Irc Warez Ftp 0day 20
Carlita Giandomenico
The studly thing to do if one is a warez d00d, it appears, is emit 0-day warez, that is copies of commercial software copied and cracked on the same day as its retail release. Warez d00ds also hoard software in a big way, collecting untold megabytes of arcade-style games, pornographic JPGs, and applications they'll never use onto their hard disks. As Ozone Pilot acutely observes:
Warez is a common computing and broader cultural term referring to pirated software (i.e. illegally copied, often after deactivation of anti-piracy measures) that is distributed via the Internet. Warez is used most commonly as a noun, a plural form of ware (short for computer software), and is intended to be pronounced like the word wares /ˈwɛərz/.[1] The circumvention of copy protection (cracking) is an essential step in generating warez, and based on this common mechanism, the software-focused definition has been extended to include other copyright-protected materials, including movies and games. The global array of warez groups has been referred to as "The Scene", deriving from its earlier description as "the warez scene". Distribution and trade of copyrighted works without payment of fees or royalties generally violates national and international copyright laws and agreements. The term warez covers supported as well as unsupported (abandonware) items, and legal prohibitions governing creation and distribution of warez cover both profit-driven and "enthusiast" generators and distributors of such items.
Warez, and its leetspeak form W4r3z,[2] are plural representations of the word "ware" (short for computer software),[2][3] and are terms used to refer to "[p]irated software distributed over the Internet,"[4] that is, "[s]oftware that has been illegally copied and made available"[5][6] e.g., after having "protection codes de-activated".[2] "Cracking", or circumventing copy protection, is an essential part of the warez process,"[7] and via this commonality, the definition focused on computer software has been extended to include other forms of material under copyright protection, especially movies.[7] As Aaron Schwabach notes, the term covers both supported and unsupported materials (the latter unsupported, termed abandonware), and legal recourses aimed at stemming the creation and distribution of warez are designed to cover both profit-driven and "enthusiast" practitioners.[7] Hence, the term refers to copyrighted works that are distributed without fees or royalties and so traded in general violation of copyright law.[8]
The production and/or distribution of warez is illegal in most countries due to the protections provided in the TRIPS Agreement.[14] Software infringers generally exploit the international nature of the copyright issue to avoid law enforcement in specific countries.[citation needed] Violations are typically overlooked in poorer third world countries, and other countries with weak or non-existent protection for intellectual property.[15] Additionally, some first world countries have loopholes in legislation that allow the warez to continue.[16][17]
However, laws and their application to warez activities may vary greatly from country to country;[citation needed] for instance, while Wawa-Mania is under sanction in France, it remains in operation via a host in Moldova, and through use of an Ecuadorian top-level domain.[25] Hence, while high-profile web hosts and domain providers[who?] generally do not permit the hosting of warez, and delete sites found to be hosting them,[citation needed] private endeavours and small commercial entities continue to allow the trade in warez to continue.[citation needed] And, in some countries, and at some times, software "piracy" has been encouraged, and international and usual national legal protections ignored.[citation needed] A dispute between Iran and United States over membership in WTO and subsequent U.S. block of Iran's attempts at full-membership has led Iran to encourage the copying of U.S. software; hence, there has been a subsequent surge in Iranian "warez" and "crackz" websites (as Iranian laws do not forbid hosting them inside Iran).[citation needed] The same policy has been adopted by Antigua,[citation needed] and others.[citation needed]
Warez are often distributed outside of The Scene (a collection of warez groups) by torrents (files including tracker info, piece size, uncompressed file size, comments, and vary in size from 1 k, to 400 k.) uploaded to a popular P2P website by an associate or friend of the cracker or cracking crew. An nfo or FILE ID.DIZ is often made to promote who created the release. It is then leeched (downloaded) by users of the tracker and spread to other sharing sites using P2P, or other sources such as newsgroups. From there, it can be downloaded by millions of users all over the world. Often, one release is duplicated, renamed, then re-uploaded to different sites so that eventually, it can become impossible to trace the original file. Another increasingly popular method of distributing Warez is via one-click hosting websites.[27] In the early 1990s, warez were often published on bulletin boards that had a warez section.
