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Here is a pretty good explaination of how it worked. https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/92uz49/the_ware... I have No idea how it is today but back then it was pretty organised. We would have people funding eg a university apartment and servers and paying for eg 10x100mbit we would Bond or Having direct access to oc connections just so they could get leech.

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What it doesnt explain is that this was very hard work to be eg a trader for top sites near impossible to even get access to one. You would work 8-16 hours a day to always be ready for a release and then when a release hit your Heartrate would double as you rushed to transfer files to the sites the allowed it All of Whom had hundreds of rules and Which you had to know by heart as the races on the Best sites were over in less than a minute and you would be lucky to transfer 5x15mb rar. 20-30 times a day you would have this short but intense moment. If your group dident perform Well it would be changed for another as top groups were rated against eachother. It became an addiction. Getting into building sites was much better for my health.

I'm pretty sure that today all trading is automated. And the quality of releases have also gone (relatively) down - for movies good P2P is better than any scene pre.

It would make sense. Taking on good groups was nessasary to build a good rated site but it was up to the groups to hand out the slots and you never knew who you were really dealing with. It could be FBI or some hacker. There was however scriptet ftp clients but even though they were known many places had a ban on them and did a client not obey site rules then too many nukes or banned content would get them kicked off sites.

BTW, nowadays it seems the power is held at least by some degree by the nukenets

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