Anti Warez Association, 1 (1993) | Hacker News Reader

Anti Warez Association, 1 (1993)

defacto2.net

122 pointshggh81 comments

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Wow. I forgot all about the days when 0-day meant new releases of warez not an exploit in the wild. Good times.

Also fun to see these tied together... "The Zero Day Warez Girl was a Trojan"

I found this glossary: http://fuuu.be/hack/1000_Tutorials/1000_Tutorials/WAREZ%20DE...

There was certainly some colorful language.

It still means that on private trackers

This is quite a screed against folks they see as stuck in that scene. I joined BBS's around this time and didn't discover warez until much later.

Any obsession can become unhealthy, strange to see a whole zine focused on a subset of the warez scene. And it's not like the others didn't benefit from the labor of all these crackers and couriers.

Regardless, it is entertaining despite the judgemental tone.

My 14.4K modem cost more than my computer... ...so I could play MP Wolf3D on a local paid BBS.

It didn't work, but boy, after going from 2400 to 14.4K, that jpeg of Pamela Anderson topless downloaded in under a minute!

14.4 worked fine for Doom MP. Those fun days when a modem init string tweak could gain 10-50% performance increase. Became a sysop of a popular BBS at this time, which led to my 25 year IT career. Fond memories.

AT&F&D2&C1S0=0X4.

Let me tell you, there was more than one

Are you sure it was Wolf3D? The original 90's Wolfenstine was single player only...

yeah that was my memory of it too. I didn't recall MP until Doom.

Doom was famous for being one of the first Multiplayer PC games. There is an old anecdote about how John Carmack noted that it would be pretty easy to add network multiplayer to the code he was writing and John Romeo's eyes practically flashed dollar signs.

Of course as an afterthought it had a couple of issues. The primary one being that the framerate was locked to whomever had the slowest computer. Probably drove PC sales as you did NOT want to be the guy who showed up to the LAN party and tanked everyone's FPS.

Modems used to be a dollar a baud!

Its a joke.

We had weekly scene reports that ranked the FTP sites and groups. It also covered the drama, politics, group mergers or closures, and personal stories (under anonymity though). You got ranked by your performance on the sites that counted towards points. In order to upload files to a top 5 site, you would have to get into release groups and get the "pre", in other words, you get first dibs at uploading the files. Europe had the fastest internet connections especially Swedish and Finnish universities. Top 5 EU FTP sites were the most important. Followed by the top 5 US which were primarily hosted at Internet2 universities such as CMU, Georgia Tech, MIT, and Virginia Tech. These FTP sites were the first place any cracked release would be uploaded to. Almost like the root DNS servers for internet.

1993.

In those days, the major groups like Fairlight operated by postal ( / snail) mail network, too.

At some point, a mutual-game-swapping acquaintance judged (the then-teenaged) me trustworthy enough to bring in, and gave me a reference/sign up form. From then on I got a few printed out pages in the mail once per month, listing the new available wares of the month, and an order form.

You would send back the order form to a PO Box address, along with actual cash payment in the envelope, and a week later, a parcel with a stack of floppy disks would arrive.

I remember something similar ie an acquaintance of mine who was ´introduced’. He used to aggregate orders and forward them to his main provider, who eventually got busted, at which point my acquaintance stopped.

I remember thinking that this was very clearly not the regular disk swapping between kids, but a much more organised, for profit, enterprise.

I miss the kind of people who would write something like this. The early 90's were something special. Where did all of these folks go? The whole culture disappeared.

It's all written on Minecraft signs now, gramps. What was unique (imho and in retrospect) about that period was the longevity of its media.

And the sign says, "the words of the prophets were lost when the griefers called."

Today most guides on SH, sed, AWK, Perl, ANSI C, FVWM, Emacs... will just work even if they are from Linux Gazzete in the 90's.

For instance, setting up the XTerm title with terminal escapes, renaming files in batch with vidir (moreutils), ffmpeg/ImageMagick FX and transcoding...

Here you have a mirror:

https://github.com/linuxgazette/lg

Lots of awesome guides, retrocode, fun and comics inside.

We're all in our 30s and 40s and 50s working boring old jobs now.

No idea where the culture went. Probably because it was greenfield then, laws were lax if not nonexistent, etc.

Mass culture grew onto the Internet and homogenized everything. Politics finished off the resistance.

Culture's still here, still hanging out in the dark corners of the internet that most aren't invited to.

How do I get invited to them?

