101–110 of 231 posts
When I first got in the Internet back in the 90s I thought warez was pronounced like Juarez the town in Mexico. To this very day when I see the word that's what it sounds like in my mind.
"Man got some prime warez on these zip disks.. dupe em!" Back when lan parties were the norm.
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…
"...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 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.
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But it serves corporations that governments work for. and it's ironic that we pay for it while big corporations can avoid paying taxes as they please.
I'm the last person to defend corporations. That said, US corporations definitely don't avoid "paying taxes." The corporate income tax rate imposed by the federal government is 21%. Employees pay income and social security taxes on top of those earnings after. From the moment a company earns income until it lands in the hands of employees the government can take as much as HALF of it. This includes everyone on salary…
Multinational corporations definitely do. They'll register themselves in a country with a cheaper corporate tax burden then argue that their income / sales is generated from that country rather than their actual country of origin. Thus reducing the amount of tax they have to pay in the US (or UK, etc).
Why do people like him think copyright laws are bad and made by rich people, but also support open source software, which relies on the same copyright laws to exist. If hes an anarchist then fine, but it looks like he wants laws that benefit him and not people that actually write software. I read the whole thing and I still don't know why he did it. He says there was no money incentive and his work had no impact on p…
Because they have more nuanced thoughts that you think ?
"A copyright law" is not a one thing.
DMCA doesn't touch OSS software for example. It could entirely go away.
Length of copyright protection could be 5 years from creation instead of 70y from authors death and it would do near jack squat to OSS software. Ye you could use 5y worth of unfixed bugs and ignore OSS license but that wouldn't exactly hurt most projects.
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That's why it's always important the jury be educated on their rights to decide verdicts however they see fit.
Juries do not have the “right” to ignore the law. Juries are required to follow the law as set forth in the judge’s jury instructions. Their job is just to determine the facts and apply the law to the facts. As a legal matter, nobody gives a shit what twelve random people think about the law enacted by the democratically elected legislature. “Jury nullification” therefore isn’t a “right” it’s a loophole. It arises fr…
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I was a minor and it was 30 or so years ago, I don't think I'm at much risk. I think it was an interesting time in tech and worth sharing some of the details of what went on. Also, most of the people that served time weren't busted because of piracy alone, they were often involved in some adjacent crime like trading credit card numbers, buying/selling stolen equipment, malware, or some other fraud.
I imagine there are a bunch of us "Scene kids" around, Everyone I know that got arrested were the for same reasons. Ironically most of us ended up in very interesting positions / senior positions at a lot of modern companies. Our general rule of thumb was, don't make any money. I often wonder if there are old boxes sitting in storage around universities all over the US, that contain a ton of releases that have been l…
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That's why it's always important the jury be educated on their rights to decide verdicts however they see fit.
I get the appeal, but this is a super dangerous precedent. If we ignore the law and allow juries to convict or acquit based on their personal preferences, what safety do you have when the public hates you but you've broken no law?
My childhood hero. Sad to read what he went through in prison. The warez scene is still active and there's no slowing down so this bust doesn't really mean shit. Shoutout to the OGs RELOADED, SKIDROW, RAZOR, PARADOX,CODEX.
Ah, PARADOX. Nostalgia when hearing the Photoshop CS2 Keygen music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYvjFOKOP7c
Ruined a guys life because of overestimated profits. Ridiculous
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... > The principal criminal statute protecting copyrighted works is 17 U.S.C. § 506(a), which provides that "[a]ny person who infringes a copyright willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" shall be punished as provided in 18 U.S.C. § 2319. Section 2319 provides, in pertinent part, that a 5-year felony shall apply if the…
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I imagine there are a bunch of us "Scene kids" around, Everyone I know that got arrested were the for same reasons. Ironically most of us ended up in very interesting positions / senior positions at a lot of modern companies. Our general rule of thumb was, don't make any money. I often wonder if there are old boxes sitting in storage around universities all over the US, that contain a ton of releases that have been l…
That anti-profit motive is exactly the one I followed as well! Yep I remembered so many of the boxes we uploaded to were wired into a university network in random closets in MIT and other universities. Your HN karma is 1337 right now lol!
Yeah we had FXP hosts on most of the east coast universities. Those were the days of just having fun. Ironically it's the knowledge and experiences of being in the scene that quasi got me into working for the government and those letters agencies. I was fortunate that the only real trouble I caused was met with education and support rather than a harsh response. If I was born 5 years later with the slow deployment of ZERO tolerance policies I would have been screwed.
I still give back though, I have a few racked servers that are out there sharing torrents (all legal data), and run a bunch of crawlers for archive.org etc. It's as close as I can get these days to the olden days.