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

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.

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.

Is it about a perceived lack of consequences of the one vs the other? What if the hack caused real damage and suffering? For example, people's medical histories get stolen and exposed? Ransomware encrypts hospital systems, disrupting medical care?

Or, the inverse: while you're away, somebody breaks into your home non-destructively, takes some photos, sleeps on your couch, and leaves. Should that be forbidden? Your fault for allowing it? It is easier to pull something like this in the digital world, is that why it seems different to you?

What an absurd world view.

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.

There is no door, that cannot be opened with enough effort. Part of what stops people trying, is the fear of consequences.

I switched to linux in 2004 or so. All those old use cases kind of vanished or changed. Perhaps the subset of software is more limited on linux, since Microsoft also builds - and exploits - a platform for commercial success, but I see more and more linux-specific applications too, typically using qt5 or qt6. Which is interesting considering linux does not have a huge share here. I guess there does exist some market value here.

I just can not really see myself using or needing "warez" on linux - the use cases are sooooo different now. For multimedia there are very few use cases not covered by ffmpeg and mpv. The only thing I'd like is something like avisynth, but more like a domain specific language that is even shorter. I remember back in early 2004 or late 2003 I was still writing avisynth scripts to modify video data on windows. Linux pipes never really went into an object-oriented approach and view onto data.

I remember switching to Linux around 94 and at the time one of the things that annoyed me was that there was very little commercial software to patch registration checks out of!

There were a couple of image-viewers, and similar things, but I fell out of the habit of decompiling random binaries, and stopped keeping up with the newere techqniques for a good few years. My reversing skills came back, later, but swithching to Linux where everything was "free" and source was mostly available really did change a lot of my computer-related hobbies.

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.

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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.

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://keygenmusic.tk/

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

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Service_Protocol

When people had their own internet connected machine other protocols were much better choices.

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 ; )

My first software purchase was I think after 2015, and it still felt weird compared to the usual process of finding a keygen somewhere.

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..

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