Also, probably discord.

from most of these things you get the energy out that you put in. You can't be part of amazing culture without manually sifting through niche culture on the regular. Without reading forum posts by frankly rubbish amateurs. Without going to the bar where different garage bands host their first gig every night. Almost by defintion anything media promotes to you won't be interesting and new.

If you just sit there and wait for it to come to you, you only get the things for which its worth people taking it to you. The things that extract the almighty dollar.

Okay, so the issue is, idk where to even begin to find such places let alone sift through them.

I found HN because I read a post by Scott Alexander (slate star codex), whom I found through lessWrong when I was studying RL and Control. And that was because I found OpenAI’s go-explore paper super interesting one night at the library which inspired me to go and do RL research for my thesis.

So I am hoping I get some pointers in here :D

Pay attention when wandering the Internet, and keep an eye out for interesting threads to pull get exceptionally interested in thread-pulling when people tell you not to pull them. Be prepared to not be squeaky clean, and be alert.

Gopher, Gemini, and https://wiby.me and https://search.marginalia.nu are still alive.

Usenet, too.

gopher intro: gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org

gemini intro: gemini://gemini.geminispace.info

More sites:

    gopher://1436.ninja

    gopher://adamsgaard.dk
    
    gopher://bay.parazy.de:666/7/q.dcgi?

    gopher://bitreich.org

    gopher://bitreich.org/9/radio/listen

    gopher://box.matto.nl

    gopher://gopher.erb.pw/1/roman

    gopher://gopher.icu
 
    gopher://gopher.viste.fr
 
    gopher://i-logout.cz
 
    gopher://i-logout.cz/1/bongusta
 
    gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1/bongusta/
 
    gopher://katolaz.net:70/1
 
    gopher://magical.fish
 
    gopher://medialab.freaknet.org

    gopher://ozz.ddns.net/1/
 
    gopher://republic.circumlunar.space
 
    gopher://sdf.org

    gopher://sdf.org/1/users/dbucklin
 
    gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/nm03
 
    gopher://texto-plano.xyz
 
    gopher://typed-hole.org
 
    gopher://uninformativ.de

    gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space

Usenet newsgrousps:

alt.2600

alt.2600.hackers

alt.2600.hope

alt.2600.hope.announce

alt.anonymous

alt.ascii-art

alt.comp.linux

alt.comp.os.linux

alt.computer.workshop

alt.culture.usenet

alt.cybergoth

alt.cyberpunk

alt.cyberpunk.movement

alt.cypherpunks

alt.fan.usenet

alt.folklore.computers

alt.linux

alt.os.linux

alt.os.linux.slackware

alt.privacy

alt.privacy.anon-server

alt.startrek

alt.sys.pdp10

alt.usenet

comp.arch

comp.infosystems.gemini

comp.infosystems.gopher

comp.lang.c

comp.lang.c.moderated

comp.lang.misc

comp.lang.perl

comp.lang.perl.announce

comp.lang.perl.faq

comp.lang.perl.misc

comp.lang.perl.moderated

comp.lang.perl.modules

comp.lang.perl.tk

comp.lang.scheme

comp.misc

comp.mobile.android

comp.mobile.android.misc

comp.mobile.misc

comp.os.cpm

comp.os.linux.misc

comp.risks

comp.unix.admin

comp.unix.misc

comp.unix.programmer

comp.unix.questions

comp.unix.shell

es.comp.hackers

es.comp.os.linux.anuncios

es.comp.os.linux.instalacion

es.comp.os.linux.misc

es.comp.os.linux.programacion

es.comp.os.linux.redes

hispagatos.chat

hispagatos.comunicados

hispagatos.talk

news.admin.moderation

news.announce.important

news.announce.newgroups

news.announce.newsgroups

news.groups

news.groups.proposals

news.software.nntp

rec.ars.movies.current-films

rec.ars.sf.tv

rec.ars.sf.written

rec.arts.int-fiction

rec.games.int-fiction

rec.games.roguelike.nethack

rec.radio.amateur.antenna

rec.radio.amateur.boatanchors

rec.radio.amateur.equipment

rec.radio.amateur.homebrew

rec.radio.amateur.misc

rec.radio.amateur.moderated

rec.radio.amateur.policy

rec.radio.amateur.space

rec.radio.info

rec.radio.shortwave

rocksolid.feeds

rocksolid.shared.i2p

sci.anthropology.paleo

sci.astro

sci.electronics.design

sci.electronics.repair

sci.environment

sci.logic

sci.math

sci.physics.relativity

sci.physics.research

talk.environment

talk.origins

True.

