Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy
punctumbooks.com
punctumbooks.com
This is how it all started out for me, in the end of the 90, at 11 to 14 I made my way from a lousy lurker to a top-site tech admin. Those were the days I tell you.
I started out as a kid in the FXP scene learning PHP to modify our bulleting boards (vbb & woltlab) back in the day with statistical data, to compare crews on a board working against each other.
Well as kids are, with 14 I idled regularly on the #PHP quakenet channel, as the scene was using IRC all day long anyway. As you are with 14, I blasted out, that "PHP can solve all of my problems, why would anyone ever learn something else" upon which a london financial coder basically told me "come here boy, I will show you what real programming actually looks like" and thaught me c# over the course of year, remotely with RDP. Suffice to say I was hooked and having a mentor that really explained to me the advantages of strongly typed programming languages, I fell in love with c# too and shortly after decided to try to run my first startup with it.
Luckily where i live none of that was illegal at the time and legislation only cought up years later, but boy was it brilliant. It felt like the smartest tech people from all branches gathered in IRC to keep themselves entertained, but at the same time shared their wisdom with you. Sure, they would try to troll you too, but thats more an initiation ritual :D
0-day scene was always there but seemed like madmen, delusional people. I far more enjoyed queueing for some site with an interesting collection; eventually snagging 1 of 10 connections, each with like 30Kbps bandwidth. Much more interesting to me than getting or sharing the freshest hottest warez. Alas, the modern torrent scene seems largely reverted to 0-day mania, to ratios instead of leech (even in bittorrent lands, alas!), to throw-away uninteresting downloads, instead of the far more interesting to me curated & considered content.
Also, your ftp program of choice is interesting. I'm not sure if it really had any noteable following at the time? I'm trying to pin my timeline down but I feel like things were pretty well underway by the first non-Visual-Basic release, FlashFXP, in June 1998. I mean, like, dude evidently was convinced to re-author his stuff via the much better known (afaik) LeapFTP author... I'd love an inventory of what really was popular at the time, what people would swear by. I'm far from elite, as I've already semi-confessed, but hadn't heard of FlashFXP.
That said, holy shit yes I'd buy a coffee-table book of warez scene aesthetics. The crackers & nfo files & (music) tracker files were great, just awesome.
I recall it also had a decent queue and resume.
There was also a terminal ftp client that supported the server to server transfers, but I can’t remember the name.
Flash FXP was used because it had site to site transfer, where you could use the FTP protocol directly from one server to another, therefore you would not need to upload a file to 100 servers with 5kbs but would be able to upload it once and send it directly over to the next node at 100mbits or more. Not many clients got the fxp protocol just as right as they do =)
The entire intro of this book covers the concept of prestige between topsites. A SE or CH topsite with OC3 and 2tb with top tier affils was obviously amazing. The need to be first was important, that was kind of the whole point. This is evidenced by groups releasing dupes getting said release nuked, the whole concept of racing (users simultaneously uploading zip/rxx files) with the sitebot declaring a winner based on % uploaded and site level nukes by a sitebot if the release was pre'd more than X minutes prior.
0day was the side door into a lot of sites. There was so much shareware that could be patched or unlocked with a serial with relatively little effort vs AAA game or movie releases. If your group affilled (initiate their releases on affiled site) you would be able to get a number of leech accounts (way more valuable than ratio accounts) on said site based on how prestigious your group was. Couriers were more disposable, as they had no ties to a release group (there were courier groups). Their primary function was to increase "liquidity" of content between different tiers of sites.
I remember the first time I realized how pointless all of this was, around the time automation took over and no one really needed to “race” anymore. With less humans involved, everything became more private. That was around the time torrents really took off.