Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

I was a member of Razor back in the day. I noticed that he mentioned he wouldn't say how he got Quake released before release date. I can share how I participated in an early release: I had befriended the manager of Electronics Boutique because I bought frequently there for many years prior to getting into pirating games. He would give me games that arrived but weren't on the shelf yet. From there, it was uploaded to an FTP server and a cracker would go to work removing protections, it usually took hours or less, unless the protection was novel. They'd usually push a release without a lot of large assets (FMV, cutscene type stuff) to make releasing it faster, and follow up with a full release after it was all packaged up.

I saw lots of folks get arrested/busted back in those times, and there was a key difference of outcomes for two groups: adults vs minors. Minors always got a slap on the wrist/fine (I remember TKLP from was it... RoR? had to pay out $1200 to AT&T for hacking a PBX... because he was 14 or so), and adults got sent to jail and had their lives ruined. I stopped being involved just before turning 18 and it was a very smart decision in retrospect.

"...adults got sent to jail and had their lives ruined."

I'm sure it is a polemic terrain, but I really wonder if this is fair. Eager to hear opinions.

I think it depends on the case. Some of the leaders of those groups were basically using minors like myself as cover in the same way street gangs did, and doing a lot more than piracy. I think the folks that got hit for their actual fraud deserved it, but folks that just cracked and released games were unfairly targeted, very few profited from it, and I think a profit incentive is where I consider the crime to be more relevant, but I'm not a lawyer :)

Thanks for your comments. I've been pirating one way or another for a couple of decades. Always always saw the crackers as someone who did it for anything but money.

I think in general it is fair, but the very arbitrary 18/not-18 cutoff doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I consider (myself) and most people I know to have been children at 18 and up to several years older than that. But it's not like people wear their "maturity" levels on their forehead, so the justice system has to make an arbitrary cutoff somewhere.

Not saying it's ideal, and individual circumstances have to be considered, but it's the best a crude system can do.

It is not just the justice system. After 18, you are given full citizen rights, but you also get the responsibilities that go with it. It is crude but fair.

There are exceptions, adults may have guardians and are effectively considered minors if they have mental problems for instance, and in some cases, children can be emancipated. But these are usually for extreme cases.

> I think in general it is fair, but the very arbitrary 18/not-18 cutoff doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I saw some neuroscience research once that indicated you don't really mature until your early 20s.

That said, in some cultures you are considered an adult at about 14 (mostly hunter gatherer cultures that lack the insane complexity and fundamental weirdness that we have right now).

18 seems a good rough split-the-difference, but equally, in an ideal world it'd be 21. That said, most people wouldn't want to wait that long to do responsible adult activities like drive cars too fast around the place, vote for the people who do the best job of lying, and consume borderline-lethal quantities of alcohol ... :-)

I think the penalties of many laws weren’t made with fairness in mind but deterrence. The penalty goes up until crime rate comes down. It makes sense I guess, it’s not meant to be a trade - much less a fair one - but to stop/reduce crime.

Edit: That said, super heavy penalties for what are often victimless crimes might not be good for society overall - might be better to allow the existing offence rate for that crime.

Yet , countries with the highest crime rates have the toughest punishments.

That is one of the clearest examples of both causal directions being plausible.

Depends on the crime and the punishment. I'd like to see the data you used to make this claim, since looking at many single cases it is certainly not clear that your claim is true.

Is that true? Crime across the Islamic world is remarkably low despite many countries being much more unstable. East-Asia, another region with generally harsh punishments is very safe. Like, even large Chinese cities with over ten million citizens and incomes far below what you see in the West have very low crime rates. Not to speak of more comparable countries lke Singapore.

The Islamic world is also notorious for how corrupt and non transparent it is, so getting accurate crime statistics beyond murder is going to be hard.

