The old warez cracking scene had an outsize impact on computer security. GRSecurity, Heartbleed vulnerability, most reverse engineering tools for security, etc. etc. etc.
There's so much history here, touching on all sorts of insanity including selling 0-day to the US government that was then used to apprehend high-level Al-Qaida personnel, random warez busts leading to people taking oversea jobs, etc. etc. etc.
If anyone still has old .NFO archives from 1990-2000, I'd be very interested in getting as many as possible.
It's so easy to bait me with this nostalgia. There is something mysterious and enjoyable about dialing-in or connecting to a server in the unknown. During those days, many things were not easily discoverable which added to the fun.
For a brief time, this extended to the early internet with IRC servers. I spent most of my early teenage years downloading warez, .wav music files, and trying not to be a n00b on #c while asking n00b questions
Now that I am an old man, I wonder what today's youth do that is equivalent to this fun nerdy culture? Maybe I can partake, LOL.
They do it on Discord now, witch their crackling voices on full display in Voice Chats. I was on an Arch Linux discord and one kid hopped in with a voice changer (was maybe 15) because he didnt want people to make fun of him for being a squeeker.
I don't remember a .wav era. Roughly speaking, there was .mid, .mod, .mp3
I remember a period of time where my computer was too slow to play MP3 but it could play WAV files. So I'd process a song from MP3 or similar to WAV and play it that way.
Not sure why I bothered, really.
yeah, I sought out 96kbps mp3s because I could listen to those and still use my computer without too much lag. 128kbps was enough to really bog things down lol >_<
Oh wow I totally forgot about that -- leaving the computer alone while burning a CD because even the slightest action might render your burned CD a coaster! Actually, that period lasted quite a while, as I remember quitting programs to reduce issues when burning even in WinXP... lol
I remember folks trading u-law or a-law compressed wavs before mp2 and mp3 and the perceptual codecs started to take over.
Indeed. Ah, the thrill of a 300 baud modem! :-)
I worry that the sad truth is that there isn't anything similar for "kids these days". But hopefully there is something fun and deep like this for the youths in the AI world that I'm just too old to know about.
is it still roblox and or minecraft?
1990 to 1999, that would be exactly the development timeline of Celerity BBS.
Just looking at the revision history of Celerity 2.04 on Discmaster, wow, that went forever!
https://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/43430/BBS_Software/DOS...
Good ol' times :) Cheers to all the ex. Efnet and Underworld #warezgraphics, #warezart, #3dee, #3dwarez, #3dgfx, #warez3d fellas.
Can't forget #linuxwarez
and #oldwarez where we were trading 80s games in the 90s
University of Tartu sysadmins used to point warez.ut.ee to 127.0.0.1 back in 1993 just to confuse warez-interested but ill-educated youth like myself.
That university of Tartu, https://ut.ee/en ? Which comes to mind because of the Department of Semiotics, founded by Juri Lotman.
I hope one day someone will make a movie about the warez scene. The only piece of media we have as far as I'm aware is The Scene (2004–2006) which I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone with a love for moving bytes around illegally.
Not about warez but demoscene, the french movie "DEMO" is currently in pre-production. Demoscene from Atari ST and Amiga.
Also not the warez scene, but the Swedish public broadcaster made a series about the pirate bay recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_(TV_series)
It's watchable, but not great. It unfortunately doesn't cover many of the most interesting details, such as what happened with TPB after the operators were arrested.
see also: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2608732/
BBS: The Documentary touches on _some_ Warez scene topics and legendary characters of the era.
Highly recommend downloading the .isos and playing them in mpv with deinterlacing. Lot of great native 60i footage in this doc.
Not a movie per se, but one of the protagonists in my game is a veteran from the warez scene. He mentions BlueBeep, BBSs and Demoscene in the game :)
It's quite interesting to see just how much of that historically proprietary and copywritten software from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s is thoroughly outcompeted today by FLOSS solutions that are simply available to anyone at no cost whatsoever. A very high fraction of the proprietary "utility" programs of old (with a huge amount of wasteful duplicated effort involved in their creation) are even made completely redundant by OS-level features in free operating systems. We live in the best era for "warez" of sorts, and it's all completely legal!
Such fond memories. So many OS reinstalls after inadvertently infecting my computer from a sketchy photoshop crack. You learn to never get too attached.
Same, I think at one point I was reinstalling my (pirated) copy of Windows 98 SE at least once a month. In hindsight I should have pirated Norton Ghost as well.
The NFO Search section is pure gold. I'm glad someone preserved all this.
yeah.. nice to look up yourself on many of those filez =)
From an archival perspective... it's sad to be able to search the filelists for software that's probably lost to history. For example, I've been trying to track down a (working) copy of SAS for DOS since forever. Even software from fly-by-night houses can tell us so much.
I think all the listed software is available for download in the website still-active BBS: scenelist.org:23 (I only tried the web interface briefly).
man, those were the days! I was a coder for an amiga crew in australia, we had a heap of bbs's going and we'd phreak calls to scene BBS's in europe, usa & eastern aus. Amazing what mischief we'd get up to with a usrobotics hst modem ha :D
hihi,
detailed list, of stuff i did, from 1992 to 1998 awesome, loveit.
found my name in 79 pages of nfo files
i remember some guy luke_skyw, or similar. Did you write any tutorials back then?
Those really were the good old days. My BBS ran out of my parents’ attic, with two phone lines and Renegade on the server (on a beefed-up PS/1). It was pure magic.
That's how I learned computer security, learned how IIS would allow specific commands, which paths Windows would not show, etc. Very interesting.
That's also, maybe more importantly, how I learned about information propagation and even epistemology because you HAD to 1st in order for your work to be valuable.
A lot of fun, of lot of learning still valuable decades later.
Warmly recommended!
I remember various people from that time pronouncing warez in two distinct ways.
wares ware-ez
I'm not sure which is the correct way.
My interpretation was/is that they're both right. The word originated as 'wares with a Z' but once it was spelled that way it became natural to pronounce it 'ware-ez' but nobody thought you were unintentionally mispronouncing it. The in-joke continued on certain boards as 'warez' became 'Juárez'...
Ciudad Warez was a common joke for us, though I do suspect one person actually pronounced it that way.
Warez as "softwares" seems reasonable to me, but language moves.
Okay I'm a little embarrassed to admit I might have been pronouncing it that last way for the past 20 years...
It absolutely is pronounced "wares" as in "software" but 13 year old me didn't know that so I and everyone I knew pronounced it "war-ezz", as in "warfare".
Oh, the times before voip
Ware-ez is absolutely insane.
Wares, except the s sounds like a z.
#zeraw on DALnet in the 90s, those were the days..
Archive, archive, archive some more. Duplicate and make available to the public rather than hoard.
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> If anyone still has old .NFO archives from 1990-2000
Have you checked https://srrdb.com ?
.nfo archives is quite complete out there on the archive sites. Those days were crazy busy in the warez world and the nfo files are a blast to read.
Here's the one I uploaded. It was the most extensive collection back in the day.
The dates listed are from when they were fetched, they encompass all eras.
https://archive.org/details/nfo_large_collection_2009_2012
Have you posted the right link? It seems to be a 2009-2012 collection, when the question was about the 90s.
Interesting. Where is it possible to read up on this?