraxas has three kids, one over Mad Hatter runs a small business from home. Technical guru TAG is a computer animator. Irrelevant maintains commercial real estate. They're spread all over the United States. A few are concentrated around Orlando, Florida. Two or three others are California-based.
For obvious reasons, that's as precise as they like to get. The Inner Circle was born of a sense of outrage that their beloved pirate-wares newsgroups were going to pot. Warez had been around for more than a decade, but the growth of the Internet was bringing clueless newbies onto the boards.
Warez needed a code of ethics and a group of leaders to set some examples. The leaders would be the best crackers - some of whom became the Inner Circle. The groups were being overrun by clueless people. They needed help.
They were wasting Internet resources. Perhaps if we could encourage responsible use of the available bandwidth, the whole Usenet warez 'scene' might last a while longer. Warez was around before we were, and will be after, but we wanted to help people and preserve resources using common sense. As enforcers of the warez code, the Inner Circle can be swift and sure. In April , a pirate gang called Nomad, convinced that posts to warez groups were being suppressed, decided to get themselves some unsupervised elbow room.
They selected an antiwork newsgroup - alt. Within 24 hours, the forum was flooded with the latest releases. The slackers bestirred themselves from their apathy and fought back, posting files that told the pirates politely to push off. The warez kept coming. Then the Inner Circle waded in on the slackers' side and castigated the invaders for their poor manners. The pirates left meekly - though as a parting gift, one of them posted Microsoft NT, Beta 3, all 48 Mbytes of it, in 5, parts.
The slackers' newsfeed was clogged for days. A slightly disturbing revelation came out of the slacker invasion. As a side effect, the patch also reduced email spams by two-thirds. By mid-'96, Mad Hatter decided that police work was getting to be too much of a chore. The newsfeed was being clogged by lamers, requesters, and partials posters with "room-temperature IQs. Usually, warez distributors obtain pre-released or existing copies of copyrighted software, discover an effective way to deactivate or crack the registration system or copyright protection employed by the original software vendors and then offer these cracked versions through the Internet for downloading.
The majority of warez files find public distribution within one-click hosting sites and BitTorrent sites. The most common downloads at warez sites include software or applications from well known manufacturers like Symantec, Microsoft and Adobe. Large organizations combat warez materials by releasing fake torrents, which reveal the IP addresses of those distributing warez. These organizations may contact those responsible for illegally distributing their goods and inform them about impending legal consequences.
Warez was initially coined by underground computer groups. It quickly spread to the media and Internet users. Warez most typically is downloaded by millions of users through newsgroups or other such hosts after the initial release is duplicated and renamed.
The term warez does not refer to copyrighted materials being shared between groups of friends. Also, warez must not be mistaken for freeware or shareware software, which can be openly copied and distributed under the law. By: Justin Stoltzfus Contributor, Reviewer. By: Satish Balakrishnan. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again.
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