I mean it's not Narnia, you can ask people who live there. I've spent a lot of time in the MENA region. The countries of the Arabian peninsula who are comparably wealthy to the US are practically crime free. When I lived in Amman, the capital of Jordan when the population was a quarter(!) refugees, other than some petty theft in touristy places violent crime isn't really a thing. It was a safer place than a significant amount of American cities.

Of course you can, but that isn't necessarily a reliable source.

For instance in the former soviet and satellite states people felt like there was no crime, because of propaganda despite the fact that there was a huge amount of it.

"Discovered" crime rate goes down. Many folks actually got better at covering their tracks. The ones that didn't? yeah...

It’s still a factor in a potential offender’s mental calculation.

If the penalty is very high you will still think very hard about it even if you are good at evading detection.

Not really. It is the risk of getting caught that is a deterrent. If jaywalking was a capital offense but only one person in 300,000,000 a year got arrested and convicted for it, it wouldn't put a huge dent in jaywalking. Whereas a fine of say $75 and a 95% catch rate will pull jaywalking down to almost zero pretty quickly.

>I think the penalties of many laws weren’t made with fairness in mind but deterrence.

It's a very common misconception that laws prohibit a given action. Getting straight to the point, they don't and can't: Mere words on paper can't stop a swinging fist, per se. The pen is not mightier than the sword.

Rather, the point of laws is deterence by consequence. You can swing that fist, and no piece of legalese can stop you in your endeavour, but that piece of legalese can and will stipulate the consequences for swinging that fist. The hope being the consequences will convince you to not swing that fist. The pen is not mightier than the sword, but the gavel can be mightier than the sword.

Obligatory IANAL.

18 year olds are called young adults for a reason. I think it’s harsh to do it to 18-21ish year olds but over 25, maybe, but over 30 you know what you’re getting into. If you want to live that kind of life you have to except consequences. Ideology isn’t going to save you.

The same applies to scams, drug dealing, and other nefarious activities.

Then, nefarious is the key to judge.

no it's never fair to ruin lives and torture people ("the hole" during months is torture [0][1])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement_in_the_Un... [1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/02/united-state...

At least for the US, the life ruining part is the very low barrier access to background checks. Unlike the 1980's, where only huge employers could look into your past, now everyone can see everything you've ever been arrested for, even if you hadn't been convicted. It's very difficult to find any employment at all now, and even harder to find something that isn't minimum wage.

As I understand it, in other places, like Australia, employers don't do a background check exactly. They send the job description and the candidate info to a government agency that just answers back "yes" or "no". So that, for example, a hacking conviction might disqualify you for some jobs, but not ALL jobs. And you have some idea beforehand the kind of jobs you might have success passing for. The offense is very specifically weighed against the job description, and not just some HR person's delicate sensibilities.

To me, barring some extreme exceptions, it's not fair for punishment to extend beyond what you were sentenced to. There's also peripheral issues, like the plea bargain system, which gives prosecutors lots of leverage to "convict" people that are either innocent, or guilty of a lesser crime than they plea to.

Background check companies in the US scrape public access government websites, too. There’s a great chance that if you have the same name as someone listed on those websites and in the same geography you’re going to get false matches. An Evan Anderson close to my home was involved in a hit-skip car crash and it has come up in searches that have been done on me. Fortunately I was told about it and able to produce documentation that showed it was a different guy. I’m lucky.

I had a similar thing happen a few years ago when I bought my house. There was a guy the same age as me with the same name who had defaulted on his mortgage, and I had to sign a statement saying I wasn't him. The funny thing was, I looked up the house he abandoned, and it was basically identical to the house I was buying, down to the ornamental plum tree in the front yard. Presumably got built in the same wave of development in the 70s.

In the Netherlands when a job requires a background check - for example working in fintech - the employer is only permitted to request information directly related to the industry, e.g. financial crimes.

Unfortunately this does not avoid them using "3rd party" services but it is refreshing to know employers can't have a data trawl from the Government.

To add to the Australian landscape in this discussion: - only convictions are assessed against, not arrests.

- only relevant convictions are assessed against.

