Warez Wars

              For the Inner Circle, cracking software is a challenge. For the wannabe underground, collecting it is an obsession. For the software industry, it's a billion-dollar nightmare. 

              By David McCandless

              Sunday morning, 7 a.m., somewhere in US Eastern
              Standard Time: Mad Hatter gets up, has a glass
              of Seagram's Ginger Ale and a cigarette, and
              checks his machine, which has been running
              automated scripts all night. He looks for errors
              and then reads his email. He has 30 messages
              from all over the world: some fan mail, a couple
              of flames, a few snippets of interesting
              information, three or four requests - some
              clear, some PGP-encoded. After a quick espresso
              and another cigarette, he surveys the contents
              of a few private FTP sites, filters through a
              bunch of new files, and then reroutes the good
              stuff to his newsreader. After breakfast with
              the family, another wave of automated scripts
              kicks in. The ISDN connection hums to life. A
              steady stream of bytes departs his machine 128
              Kbps and vanishes into the ether. By the end of
              the day Mad Hatter, a ringleader of the software
              piracy group called the Inner Circle, will have
              poured 300 Mbytes of illegal "warez" onto the
              Internet.

              Monday morning, 9 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time:
              Phil arrives for work in Bracknell, England, in a
              suit and tie, just back from a few days in
              Switzerland. Inside Novell UK's glossy
              five-story headquarters, he lets himself into his
              office. It looks like a mad, bad bedroom - shiny
              desktops and derelict ones, disemboweled
              minitowers and battered servers, every last
              expansion slot distended with DAT machines,
              CD-ROM burners, extra hard drives. A metal shelf
              unit contains a rack of monitors, some video
              equipment, spare keyboards. Everything is wired
              insanely to a single ISDN line. After a coffee,
              Phil boots up and skims his email. Twenty
              minutes later he has ceased to be Phil. For the
              next week, he will pretend to be a trader, a
              courier, a cracker, a newbie, a lamer, a lurker, a
              leecher. He is an undercover Internet detective,
              a "technical investigator." He spends his days
              roving the Net, finding people like Mad Hatter -
              and busting them.

              This is a story about a universe with two
              parallel, overlapping worlds. One is the familiar,
              dull world of the software industry, with its
              development costs, marketing teams, profit, and
              loss. Phil's world, at least part of the day. 

              And then there is warez world, the Mad Hatter's
              world, a strange place of IRC channels and
              Usenet groups, of thrills, prestige, and fear. A
              world of expert crackers who strip the
              protection from expensive new software and
              upload copies onto the Net within days of its
              release. A world of wannabes and collectors,
              whose hard drives are stuffed like stamp
              albums, with programs they'll never use. And a
              world of profit pirates, who do exactly what the
              software makers say: rip off other people's stuff
              and sell it for their own benefit. 

              In Phil's world, software is a valuable tool that
              commands high prices - programs like
              QuarkXPress, Windows NT, and AutoCAD, costing
              thousands of dollars a shot. But in Mad Hatter's
              world, those sticker prices means nothing -
              except inasmuch as more expensive programs
              are harder to crack, and that makes them the
              most desirable, spectacular trophies of all.

              In Phil's world, warez are a menace. In warez
              world, Phil is.