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Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

Oh no, Russia is still a veritable bastion of sharing.

It's the one place where you can get clean, good Adobe CC shit conveniently packaged in a good old Master Collection format.

Torrent forums without the ridiculous ads and popups.

The only place I could find firmware hacks for various hardware including some brilliant mods for SFP routers and washing machines.

There still seems to be a sense of solidarity although I don't really like it since it's the old "fuck them all western shits".

Chinese net pops up every now and then. It's just hard to navigate, hence it's very much unknown to western users. But I know there's troves of cool stuff there.

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Cracking/warez/firmware hacking is very different from the real blackhat scene.

It all used to be the same scene, at the advent some sceners only being there for gfx art. ( the cracktro and asci/ansi art people, now evolved to demoscene ) Eventually, the scene started to grow, diverge and many groups specialized in only certain aspects. For a while, 0-day exploits where traded the same way people did mp3 or disk images.( It's also where the nomenclature "0-day" stems from ) Different competing scene sites carrying different sets of file types all following the same scene standards & pyramid. Then people started being prosecuted for bullshit more frequently, the earliest example is Mitnick being locked up for being able to whistle nuke launch codes. Actions like these and their increase in numbers and sophistication made people require larger amounts of money in order to keep themselves and other save from predators. Commerce was introduced by some groups in order to pay for security, others such as the still non commercial group CORE kicked all couriers out of the scene for the same reason and refused to race with commercial "leakers". From there everything became the clusterfuck that's left today. In other words, what you call "real blackhat scene" is nothing but a third order simulacrum of what used to be referred to as just "the scene". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_simulacra

This seems to me like you're talking more about your background and particular bubble rather than give any sort of "overseer" insight about a phenomenon whose various aspects and manifestations you seem painfully unaware of.

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