Hackers have been widely blamed for the system-wide AT&T crash on Martin Luther King Day in January 1989, although no individuals or groups have been charged with the crash. Space doesn’t permit even a cursory examination of recent cybercrimes, but as law-enforcement attention focused on the hackers, the warez d00ds got less attention, partly because of the way the copyright law was written and partly because the hackers were doing far more serious stuff.
Computer hackers, or those who break into computer systems, have received more attention recently. I didn’t see a lot of pirate boasting, per se, in the message subboards of MM, but it goes on, and on a national and international scale.
The warez d00ds basically share pirated (that is, illegally copied) versions of programs, and in another long tradition of the computer underground, brag about their skills and exploits on boards like Minus Morgul. The pirates refer to themselves, sometimes derisively, as “warez d00ds,” or, roughly translated, software dudes. The text files were generally material that would interest an advanced computer user.īased on phone and e-mail conversations with Naz and some other research, including the excellent Bruce Sterling book “The Hacker Crackdown” (Bantam $5.99 317 pp.), software piracy has been around almost as long as bulletin boards themselves. The files also contained text files, most of which didn’t involve material protected by copyright. The Naz’s board’s file area contained some pirated software, but most of the warez were computer games. Most pirated software is available on the warez boards well before the manufacturer’s official release date. This time range refers not to the official release date, but the time it has been available to the pirates themselves. Pirates thrive on sharing software and getting copies of the hottest, most currently available stuff, which is usually characterized by the time it has been available to the pirate community.Īn 0-3 Board, for example, has software that is between zero and three days old. This is small for a pirate board, which generally has at least a gigabyte or more of storage space. He still maintains his board and keeps a close watch on what gets uploaded, not because of copyright concerns, but because of his board’s limited storage space, about 120 megabytes. He was once part of a national pirate group, but, after a few months, determined the experience was “lame” and quit. Naz admits his board isn’t as active as it once was.
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