How Net piaracy works

Rew

Very good Wired article that explains the piracy scene very well.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html

Before any Mods get over zelous it doesn't explain how to get illeagel stuff. I still remember the weeks ban I got for posting a harmless link...

weemcd

a good article but it goes a bit over the top in places, like a scene from hackers or something at times i thought he was taking the piss, especially

"The FBI would kill to be sitting here looking at this,"

rofl like they are taking the piss with that one

Spunog UIE

pretty good.

OfflerCrocGod

Pile of crap and way over the top

Rew

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

Pile of crap and way over the top

In what way? Its accurarte but a bit "sexed" up to apeale to the masses.

talking_walnut

I've always found it facinating just how organised the whole scene is. I remember reading the rules for releasing games a while back. They're quite strict

OfflerCrocGod

Rew wrote:

In what way? Its accurarte but a bit "sexed" up to apeale to the masses.

One word: "Bittorrent". It makes all this over the top spy/fiction crap utterly worthless, the article really made the scene sound a lot more criminal and dangerous then it actually is. I mean Doom 3 was relased first my a kid working in a games store in the UK, he just ripped it and made a torrent from it and placed on a public tracker. No big "pyramid/network" of releasers. I've seeded a few thing myself - I share 130GB worth of files myself, I'm not part of any big pirate network.

An interview subject warned me against even mentioning Anathema in this article: "You do not need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door."

These guys are mainly kids ffs, they don't even make cash from their releases, tons of spice and way over the top journalism - it's just a bid to increase the number of click-throughs.

Rew

Its beyond organised hence the various law enforcement crowds have never managed to compleatly crack it.

ObeyGiant

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

One word: "Bittorrent". It makes all this over the top spy/fiction crap utterly worthless, the article really made the scene sound a lot more criminal and dangerous then it actually is. I mean Doom 3 was relased first my a kid working in a games store in the UK

If you could please get beyond the idea that there is more to piracy than bittorrent, we could start getting somewhere. Bittorrent is the bottom of the feeding chain when it comes to piracy, and I can guarantee that Doom 3 was not first released by that "kid". Perhaps it was first released to the general public when this guy seeded his rip, but it was almost certainly floating around these private groups for much longer.

aidan_walsh

ObeyGiant wrote:

If you could please get beyond the idea that there is more to piracy than bittorrent

Thats not so hard for people to believe, as it is to ask them to accept that there is more to Bittorrent than piracy... :rolleyes:

Rew

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

One word: "Bittorrent". It makes all this over the top spy/fiction crap utterly worthless, the article really made the scene sound a lot more criminal and dangerous then it actually is. I mean Doom 3 was relased first my a kid working in a games store in the UK, he just ripped it and made a torrent from it and placed on a public tracker. No big "pyramid/network" of releasers. I've seeded a few thing myself - I share 130GB worth of files myself, I'm not part of any big pirate network.
These guys are mainly kids ffs, they don't even make cash from their releases, tons of spice and way over the top journalism - it's just a bid to increase the number of click-throughs.

Where is the quality control in Bitorent? Who nukes the crap? Did the kid crack the game as well? As far as I know Doom was released 2 weeks before the street date. Give me the torent date and ill dig out the "topsite" date.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

OfflerCrocGod

Rew wrote:

Its beyond organised hence the various law enforcement crowds have never managed to compleatly crack it.

No, law organisations have better things to do with their time. Also new kids join in as others are fined ( ye fined you don't get the death penalty for this mafia style, top secret, criminal mastermind, evil spy, society thing!!! ), I'm sure you know about all the arrests in the last while shutting down all those huge DC++ hubs in Iceland, all it takes is a simple trace of an IP address......not beyond a modern police organization ( if they are legally allowed do that of course! ) And those kids servers were seized.....of course a bunch of users from Sweden are covering Iceland until they get themselves back up. Not very glamorous.....just a bunch of kids.

ObeyGiant wrote:

If you could please get beyond the idea that there is more to piracy than bittorrent, we could start getting somewhere. Bittorrent is the bottom of the feeding chain when it comes to piracy, and I can guarantee that Doom 3 was not first released by that "kid". Perhaps it was first released to the general public when this guy seeded his rip, but it was almost certainly floating around these private groups for much longer.