- most states expunge convictions after a certain number of years. Those convictions will not ever be considered in any job application ever, nor any court case. There are some small number of exceptions.

- your record is as tightly held as a state secret.

- there is no third party access to records beyond police and courts.

- there are no for-profit prisons with quotas. I don't believe there are many, if any, for profit prisons at all. They are looked down upon.

- the judiciary is well educated, career accomplished, is not voted in, and has an expectation of continued professional development.

- the judiciary tends to be more progressive than politicians, focusing on interventions and improvement rather than incarceration, where appropriate and possible.

Even under the ancient - and extreme - jurisprudence of 'an eye for an eye' then this is clearly not fair unless a cracker actually ruined people's lives.

> I'm sure it is a polemic terrain, but I really wonder if this is fair.

None of it's fair.

A servile government, with license to use force/incarceration, bent on defending putrid industrial system that hordes as much rights for itself as it can? That has extended copyright to 70 years, by crook & by hook? The whole thing is a sham, a disgrace to the human spirit, a scourge upon the earth.

The damage numbers are all made up. These people get punishments exceeding those of violent crimes. It's all deeply unfair & unjust & immoral. The system debases itself by being a mean, cruel, unjust bastard with no remorse to adults. It's pathetic & weak & servile to the worst aspects of society (corporate cultures). Asshole Jack Valenti piece-of-shit RIAA lawyers & trashbag DRM systems are a heavy foot of injustice stomping down on the face of society, forever & ever. It's all woefully biased brutally against society & social possibility, for the greed of very few.

Alas there's seemingly next to no representation for the human cause. Patents & IP rights grow, & seemingly little curbs them, ever. The proprietarization of knowledge & intellect ever expands, a system unable unwilling & uninterested in checking the expansion of intellectual ownership. Fucking shit show man. Fucking awful. Fuck all this.

And, this unjust behaviour with intent, like lies do, hurts not like a mere blow, but like erosion of goodwill and trust of everyone, including unborn yet children of all paths of life.

(late edit: Valenti was an MPAA lawyer, a different head of the cerberus)

I never could wrap my head around long prison sentences. Even assuming a truly humane prison (not a reality in many places), which rehabilitates inmates well, it's hard to map a year, five years of prison on a crime that happened in one moment in time.

The way decisions, actions, arguments and repentance work in real life, as regularly seen with children, is usually on a short time frame. If you really need to punish someone - questionable in itself - maybe bring back the whip, but let people walk with a clean record the next day. If people can't be put back into society, they could be subsistence farmers with a netflix account in a fenced in plot of land or something. A significant change in scenery, and some forced lifestyle changes could be OK as part of a judgement

But putting humans behind bars? Nah...

I was a member of Razor back in the day.

I vaguely remember an intrincate big ascii logo, always wondered what 1911 meant.

I don't think I even knew back then (didn't care!) but from Wikipedia it's interesting!

> "The group was founded as Razor 2992 by Doctor No, Insane TTM and Sector9 in Norway in October 1985 as a Commodore 64 software cracking group. Shortly after, they changed from 2992 to 1911 which translates to 777 in hexadecimal."

Next question might be what is 2992? My best guess is it's b00b in little endian hex?

I always assumed it's a reference to the 1911 pistol... but it doesn't make a lot of sense when combined with razor haha.

Pretty sure I assumed the same thing at the time without asking :)

UHM....

Was one of two heads of DRG gaming labs at intel in the 90s...

Yeah Razor was massive back in that day and we ran a massive warez bbs out of that lab....

we got pre-deploy releases and....

the other guy went on to be evp of dev for blizzard...

FYI: I never knew who the 1911 guy was...

If you don't mind me asking, what motivated you? Were you afraid of law enforcement ever catching up? Was is just pure scene cred it even that did not matter much?