Today most warez files are distributed to the public via bittorrent and One-click hosting sites. Some of the most popular software companies that are being targeted are Adobe, Microsoft, Nero, Apple, DreamWorks, and Autodesk, to name a few. To reduce the spread of illegal copying, some companies have hired people to release "fake" torrents (known as Torrent poisoning), which look real and are meant to be downloaded, but while downloading the individual does not realize that the company that owns the software has received his/her IP address. They will then contact his/her ISP, and further legal action may be taken by the company/ISP.[clarification needed]
In the mid-1990s, the average Internet user was still on dial-up, with average speed ranging between 28.8 and 33.6 kbit/s. If one wished to download a piece of software, which could run about 200 MB, the download time could be longer than one day, depending on network traffic, the Internet Service Provider, and the server. Around 1997, broadband began to gain popularity due to its greatly increased network speeds. As "large-sized file transfer" problems became less severe, warez became more widespread and began to affect large software files like animations and movies.
In the past, files were distributed by point-to-point technology: with a central uploader distributing files to downloaders. With these systems, a large number of downloaders for a popular file uses an increasingly larger amount of bandwidth. If there are too many downloads, the server can become unavailable. The opposite is true for peer-to-peer networking; the more downloaders the faster the file distribution is. With swarming technology as implemented in file sharing systems like eDonkey2000 or BitTorrent, downloaders help the uploader by picking up some of its uploading responsibilities. There are many sites with links to One-click hosting websites and other sites where one can upload files that contribute to the growing amount of warez.
Prior to the development of modern peer-to-peer sharing systems and home broadband service, sharing warez sometimes involved warez groups scanning the Internet for weakly secured computer systems with high-speed connections. These weakly secured systems would be compromised by exploiting the poor FTP security, creating a special directory on the server with an unassuming name to contain the illegal content.[28][29]
A common mistake of early FTP administrators was to permit a directory named /incoming that allows full read and write access by external users, but the files themselves in /incoming were hidden; by creating a directory inside /incoming, this hidden directory would then allow normal file viewing.[citation needed] Users of the compromised site would be directed to log in and go to a location such as /incoming/data/warez to find the warez content. Messages could be left for other warez users by uploading a plain text file with the message inside.[citation needed]
Hackers would also use known software bugs to illicitly gain full administrative remote control over a computer, and install a hidden FTP service to host their wares.[citation needed] This FTP service was usually running on an unusual port number, or with a non-anonymous login name like "login: warez / Password: warez" to help prevent discovery by legitimate users; information about this compromised system would then be distributed to a select group of people who were part of the warez scene.[citation needed]
It was important for warez group members to regulate who had access to these compromised FTP servers, to keep the network bandwidth usage low.[citation needed] A site that suddenly became very popular would be noticed by the real owners of the equipment, as their business systems became slow or low on disk space; investigation of system usage would then inevitably result in discovery and removal of the warez, and tightening of the site security.[citation needed]
As the ability to compromise and attain full remote control of business servers became more developed, the warez groups would hack a server and install an IRC bot on the compromised systems alongside the FTP service, or the IRC bot would provide file sharing directly by itself. This software would intelligently regulate access to the illicit data by using file queues to limit bandwidth usage, or by only running during off-hours overnight when the business owning the compromised hardware was closed for the day.[28]
In order to advertise the existence of the compromised site, the IRC software would join public IRC warez channels as a bot and post into the channel with occasional status messages every few minutes, providing information about how many people are logged into the warez host, how many files are currently being downloaded, what the upload/download ratio is (to force users into contributing data of their own before they can download), which warez distributor is running the bot, and other status information.[30]
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