His was the first "released to the general public" ( that's what counts it's all a race! ) he worked in a shop.....just like the vast majority of the people who make these rips, just a kid who had internet and riped the isos - big deal I could have done that. Bittorrent is a very efficient way of spreading files, much better then IRC or anything else ( I presume you are talking about IRC/DC++/USENET etc when you speak of "other ways" ). Look at Half-Life 2 no one had the complete version until after the game was released - that's because the kids couldn't make a rip until Valve relased the game......very impressive. The "scene" is not some huge mafia style group it's just bored teenagers and kids who grab discs from shops and disc presses and rip them and stick them onto fast servers and then either seed them or put them onto DC++ hubs. They most definitely do not hire hit men to kill people who talk about their servers It's more a pastime or a hobby, it's fun to be first, you get kudos from your friends, there is no profit in it.

Rew wrote:

Where is the quality control in Bitorent? Who nukes the crap? Did the kid crack the game as well? As far as I know Doom was released 2 weeks before the street date. Give me the torent date and ill dig out the "topsite" date.

Supr had 30 or so sub-editors making sure torrents were OK.....I'm sure you knew that. There are craking kits out there which will patch the relevant files of the game to crack it.....usually involves modifying one or two files that perform security checks - all that has to be done is figure out the protection used on the game and then use the relevant kit. Of course when new protection is relased it can take sometime before it's cracked ( TOCA 2 took weeks!!! ). I got it two weeks before the Irish release date, or a week before the US release date, so it depends on which date you use. Either way there is a couple of hours/one or two days time difference between the torrent and the FTP topsite starting dumping.....hardly worth the bother

"One file became 30 files became 3,000 files became 300,000 files ", "One confiscated server alone contained 65,000" "In 24 hours, SMF's single version of The Hulk had metastasized into at least 50,000 copies"

From that the bootlegers need to contol petabytes of disk storage. A gig per movie, times 100,000 sites is a petabyte, times 52 weeks a year, times 4 movies a week, is around, 200 petabytes. Even if all files were 100 megs, then that's still 20 petabytes. Or 65'000 files each 700MB ( lots of movies are bigger then that ) is about 45 Terabytes.......Mother of God that is MASSIVE storage for one site. The bandwidth to move all this has to be mind blowing! All this equipment costs and costs a lot ( servers, storage and the internet connections required to move so much data - and these kids don't make any cash from this. ). Wired just sensationalised the entire article, this article really stinks, it makes a bunch of kids seem like some massive dark mafia-like force.

Basq

On a somewhat related subject.. read this: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=2243685

Interesting.. first i've heard of it with Irish ISP's!

Rew

basquille wrote:

On a somewhat related subject.. read this: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=2243685

Interesting.. first i've heard of it with Irish ISP's!

Speaks volumes about the the merits of encrypted FXP's

ObeyGiant

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

No, law organisations have better things to do with their time.

With the amount of [financial] pressure being put on them by the movie studios, I'd say clamping down on piracy would be pretty high on their list right now.

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

His was the first "released to the general public" ( that's what counts it's all a race! )

Unfortunately, it's not all that counts in this race. From reading the article, we learn that the kids have absolutely no interest in the general public, and the real recognition comes from being the first to release it among a small group of like-minded friends. From there, it generally trickles further out until it reaches the "general public". When your boy released his copy, it had already been doing the rounds among pirate groups for a couple of weeks.

Look at Half-Life 2 no one had the complete version until after the game was released - that's because the kids couldn't make a rip until Valve relased the game......very impressive. The "scene" is not some huge mafia style group it's just bored teenagers and kids who grab discs from shops and disc presses

Interesting that you make such assumptions about "the scene" while mentioning the Half-Life 2 case, which proves that your statement is just plain wrong. The two stories I have heard about the Half-Life 2 leak were both well-engineered cracks which took a fair amount of knowledge to pull off. They may have been pulled off by "bored teenagers", but they certainly did a lot more than just grab the disc from the shops.

It's more a pastime or a hobby, it's fun to be first, you get kudos from your friends, there is no profit in it.

Did you even read the article? If you did, you must have seen this bit: "as Forest likes to point out, that no one gets paid (unless they strike up relations with for-profit Chinese bootleggers, which is considered bad form)". If you did, then I'm assuming your point above was merely an excercise in tautology, and not an actual complaint about the accuracy of the article.

