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TEXT_136.txt
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1997-05-27
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10KB
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179 lines
For Joe Warez Addict at the end of the cracked
software food chain, membership in a group like
the Inner Circle is the ultimate collectible. A
way to legitimize their addiction, work for the
common good, and, of course, get a nice fresh
supply of warez. The drug addict becomes dealer.
A sizable chunk of Mad Hatter's daily mail is
begging letters.
"I hope that if I ask this question, you will not
be offended in any way. But can I join the Inner
Circle? I mean, I respect the Inner Circle ... but
never got a chance to join it. I was just
wondering, can I? Please mail me back ASAP."
Needless to say, this lone obsessive didn't get
his chance. Joining the Inner Circle is nigh on
impossible. Reaching its members, though, is
easy enough. They keep a high profile, both in
posting files on Usenet and flaming lamers.
When I first tried to contact them I thought that
they weren't so good at answering email, but it
turned out their provider had just been taken
offline for illegal spamming. They relocated en
masse, and my mail had been lost in transit. So I
posted a message to one of their newsgroups,
made sure it was correctly labeled, politely
worded, and not crossposted (a cardinal sin
anywhere on Usenet). A reply arrived within
eight hours. Mad Hatter was more than happy to
talk, but not on the phone, not in person, and not
on conventional IRC. "It has a bit of a habit of
advertising my IP address," he said. He and six
other Inner Circle members set up their own IRC
server, configured a secret channel, and
arranged a mutually convenient time for a live
interview. We met and talked for nine hours, in
the bizarre overlapping conversational style of
IRC. They were frank and open, friendly and
articulate - and, like any new start-up,
flattered by the attention.
A 17-strong force, the Inner Circle has its own
iconography and its own ideals. Its members are
warez gods. They preach, police, advise, flame.
Their commandments? Good manners, good use
of bandwidth, and good warez. Give unto others
as you would have them give unto you. When the
Inner Circle is not sourcing warez from secret
sites, its members are hunting and gathering
from more conventional sources. Clickety
borrows fresh stuff from his clients. A few have
attended Microsoft Solution seminars. "Some of
us are actual beta testers, too," says Mad Hatter.
"That's got to be scary for the developers." One
way or another, they help maintain the steady
flow of warez onto Usenet. From there, various
wannabes, lamers, and aspirants copy their work
to countless BBSes, FTP sites, and Web pages.
These are not pimply teenagers devoid of social
life and graces, little ferrets who talk in bIFF
text and make napalm out of soap and lightbulbs;
they're not downloading porn or being careful not
to wake their parents or spelling "cool" as
"kewl." According to the interviews I conducted,
not one member is younger than 20;
Clickety-Clack is the youngest at 23. Most are
30-plus. Champion uploader Digital has been
happily married for 22 of his 46 years. Most are
well-adjusted white males with day jobs and
thoroughly nuclear families. Founding member
Abraxas has three kids, one over 18. Mad Hatter
runs a small business from home. Technical guru
TAG is a computer animator. Irrelevant
maintains commercial real estate. They're
spread all over the United States. A few are
concentrated around Orlando, Florida. Two or
three others are California-based. For obvious
reasons, that's as precise as they like to get.
The Inner Circle was born of a sense of outrage
that their beloved pirate-wares newsgroups
were going to pot. Warez had been around for
more than a decade, but the growth of the
Internet was bringing clueless newbies onto the
boards. Warez needed a code of ethics and a
group of leaders to set some examples. The
leaders would be the best crackers - some of
whom became the Inner Circle.
"We took over alt.binaries.pictures.leek in early
'96," explains Abraxas, "and then leaked the first
Nashville [Windows 97] beta. The groups were
being overrun by clueless people. They needed
help. They were wasting Internet resources.
Perhaps if we could encourage responsible use
of the available bandwidth, the whole Usenet
warez 'scene' might last a while longer. Warez
was around before we were, and will be after,
but we wanted to help people and preserve
resources using common sense."
As enforcers of the warez code, the Inner Circle
can be swift and sure. In April 1996, a pirate
gang called Nomad, convinced that posts to
warez groups were being suppressed, decided to
get themselves some unsupervised elbow room.
They selected an antiwork newsgroup -
alt.binaries.slack, relatively empty and off the
beaten track - where software could be slipped
past news providers who had firewalled the
usual warez forums. Within 24 hours, the forum
was flooded with the latest releases. The
slackers bestirred themselves from their apathy
and fought back, posting files that told the
pirates politely to push off. The warez kept
coming. Then the Inner Circle waded in on the
slackers' side and castigated the invaders for
their poor manners. The pirates left meekly -
though as a parting gift, one of them posted
Microsoft NT, Beta 3, all 48 Mbytes of it, in
5,734 parts. The slackers' newsfeed was clogged
for days.
A slightly disturbing revelation came out of the
slacker invasion. "After the first attempted
takeover, we discovered just how scary search
engines like Deja News and AltaVista were,"
explains TAG. "You could dig up real email
addresses pretty easy on about 75 percent of
people posting warez." A worried TAG hacked
into the code of Forte Agent, an industry
standard newsreader already cracked to bypass
the shareware cripples, and stripped away the
X-newsreader header, giving posters far greater
anonymity. As a side effect, the patch also
reduced email spams by two-thirds. "The hack
went over so well with even nonwarez people
that Forte eventually incorporated it into Agent
as a feature," TAG says proudly, "although I don't
think they'll be giving us credit."
By mid-'96, Mad Hatter decided that police work
was getting to be too much of a chore. The
newsfeed was being clogged by lamers,
requesters, and partials posters with
"room-temperature IQs." Those genuinely into
warez were seeing less and less complete
software uploaded; in its place were hundreds of
stray disks and clammy begging posts. In a rare
fit of pique, Mad Hatter took his revenge.
"If I continue to see the 'here's what I have'
threads," he wrote, "I will stop uploading here. I
will not help and will laugh my ass off that
everyone is suffering. If for some reason you
doubt that I make a difference, it's your loss, as
I personally have uploaded 85 percent of all the
shit that's getting posted now when it was zero
day or still fresh. Keep fighting over stale shit -
I like to watch; keep posting partials, and I'll
stop upping my 100 to 300 Mbytes a week. In
fact, I think I'll stop now."
And stop the Inner Circle did. "We became burnt
out on educating the masses," Mad Hatter says.
Instead, a range of guaranteed lamer-free
encrypted newsgroups was created for posting
PGP-encoded warez, for Inner Circle-approved
members only. Those on the select
interested-parties list are given the codes to
unlock the software, and anyone can apply to
join. Requirement: a reasonable knowledge of
PGP. "Hopefully this is a sign you won't be
totally incompetent if you choose to post," says
TAG. At the last count, the IPL had 500
subscribers, happily trading warez under the
protection of the latest in antilamer technology.