Initial motivation was being a teenager without enough money to buy all the new computer games coming out. From there, it was partly just excitement using new technology that was relevant to the scene (Linux, high speed networks, cool ANSI art). In general scene cred was a big motivator. I also ran a BBS, and being well known in the scene also meant that artists made you great art for your board for free, which was a nice benefit if you wanted a cool aesthetic on your BBS.

Aside from cred, there were a lot of like minded people and back then it was hard to find locals who were into computers/tech, so it was sort of a social network of sorts on IRC back then, I made real friends that I still keep in touch with today, so in a way it was a shared social activity.

One fun anecdote: When I was like 14, I got on a PBX 1800# call with some folks in a group I was in and it kind of blew my mind that I was talking to someone in Israel. It was like the world opened up. That is not novel today, but back then the idea of socializing and sharing ideas with people across the world in real-time (for free) was extremely exciting. Keep in mind back then long distance cost per minute, as did much of the dial-up internet.

About law enforcement: not much. Because I did see that minors were usually spared any real consequences, I mainly avoided anything that involved profit (though I once unwittingly bought a stolen modem for cheap, when it's that cheap you kind of know). There was an uptick of paranoia when Kevin Mitnick was busted (in the town I lived in), but for the most part we weren't doing the same kinds of crime he did (some of the folks I knew were, one ended up in prison for ~13 years). I also stopped being involved when I turned 18, which was a smart move. I got a visit from the FBI or state police (I don't remember) once, and my parents nearly shit a brick, and gave me a stern talking to because they were freaking out, but it turned out they were looking for a flasher who had been going around on Halloween! whew!

I didn't do any cracking, but I was a teenager in the late 90s and I share your thoughts on the way that computers and the internet eventually opened up my experience. I ended up making friends with any internet café owner in my city because that was the only reasonable place to use the internet before broadband.

Thanks for sharing!

Happy to share! I ended up working for an ISP at 16 so I could have T1 access and free ISDN at home. I was lucky the scene provided motivation to teach myself Linux and sysadmin stuff, which is where my career ended up going at the time.

Thanks for sharing!

When I was a kid, my dad worked for the government in a handful of fairly remote places, and even though I could dial in to places like TOTSE and The WELL, it cost a ton of money in long distance fees. As a result, there was always incentive to get access to 1-800 numbers that did things like give you a telnet prompt or a modem in a different city. I remember the first time I got access to a network that had internet connected hosts distributed around North America, and I sent an email across the country that arrived in the blink of an eye. When I saw that I was like, "Who the hell is paying for this...this dedicated high speed phone call that's probably been running nonstop since I was in kindergarten?" It didn't occur to me that by the late 80s and early 90s, a "phone call" was really more of a metaphysical fiction than anything else.

Not who you asked.

The reason was the juice. The excitement of sending stuff around the world before everyone else. I never cracked on x86 just a little bit with 6809.

I was a courier in late 90s(anyone recall FlashFXP). Fall of 1999 is when isonews.com(some old schoolers here will remember this website) got their homepage owned by the FBI. I left the scene that day.

1999 was still pretty early! iSONEWS launched in December '98, but really it was the spring of '99 when things really gained momentum. The domain seizure was 2003.

Ahh the memories

FlashFXP was insane! It's funny to think now a 1.2ish meg disk in 2 seconds between two servers seemed nuts and now I have almost 100Mbps to my house.

As a 15yo in the mid-90’s I was a member of and courier for a group called FaTe. Did it all over a 28.8k and later 56k modem. It was so much fun and I never once considered actually getting caught - it never felt real and the friends made along the way were worth it, at least in my case. Went to college and gave it all up. Studied a science but came back to IT and get paid today off of the skills I started learning back then.

Hope you guys are all using VPNs. I wasn't busted for piracy, but almost lost my freedom (even though I was a minor) for other computer related 'stuff'. I will neglect to say anything more for 'reasons'. :)

IIRC the statute of limitations for the CFAA only has a statute of limitations of 2 years, but there are so many other laws outside the CFAA (and copyright, etc.) that you can violate.

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