Apparently we're all right here. It was a special time, it was like watching the birth of the publicly networked universe.

We’re working for techbros and MBAs that destroyed the culture for profit.

MBAification is very real and very awful.

I have a working theory that it’s not just tech, or just MBAs, or just the opposite political people, or tactical division, or just (prescription) drugs or just enshitification, or just media… but all of the things at the same time. A big theory of why everything sucks.

For a microcosm… music. Music now objectively sucks, and it’s for all the reasons above at all the same time.

But if you made me pick a single thing… it would be MBAs ruining everything.

Interesting, I’d say music is a clear counterexample. I’m nostalgic for the 90s as well, but there is so much more great, diverse and wonderful music being made now than ever before. Even finding it isn’t really that hard, either.

Whenever someone says a particular art form sucks now, what they are really saying is that they don't like the mainstream version of that art form. The thing about art is that people are self-motivated to make it. Sure, the financial incentives aligning with good art can help spur more of it by allowing people to dedicate their whole lives to making art. However, there is always someone making cool stuff in their free time regardless of the financial reward.

There is more good art out there than any individual could possibly consume, it just becomes a little more difficult to find it when it isn't playing on the radio.

Disagree.

This is a subjective dismissal for a topic that is objectively been enshitified.

This isn’t “back in my day”. There is objectively less quality and massively more quantity.

* With studio quality equipment being reduced to almost literally nothing anyone can be in the game.

* Studios don’t need to pay to developer artists. They are entirely disposable now.

* Albums aren’t at all important. There is very little in the way of major releases outside some traditional artists. Just dump a single to Spotify and walk away.

* Directly from an executive that worked a major label - people that actually like music are no limited to basically just sound engineers. Everyone else has a MBA and couldn’t care less if they were making movies or music or gears.

* From the same high up executive I am social with - Rap has been hit the hardest. It is objectively garbage. There are no Nas, or NWA, or Eminems coming up. The last of the actual poets that got any play at all like Kendrick for example just aren’t pushed. It comes back to quantity, but as a side note he did lament how these guys are the worst to try and deal with if they try to at all.

* Automation has hit this industry with its massive influx of quantity. Basically get on Spotify and get to a level, then you’ll get an automated contact, maybe they’ll front you a few thousand at a bad deal so you can set up your own tour and make a couple dollars. If you fuck up or whatever they just move on to the next one. Literally no one cares about you until you hit a Spotify number.

* previously there were things like handlers and PR. But now, as an artist you are entirely on your own. Want to do a porn or have a mental breakdown? Ok so what, you are more of a number in a system than you have ever been. There is no “guy from the label” until you are at the top Spotify tiers.

* it’s not all studios and MBAs and labels. There’s a side effect going on as a culture we don’t really have a shared listening experience. Since the invention of radio, we all heard roughly the same thing at the same time. Now, kids have their on playlists and maybe they recommend some thing on that playlist to their friends, but you go one school over and they can have drastically different collections. They aren’t hearing the same song on the radio, there is no Casey Kasem‘s Top 40, everyone has been down selecting their own optimization.

* trust me, if you knew my history with music, you’d be shocked as I would typically be the last person in the world to recognize any positive effects that labels and the industry had on the art. It’s strange days my man.

* do you know the phrase “it takes a lifetime to make the first album, and the year to make the second”? Part of that is it your first album has so much polish. You need to hit hard to get the eye of a label. There’s no reason to hold a song back now at all, to work on it, to have versions that you’d like to hear better when you’re touring, versus on a car stereo versus in the studio… there’s no reason to polish anything anymore. You get it out you were Lisa you put it on Spotify and move along. Just like everybody else is doing.

So no. Objectively, the quantity of music has grown exponentially and the overall and polish quality has gone down.

I will old man shakes his fist of clouds all day, but I won’t take some thing so obvious and as many examples is this has, and just dismiss it as that.

Your comment here is helping to prove my point. You are equating the music industry with music as an art form. Studio equipment being cheaper and there being no "major releases" or "shared listening experience" does not mean music today is worse. It just means the mainstream has broadened to a degree that it barely exists. Complaining about that is effectively old man yelling at clouds behavior. But if you are truly craving the mainstream shared experience, Taylor Swift is currently in the middle of the most culturally relevant concert tour in decades.

>Taylor Swift is currently in the middle of the most culturally relevant concert tour in decades.

Name another.

