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TEXT_135.txt
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1997-05-27
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8KB
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168 lines
Phil's world is full of nasty numbers. Antipiracy
organizations like the Software Publishers
Association and Business Software Alliance
estimate that more than US$5 million worth of
software is cracked and uploaded daily to the
Net, where anyone can download it free of
charge. A running scoreboard on the BSA Web
site charts the industry's losses to piracy: $482
a second, $28,900 a minute, $1.7 million an hour,
$41.6 million a day, $291.5 million a week. A lot
of that is garden-variety unlicensed copying and
Far East-style counterfeiting. But an estimated
one-third leaks out through warez world, which
can be anywhere there's a computer, a phone, and
a modem.
This is bad news for the business. Think of the
lost revenue! The lost customers! "It's a
frightening scenario out there," says Martin
Smith, Novell's product-licensing manager for
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. "We are
seeing a very, very rapid development of crime
on the Internet."
He's not being paranoid: look at the thousands of
messages that pour through
alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc and the other Usenet
sites that are the warez world's pulsing heart.
In a typical week, you'll see Microsoft Office Pro
and Visual C++, Autodesk 3D Studio MAX,
SoftImage 3D, SoundForge, Cakewalk Pro Audio,
WordPerfect, Adobe Photoshop 4.0 - virtually
every high-end package in existence. All this
plus impossibly early betas and alphas. Add a
smattering of mundane Web tools, Net apps,
registered shareware, games, and utilities, and
you have everything for the forward-looking
computer user.
Warez world's volumes are impressive, too - a
good 65 Mbytes a day of freshly cracked, quality
new releases, chopped into disk-sized portions
(to make it from one hop to the next without
clogging the servers), compressed, and uploaded.
Postings can vary from a few bytes (for a crack)
to hundreds of megabytes. The nine main warez
sites alone account for 30 to 40 percent of the
traffic on Usenet, an average of more than 500
Mbytes in downloads every 24 hours, according
to OpNet.
Bad news indeed for Phil and his friends, gazing
at those endless dollar signs. But warez world's
leading citizens say that filthy lucre is beside
the point - at least for them and the hungry
collectors they supply.
"No money ever exchanges hands in our forum,"
says California Red, one of a half dozen of the
Mad Hatter's Inner Circle colleagues gathered for
an IRC chat.
"We're on the nonprofit side of the warez feeding
chain," insists another, TAG (The Analog Guy).
"It's a trade. You give what you have, get
something you need. No money needed," adds
Clickety.
"We're not in it for the money. I would never sell
something I got from warez," California Red
reiterates.
"Never made a dime," says Mad Hatter.
Even Phil admits these are not the people
responsible - not directly, anyhow - for the
500-Mbyte, $50 bundled software CD-ROMs from
Asia that are the industry's most prominent
nightmare. Warez crackers, traders, and
collectors don't pirate software to make a
living: they pirate software because they can.
The more the manufacturers harden a product,
with tricky serial numbers and anticopy
systems, the more fun it becomes to break.
Theft? No: it's a game, a pissing contest; a bunch
of dicks and a ruler. It's a hobby, an act of
bloodless terrorism. It's "Fuck you, Microsoft."
It's about having something the other guy
doesn't. It's about telling him that you have
something he doesn't and forcing him to trade
something he has for something you don't.
In other words, it's an addiction. Listen to a
typical dialog on an IRC warez trading channel:
"What you got?"
"Cubase three."
"What's that?"
"A music program."
"I got it. What else?"
"No, but it's Cubase three-oh-three - the latest
bugfix."
"Shit. Gimme."
"It's not a patch. It's another seven meg
download."
"Don't care. I want it."
Warez traders scour the newsgroups every night,
planting requests, downloading file parts they
don't need. Warezheads feel unfulfilled unless
they've swelled their coffers by at least one
application a day. They don't need this Java
Development Kit tool, or that Photoshop plug-in
- the thrill is in creating the new subdirectory
and placing the tightly packed and zipped file
cleanly, reverently, into the collection. They
may even install it. Then toy absentmindedly
with its toolbars and palettes before tucking it
away and never running it again.
Look at Michael, an 18-year-old warez junkie
who's also into weight lifting. In the evenings,
while his friends pursue women, he's either at
the gym or home at his machine, combing the
planet for the latest dot releases of 3D Studio
MAX. "I bought a Zip drive so I could store it all.
The SoftImage rip is 20 disks. It took me three
months to get the entire set." A directory called
WAREZ on his D:/ drive has $50,000 worth of
cracked software, more than any one person
could ever use, ludicrous amounts of
applications. The more high-end and
toolbar-tastic the app, the better. Without
technical support or manuals, he hasn't a clue
how to use most of it. But it's there and will
stay there. "Warez give you a weird kind of
feeling," he says. "You end up collecting
programs you don't need and never use. Just so
you can say, 'I've got this or I've got that.' Or 'My
version of Photoshop is higher than yours.'"
Mad Hatter knows the feeling. "It's an obsessive
game. We see it every day - people begging for
something to 'finish their collection.'" He's not
much better himself. "When I was out of work on
disability, I was totally motivated by the thrill
of massive uploads, uploading at least 40 Mbytes
a day for four months straight." Fellow Inner
Circle member Clickety used to spend 12 hours a
day online until college got "awful heavy."
Another, Abraxas, spends 6 to 10 hours online on
weekdays, 12 to 16 on weekends. But Mad Hatter
- who runs the semi-tongue-in-cheek,
semi-poker-faced discussion group
alt.support.warez.recovery - is making progress:
he's down to 30 Mbytes a day. "My computer is
online 24 hours a day," he says. "A warez pirate
is always online."