Or 65'000 files each 700MB ... Wired just sensationalised the entire article, this article really stinks, it makes a bunch of kids seem like some massive dark mafia-like force.

Did the BBC also sensationalise their article? Did Techweb? These numbers were pulled from an actual news report. Remember, Wired write for an extremely tech-savvy audience, and they couldn't get away with pulling some absurdly large number out of their ass, with no basis in reality just because the number sounds "sensational".

Ponster

As an ex-admin of a popular FXP board I can say that the article is pretty accurate, explaining how the warez makes it down to the P2P feeders but seems a little jazzed up for the general public.

OfflerCrocGod

Ponster wrote:

As an ex-admin of a popular FXP board I can say that the article is pretty accurate, explaining how the warez makes it down to the P2P feeders but seems a little jazzed up for the general public.

That was my problem it was just hyped up and made seem a lot more dangerous and mysterious then it actually is, "Darknet", "Shadow Internet" and "terrorizing the entertainment business" instead of the far less interesting SFTPs and profitless and hitmanless "bunch of kids sharing files". If they really were sharing 65,000 files then they would probably be music files and not movies ( that's 325GB if each mp3 is on average 5MB, I have more than that amount of storage on my PC.....a lot less amazing then petabytes ). Yes, recentely law agencies are receiving lots of pressure about this and they are catching people.....but most people just get a letter or a fine, since they are underage.

it had already been doing the rounds among pirate groups for a couple of weeks.

Fat chance since the game had only been code-completed 2 weeks before hand.....unless these "Shadow Internet" groups had access to a time machine. Having your copy released first was a very important thing for a hyped game like Doom 3, I can't see them just sitting on the game "for a couple of weeks" ( reloaded seemed to have released in on the 1st, a few hours after the kid ). If you are talking about the half life 2 leak that wasn't the complete game ( "BETA" is not even close ) and it was a lone cracker who just trojaned Valve with the help of Outlook ( hopefully they are using thunderbird now ). The article didn't really emphasize the hobby part of the groups, they don't set out to "terrorize the entertainment business", for the majority it's just pastime ffs, they mean no real harm.

ObeyGiant

Moving attrociously off-topic...

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

Fat chance since the game had only been code-completed 2 weeks before hand

Of course, but what about the intermediary step? In between the delivery of a "gold" copy to the reproduction facilities and the actual release date there is a large window where the pirate groups can get a copy of this software. Ignoring the rumours I'd heard about Doom 3 - the article itself says that this is the best time for pirate groups to get their hands on the things they want, as copies are thrown out for mis-aligned labels on the cd/dvd.

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

If you are talking about the half life 2 leak that wasn't the complete game ( "BETA" is not even close ) and it was a lone cracker who just trojaned Valve with the help of Outlook

Regardless of the amount of the game he escaped with, the point I was making is that piracy is not all "bored teenagers ripping CDs from shops", as you were making out, in an attempt to highlight that your views on piracy are wrong, and are perhaps closer to the picture painted by Wired than you think, and as such, the article deserves less of your ire.

(By the way, "Just trojaned Valve" is a disgusting dismissal of the actual effort involved in what that kid did - as much as I sympathise with Valve and am thoroughly against most forms of piracy, I can't help but be impressed with the lengths this guy went to)

(Also, that's just one story.. the other involves someone hunting down a company owned by GabeN's brother/cousin/whatever whose web server was hosted on Valve's network, cracking this, then sniffing passwords through this.. also impressive)

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

The article didn't really emphasize the hobby part of the groups, they don't set out to "terrorize the entertainment business", for the majority it's just pastime ffs, they mean no real harm.

Respectfully, I disagree. "You do not need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door." aside, my reading of the article was that these were a bunch of kids out to have a bit of fun and not really cause any harm. Or at least, they weren't setting out to cause harm, but don't care if that happens along the way so long as it doesn't interrupt their fun. Again, from the article: "The kids in the scene aren't trying to bomb the system. They don't care a whit whether major labels suffer more from file-sharing than indie labels, or if a ban on prerelease DVDs affects Miramax's chances at the Academy Awards. They do this because it feels mildly rebellious, like smoking a doobie behind the local Kroger or setting off the school fire alarm - and because it's fun."