Software piracy scene and r/CrackWatch

[Fornicario]

Yeah, especially when you consider what developers were doing to avoid their stuff being cracked. It was a fun arms race.

There were all kinds of tricks developers pulled back in the DOS days. I tried cracking some BBS software a couple years back and it was a minefield. The copy protection was code that generated more code then put it on the heap and made it executable, and also they had stuff in there that would crash your debugger.

Partially an arms race, but also if you could strip a DRM from the game you would also free up precious memory and CPU load which in the 90's was a challenge in itself.

 

[Autistic Joe]

Been following this thread for a while and I gotta say, it's funny how the little the scene has changed over the years with all the drama. Same thing even before the DOS days, since back in the C-64 BBS scene in the 80's, it's all just a dick-measuring contest between competing hackers or distributors.

It was never about piracy, really, in the old days, even though BBSs were full of it, naturally. Besides the point, but oldschool pirates got grounded for 6 months for 500 dollar phone bills from dialing into BBSs across the country back when long distance was a thing and it took hours to download a couple floppies worth of games (720-1440KB per floppy disk in my time).

For a few years we could even avoid the $500 phone bills. There was an extensive phone-phreaking scene online, after the breakup of AT&T the new smaller companies were laughably easy to brute force codes, and didn't have the technology to go after the hackers. Some services could even call overseas, which allowed importers to contact BBSes in Holland and West Germany to import cracked games from over there.

As a dumb kid, I didn't understand the scene, and was just glad to have a game library far surpassing what my allowance would ever afford me. Anyways, nfos used to have a lot of shit talk about pirates in those days. It was about seeing if it could be done, kinda, and competing to see who could do it first and better.

Scene drama has happened since the scene existed, ego is one of the main reasons they do it

The scene has never been about causing mayhem, it's about being the best. In short, it's young dude shit, consequences be damned.

I learn all about the scene in the 90's and it wasn't about who or why, it was about who can do it better and faster. The nfo of that age were full of shittalk. And CODEX released their cracks for free. Which is what the scene was about, not money or privileges, just fame and attention.

Yeah, especially when you consider what developers were doing to avoid their stuff being cracked. It was a fun arms race.

There were all kinds of tricks developers pulled back in the DOS days. I tried cracking some BBS software a couple years back and it was a minefield. The copy protection was code that generated more code then put it on the heap and made it executable, and also they had stuff in there that would crash your debugger.

All of the above Quoted For Truth - reading those comments really brought me back to Ye Olden Days. Totally agree, the earliest cracks/hacks were all about who's first and who's best. Who had the better contacts over in Europe, who could add the most cheats/trainers to a game, who had the flashiest intro screens, etc.

And it was of paramount importance to shit-talk the other groups in your scroll text - SRS BZNZ GUIZ! Then a month later when your group disbanded you'd end up working with the same group you just called "gaylords" a few weeks ago lol.

 

[AnOminous]

For a few years we could even avoid the $500 phone bills. There was an extensive phone-phreaking scene online, after the breakup of AT&T the new smaller companies were laughably easy to brute force codes, and didn't have the technology to go after the hackers.

Even for the lawful-minded there were things like Telenet/PC Pursuit, where if you lived in the right place you could use it for free. And other X.25 networks for that matter, where you could dial in somewhere local, connect to a remote node over the network, then dial out somewhere local to the BBS or whatever.

It was also generally easier just to hijack some X.25 node than to phreak unless you were particularly into that.

 

[JustSomeDong]

@Autistic Joe motherfucker got me all nostalgic and misty eyed. I guess I'm one of those old fuckers I hate now, sitting around waxing nostalgic about the good ole' days.

Bet my parents wish I'd gotten into phreaking, though.

 

[Kees H]

I was living in Europe when all of the BBS shit was going down. BBS'ing in Europe was fucking annoying as all the telco's over there even billed local calls, albeit at a reduced rate. At a certain point I even started to learn Dutch (retarded German for apes, not even kidding) to read one of the Dutch local phreaking magazines named Hack-Tic (which later started the first Dutch customer ISP, which was pretty awesome), as the phone bill was running up to 200 ~ 400 bucks easily monthly and the Dutch phone company was asking questions about how much the line was being used.

Really brings me back to the good old times of fucking around with modems and trolling BBS sysops over phone lines.

 

[AnOminous]

Really brings me back to the good old times of fucking around with modems and trolling BBS sysops over phone lines.

I remember one time I made someone mad enough trolling them on Trade Wars 2002 by constantly blowing up their ships that they threatened to come to my house and kill me.

 

[Kees H]

I remember one time I made someone mad enough trolling them on Trade Wars 2002 by constantly blowing up their ships that they threatened to come to my house and kill me.

Yeah, we had one sperg who got caller ID installed on the phone line to his BBS (which was expensive as fuck in Europe, at least 30 to 40 bucks monthly) and would call my house after I fucked around uploading some fake executables of games with random titles I made up. Remember him calling my house, getting my dad on the phone and my dad telling him to get a life. Hilarious.

These people take piracy and other shit so serious, they should really touch some graass.

 

[JustSomeDong]

Trade Wars 2002

How can something I'd completely forgotten about hit me right in the feels so damned hard?

