pouët.net

Sparcus: Who cares about those fucking "groups", it's about people who do wrong. And they should be caught, simply for breaking the law. And I certainly dno't blame the Department of Justice for not investigating the roots of a totally irrelevant subcultural tag used by a group of criminals. Not if they can just catch 'em like this :)

The point is that it costs way to much to hunt the kids down. And really, they dont cost that much, prety much the opposite according to all software companies i know about :)

(ofcourse they cant say this OFFICIALLY)

p2p is lame anonymous shit where the last fucking lamer can participate. you can get stuff without doing anything for it, same goes to fxp boards and xdcc channels. fuck that shit! no true scener should support that.

P2P / XDCC kills the scane. FXP BOARD lamers are getting the feds on the real scene's back. BOYKOTT THAT SHIT!

Plek: I care about that statement on the dutch DoJ site because when they start searching houses and arresting people (things which should *not* be taken lightly) I want them to have their facts straight.

Who cares about warez anyways??? :P

Maali: it should be "we are all members of Fairlight" - just like in the - where was it again? - with jews in the late 30ies!

Optimus: oh come on! how much software do you *own*? What you don't apparently care about are viruses in your memory stick. :>

The antivirus you suggested me is cool, but it showed up that me, my computer and my USB stick are clean ;]

I have Windows95 original :]
The girl owned it, who sold me the crappy Pentium2..
Classic!

dip: that's another problem which can't be fought imho... we are in 2004 you know :p

but i was talking about the obsolete and vulnerable structure of the scene organized around a hierarchy of ftpd... that's so 90s ! ;)

the future key is a system of private secured sshed p2p networks with *weak* links between them... ok the system will be slower and less efficient, but more ethical (we share mostly between friends, not with everyone on the planet) and far more bulletproof :p

you should have a look at the essay called "Next-Generation File Sharing with Social Networks"

the scene you have known is dead, such a surprise ! ;p

there are far more effective ways to stop piracy then hunting down warez groups, i'm absolutely sure about that, the most simple solution would be to offer cheaper software, and charge extra for support, daily updates etc etc, the list can be made long, very long. however, most companies haven't realised this yet but i'm pretty sure that in a couple of years the prices will drop because it will proove to be a more cheaper way of getting rid of piracy.

Mmm,. actually I didn't wanted to say "who cares about Warez" but who cares about such discussions? Because they are preety old and I hear the same and the same arguments. Personally I had enough of these a lot of years ago in greek forums and letters in a commercial computer magazine. It's funny to me to see the scene talking about piracy :)

Sparcus: I believe they've got the basic facts quite straight. The DoJ does not take such actions lightly either (it hardly happens, while piracy is an ever ongoing daily practice, certain at a campus like in Twente), but getting facts straight about irrelevant subcultural bullshit is not and will never be their top priority. The top priority was to arrest those who most probably did wrong; not guilty until proven of course. But they probably were not generating those hundreds of GB's of data-traffic by exchanging uncompressed white noise. Or spreading digital media, or whatever :)

zest- Smart man. I'm actually developing such an application right now. Interested in helping? ;-)

dip- I hope you're joking, man... As Zest pointed out, this is 2004. That sort elitist attitude doesn't really have any relevance in this age of almost free-floating information utopia.

elitism is useful when filtering out the useful stuff from the garbage

elitism is so november 1999 like, if you know what i mean ;-)

So are you, venomsoup.

:P

gargaj- It's useful for being closed-minded about your chosen area of masturbation, that's for sure.

You're funny.

Since we're talking crime here, a lot of people prefer the anonymous aspect. Waving your dick around in cracktros gets you arrested, boys and girls!

I love it when warez people talk ethics...

p2p is never anonymous.

Plek, you're very wrong here. The DoJ and the FBI made it pretty clear that they were organizing "organized criminal groups" (I even read the term international crime syndicate somewhere. And since they're investigating organizations they should know how these organisations work, they should know that not every member of these groups are warezpeople, they should understand the concept of the demoscene as well. And most important of all, they should be careful in their press releases and give the public correct information because currently their information harms non-guilty people.

I really don't give a shit about those warezpeople, but I do care about the demoscene, and what I currently see is that groups like Fairlight are now portraited in the media as some sort of maffia organisation. People from these groups visit the same parties as we do and they are active on the same websites as we do. What do you think would happen if for example the local politicians of Bingen would hear that people from Fairlight visited Breakpoint? Do you think there would be another Breakpoint ever again in that town? I seriously doubt that.

Sparcus, we all know local politicians will sometimes do stupid things, like banning events on DoJ or police supplied information rather than a judge's verdict. This happens all the time in football for example... Yet there are millions of people watching football on TV or in stadiums every weekend. I don't see the game getting banned anytime soon, and neither will the demoscene as long as enough non-criminal elements keep showing up at parties (in whatever village they're being organized).

RaD Man: I don't really see the point in blaming MPAA and RIAA when the FBI primarily went after game groups.

Anyway, if they really were selling warez as some articles claim, they had it coming for them. But I feel a bit sad about the loss. If it weren't for the warez scene, we probably would have lost many of the games for older systems like the C64 and the Amiga.

havoc: The difference is that any local politican knows what football is, while most of them don't have a clue about the demoscene :-)

Luckily they only showed some ascii logo of Fairlight on the dutch
news, but imagine what would have happened if they had shown
one of their cracktro's? A lot of us would have heard the phrase "hey,
isn't that what you do?" from friends and relatives (or worse, bosses) if that would have happened ;-)

I doubt demosceners will be arrested due to being associated with the warez-scene, but i have strong feelings that demosceners will be arrested due to heavy drinking and drug abuse :)))