Name one that came up in the last ten years that is at your Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, whatever pop level. Who is the biggest name in country right now and when did they come up? How about rap?

You're refusing to look at it outside yourself. It's hard to say what good art it - but it's pretty damn easy to say what bad art is. I'm not talking about preference, I'm talking about "everyone is special" pushed so much that there are more than there used to be with less polish and drive. It takes a lot less talent and vision to just see that it's just being pumped out by everyone for free.

The labels figured out quickly they don't need these superstars anymore. It's the effect from influencers. Or AAA movies, where is this generations DeCaprio? .... It's DeCarpio.

Do you remember when Lady Gaga's dog walked was shot and the dogs stolen? That was expensive for Universal. Why bother?

Remember when Britney broken and shaved her head? Who needs that?

If you have 100000 gorgeous little starlets that can sing ready to replace each other, who cares if one kills someone in DUI or releases a porn/onlyfans? Why pay for PR and handlers and management when you can just replace them?

And for the same reasons you don't need to invest in them for a shared cultural listening experience. Everyone can sing into equipment the Beatles would have murdered each other for then release it worldwide in the time it takes to cross abbey road.

How can you not see the effect of that is lower quality?

> It's hard to say what good art it - but it's pretty damn easy to say what bad art is. I'm not talking about preference, I'm talking about "everyone is special" pushed so much that there are more than there used to be with less polish and drive.

Not only are you talking about preference, its preference for superficial marketing.

> Why pay for PR and handlers and management

Do these things make better art, or just better sell mediocre art?

>Do these things make better art, or just better sell mediocre art?

It's downstream effect.

Who did Kurt Kobain grow up listening to? Chili peppers? Who did Dolly Parton learn from and idolize? I bet they were on polished albums and tours and on the radio. You had to be pretty good to have money invested into you then. Who did the great Jazz artists listen to? Black records were absolutely a thing, and they weren't glued to their phones, they were in clubs and on streets. Country was far more from campfires after a long day because it didn't make sense to try and ride back home, now you GPS tag the cattle and take the four wheelers out, be back in an hour no one is sitting around.

Some kid in Seattle is probably out there with a lot of talent and a lot to say... With no one great of his generation to learn from. Just a higher quantity of blah music than at any point in history.

It's culture. We've killed our shared music experience ironically by connecting everyone and everything.

I'm done with this topic for the most part... For my final point.... trap and drill exist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJq7yjDT9Qw You point out ANY musical theory in this, then go listen to Illmatic (one love)

I disagree with the specifics (eg music doesn't "objectively suck," that's an oxymoron) but I think we're directionally on the same page. I have a similar hypothesis I call "The Complexity Crisis," which is that our willingness to create new systems and to expand existing ones outpaces our ability to manage that complexity. Leading to a constellation of seemingly independent crises (eg, the climate crisis, financial crises, armed conflicts, ...).

I was thinking about this. Our city just spent $45 million a bridge and wants to change it around some one way streets which means new signage, parking, and a few lights at a cost of $20 million.

Basically for all good reasons of safety and codes and bla, we can’t even make roads and bridges in a sustainable way. There isn’t going to be a “solution” to the housing crisis because it will never cost less to build a house. It’s not like the 1960s where you can do it, you need permits and specialists and etc.

How is my city going to do anything about the homeless when it costs $20 million to change the direction of a few streets?

A willingness to expand systems is an interesting idea.

Music only sucks if you're over 35. Always has.

Classical music is pretty good

Not the case for me at all. Pop/mass-culture music sucks, but that is an opinion that didn't change for me since I was 16.

I quite like a lot of pop from my youth, music that I turned my nose up at back then.

I don’t disagree with this as a general rule but I wrote a much longer post in another chain that details why (of course!) I am right ;)

We’ve seen the biggest change in music since the early 1900s deployment of music on the radio. And it has been a change that resulted in objectively high qulity recordings but almost nothing at all to say or feel. The quantity and enshitification is unmistakably bad.

So, this is a very niche community specific inside joke (or diss) which I think never really went away, you just need to find a small and nerdy community and you'll see this kind of stuff come up from time to time. I used to see this in forums but now I'd argue this sort of thing is easier to find on Discord, maybe.

I dropped out to focus on college and then all the FBI busts happened. I work in tech now. I lost touch with most people.

I can still find my name and groups in the scene reports that have been archived on defacto2.

It was once in a lifetime. Now most everyone's following commercial maximes while faking enthusiasm and dying inside a bit every year.