 

[Mikoyan]

I remember one time I made someone mad enough trolling them on Trade Wars 2002 by constantly blowing up their ships that they threatened to come to my house and kill me.

Fucking based. In person or were you minefagging?

 

[AnOminous]

Fucking based. In person or were you minefagging?

Pretty much anything that would work.

 

[Saint Agustin]

who could add the most cheats/trainers to a game, who had the flashiest intro screens, etc.

Ohh the Codex intros in the ps1 were fucking lit! Swirling shit, rainbow colors, shit talk in the intro and in some games you could activate cheats from a list. God tier stuff.

Spiro 2, Tekken 3, Crash Bash.... Good memories.

90's were the best time for the scene.

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

Even for the lawful-minded there were things like Telenet/PC Pursuit, where if you lived in the right place you could use it for free. And other X.25 networks for that matter, where you could dial in somewhere local, connect to a remote node over the network, then dial out somewhere local to the BBS or whatever.

It was also generally easier just to hijack some X.25 node than to phreak unless you were particularly into that.

I'm impressed there is anyone on here who even knows what X.25 is. Hard to believe it almost won over TCP/IP as the internetworking standard. If Berners-Lee hadn't picked TCP/IP as the basis for the WWW, it's hard to say how things would have turned out in the end.

 

[Mikoyan]

I'm impressed there is anyone on here who even knows what X.25 is. Hard to believe it almost won over TCP/IP as the internetworking standard. If Berners-Lee hadn't picked TCP/IP as the basis for the WWW, it's hard to say how things would have turned out in the end.

Euros and big telcos wanted it. And I sure know what it is!

 

[Kees H]

Euros and big telcos wanted it. And I sure know what it is!

Yeah, minor power level, I was living in Europe at the time this went down X.25 was being pushed HARD by all the European telco's, with massive X.25 networks going up all over Europe and being interconnected. My local telco at the time was trying to get small BBS'es up on their X.25 network as well, which failed hard due to the fuckload of expensive equipment needed instead of a cheap modem. The most popular use ended up being dialup ISP's using the X.25 networks for cheap backhaul of IP traffic to their local PoP's all over Europe, with just plain SLIP or PPP with no X.25 access offered to their end clients.

The longest one that survived was the French one (Transpac), as their Minitel videotext system that was up until 2012 was just dialing in to a local X.25 access point and using that to access nodes on the network. CERN pissed all over it with getting WWW/HTTP over TCP/IP, which is based as fuck imho, and killed the X.25 dream that would have kept the big national telco's in Europe alive.

 

[AnOminous]

I'm impressed there is anyone on here who even knows what X.25 is. Hard to believe it almost won over TCP/IP as the internetworking standard. If Berners-Lee hadn't picked TCP/IP as the basis for the WWW, it's hard to say how things would have turned out in the end.

The larger Internet was (mostly) TCP/IP based by the time the web was invented, so that's probably why. You also had BITNET and uucp at the time, both of which worked very differently (and would have probably sucked for the web).

 

[Cuckoman]

CERN pissed all over it with getting WWW/HTTP over TCP/IP, which is based as fuck imho, and killed the X.25 dream that would have kept the big national telco's in Europe alive.

I think TCP/IP would have won in the end anyways.
Telco standards have always been overly bulky, complex and difficult/expensive to implement.
(PL, I worked on a project that eventually got cancelled and failed because it was just too fucking hard to implement the protocol)

Just some examples I have had the misfortune to directly experience
X.500, this where the word "Light-weight" in LDAP comes from.
CMIP, yeah, this why S in SNMP is "Simple"
H.323, was eventually completely displaced by SIP. Was a lost opportunity to not add something in the name to mock H.323 and its crazy as fuck encoding rules.

 

[Kees H]

Telco standards have always been overly bulky, complex and difficult/expensive to implement.

Yeah, one of my local BBS'es put up a post at the time they needed the equivalent of 5k USD in 1985 money to get onto X.25, to save nothing in monthly costs as the leased line they would need to connect up to the X.25 network was as expensive as their 20 phone lines, and all of their users would have to get a subscription to the X.25 access point over dial-up from the national telco. IP is just much easier and cheaper to implement, and that's why it won in the end.

I just think it is hilarious the relatively cheap X.25 connectivity in Europe really boosted the local ISP market over there because they could use it to connect to their core network relatively cheaply. All the commercial dial-up equipment supported X.25 backhaul out of the box, and small cheap ISP's popped up all over Europe as the Internet and TCP/IP gained popularity.

 

[Yourmissingsock]

I'm impressed there is anyone on here who even knows what X.25 is. Hard to believe it almost won over TCP/IP as the internetworking standard. If Berners-Lee hadn't picked TCP/IP as the basis for the WWW, it's hard to say how things would have turned out in the end.

I still use it for packet radio stuff, lol.

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

Is it safe to say "she's" lost it?

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

I had no idea we had so many well versed technical people on this forum, with practical experience no less, especially when it comes to something that is generally regarded as something of a niche standard in the 21st century.

I still use it for packet radio stuff, lol.

Packet radio is interesting stuff, but my understanding of it is quite limited.

Is it safe to say "she's" lost it?
View attachment 5299741

I would say it should be questioned if she ever had it in the first place.

Exceptionally talented? Yes. Sane? Ha!