It’s quite depressing.. Even more recently, the early days of youtube when it just edutainment, and gaming were great .. but now I see VSauce making short format videos (tiktok equivalent) and looking dead inside.

The stress, living costs, and commercialisation of everything has sapped the internet of what made it so good in the first place.

Not VSauce too :( It's like a virus.

$$$ is the culprit. The lie that people only make things because patreon dollars, because ad impressions, because sponsorships. They begin to optimise for these metrics and not the most important metric (fun).

The lie in general that creative output only happens because people pay for it is wrong in so many ways. People love to be creatively fulfilled. I'd argue the exact opposite, that unless something else is physically preventing them, people will make creative things. Video, songs, games, writing.

I think most of OSS is evidence that people will do creative things for free.

I suppose that if people's needs were met, more of them would be willing to do all these for free without chasing a dragon.

Advertisements did this.

You are on "hacker" news, where people are "passionate about SEO"

Groupies never know where the artists have gone. Only the artists know.

They got golden handcuffs and forced to become normies.

Where did all of these folks go?

Zine writer Jason Farnon, who likely is the same Jason Farnon from the AWA issue in the OP although I don't know this for certain, wrote this article in his zine I Bleed For This? in 1996:

http://textfiles.com/magazines/IBFT/ibft045.txt

A recommended read for people who wonder where this culture went as the people who were in it got Real Jobs in the Real World. This file affected me personally pretty deeply in my teens -- now as an adult it feels a little over-dramatic but it's written from a place of honesty and it's just one of those things that you read when you're 17 and you swear up and down that will never be me.

This brings back memories of EFNET #warez in the mid early ‘90s. It was invite only of course.

I hung out in #Altrock

One of the ops in #warez had the genius idea to register breasts.com back in the early '90s when domain names were literally free. He got retirement money almost immediately, to the tune of 50k a month. Probably got a small fortune when he sold the domain.

> It is hereforth proclaimeth the establishment of the Anti Warez Association by it's founders and charter members:

> the Anti Warez Association announces it's establishment and openly begins soliciting membership.

Trying to write in formal/archaic English while systematically misspelling "its".

To be fair to them, it was hard to Google how to spell something when you were using a 14.4Kbps modem and Google wouldn't be launched for another five years.

The site was down for me. https://web.archive.org/web/20230814142753/https://defacto2....

i also miss the 90s, particularly the phrack49 era unleashed by aleph1's smashing the stack for fun and profit

maybe with lora and riscv this time will come back

open computers that can talk to each other, jump to an address and execute code

hack the planet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMGOm9E-HakThePlanet

Very interesting URL, it redirects to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMGOm9E-Hak. I didn't know that you can append whatever you want to the video ID.

Yep. Occasionally used for silliness.

I uh, wish I had read this back in 1993 - although I would not have taken it serious, but thought of it as humour, sarcasm, slapstick or irony.

   "We don't crack software, we crack kitchen counters"

l33t times.

old school trolling, calling out IRC D00DZ, skitties, and crackers.

Did you pronounce it Wares as in soft”wares” or to rhyme with Juarez?

When I first encountered the latter it was eye-opening.

Some of my friends pronounced with emphasis on “war”

That was how I thought it was pronounced as a kid. I don't think I knew "wares".

It was the best of times. Period.

Was like the Matrix before you knew what it was about.

Was when kids and nerds were a decade ahead of the rule followers.

Was total freedom.

There's a little bit of that piratical spirit in the crypto and AI spheres. A lot of charlatans though..

The key was there wasn’t any money it; there was value but the ability to even send remote money was so rudimentary that the only people doing the things were amateurs in the true sense of the word - doing it for the love of the thing.

At the core warez was about money. All the elite boards charged money. How would you expect them to pay for 10 isdn lines? Yeah, all the culture around was teenage geek stuff. But at the core is was some serious underground business that's why it was busted.

>comrade@gnu.ai.mit.edu

Ah of course it's GNU. That explains the, uh, peculiar sense of humor. Or rather the complete dearth thereof.

I saw the email and thought it was going to be a talk on how with Open Source software there is no need to Pirate.

Instead it seemed to be a very very long piece of "Warez bad, Warez people dumb" over and over again. Maybe, I kinda glazed over after the third screen. Maybe that's the point? Later on it had (presumably long dead) IP addresses for (ftp?) servers with Warez and porn.

It felt like the kind of .txt file that can only be produced late at night in a dorm room with empty cans of Mountain Dew scattered about.

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