Warez Doodz ???
 

Anyone care to share their memories or confessions about warez scene activities?????????

I'd guess it would. Otherwise this thread would be fairly empty I think. Well maybe not. I don't know.

I did some warez-trading back in 1995. :)

It was fairly innocent stuff. I called a few not-so-elite-boards here in Norway. Downloaded warez from one place, uploaded on the next place.

It was quite noticeable on the phonebill when I started doing that. :) So I stopped doing it after a while. It was boring anyway.

However, I did get some games that way, like Alien Breed 3D and Breathless.

"Lamers" welcome too!!! :-)

BTW, Puzzle, by the time U were trading the scene was virtually dead...

I didn't get into the modem scene until 1990.... my first download was Paradroid 90.... and due to memory addressing of my hard drive card it crashed my system with a red screen... I was gutted!!

I soon worked out it was better to run a BBS than to upload and download the stuff on my phonebill...

My fave Scandinavian BBS was Guru's Dream but I also remember a good FLT one.. name escapes me tho!

I remember that back in good old Amiga Days, the best BBS´s to get stuff from were in USA, so we used BLUEBOXING to call there for free :D but after a year or two, the US Companys shut down their free numbers and changed frequences, so it got very difficult ! BUT we found a 0130 number in SIAM or THAILAND or somwhere there and used that from now on .... the problem was, it was the ONLY number for phreaking available that days, so it was quite "busy" ;)
Also there was a "real" person behin this number and any time we called, we heard a nice voice welcoming us, we laughed a lot and then throw her out of the line with 2 keypresses : "BEEEP BEEEEEEP" and the line was open to call :evilgrin
Oh I miss those old days, anyway I just digged out my old SEKA sources from our cracktros/intros think I will try to compile them again :)
Sad enough I only remember ONE BBS we called in US that days, it was called "4th dimension", anyone else remember it ? Maybe it still exists (allthough I doubt that), or maybe here´s any old member of that BBS ?? Who knows ....
Oh just one more statement : It wasn´t about money or promoting ourself that days, the point was, we LOVED gaming and nearly EVERY game we downloaded/swapped/traded/cracked ourself was also played by ourself for long .....

I used to...
 

When entering uni, I discovered the joys of IRC (those joys are now totally lost to me), and especially #amigawarez on undernet.

I got acquinted with some UK guy called Ruskie who taught me some things about DevPac, keyfiles and so on, and I quickly began developing keymakers. I remember being severely excited when I suddenly saw a keyfile of mine being traded, and even mentioned on a board somewhere.

But soon the lame-ness began. While I did this for the challenge, others started comparing keyfile creators with one another, and looking which one was released first. Soon, I began to screen the new submissions at Aminet, in order to be able to quickly run home with a shareware title and try and hack its keyfile system. Needless to say, many a night's sleep was lost, and ultimately some very sloppy keymakers were released. I quit the thing then.

(Sidenote: I always wanted to relive the kick of finding out the keyfile check routines, so I guess I'll dive into WHDLoad (or whatever it's called) someday).

eeek. That might not be a good idea with Codetapper lurking on this board :)

Ah, BB-ing...

I remember when I appeared in court and amongst the evidence of my "wrong doing" was a perfect colour photo of my Miggy with BB software running... you could even read the numbers...

The prosecution QC said "And this program does something clever with the phone system"....

Hilarious!"!!

:laugh:laugh:laugh

Almost like Rowan Atkinson in Not The Nine O Clock News...

Funny thing also was that a friend worked in the Courthouse and told me later that the Judge used to hold "copy parties"...

hahahhaha that was funny....

So you actually went to court (and jail?) for your warez-trading (or blueboxing) activities? Ouch!

I remember reading textfiles about busts in the scene... there were all sorts of rumours about that the police had started raiding sysops homes, and that this was only the beginning, and so on.

Anyway, it was crazy stuff. I'm quite glad that I got out of it fairly quickly.

Us Amiga users here in the States never had to worry about cops because the software industry couldn't be bothered with Amiga warez traders (not in the USA!) They probably cared about some of the WHQ for several groups. My fav BBS was Ice Station Zebra. Another I used to call was the GOD WHQ, The Boiler Room. Once I called the LSD WHQ, but I thought they were quite rude. I'd typed up the docs to a game that was not on any of the docs disks, but they couldn't be bothered. Not exactly the impression you'd expect to get from them from looking at their disks.

I'm still pissed at LSD for that one...

And my months as a courier were very interesting, but very expensive. If the LD calls were free, I'd have loved it. But I could not just be a mere courier (that's work for the labour force!), so I became a sysop.

I'm sure I said this before, but it's worth repeating...

There is a shop about 2km from me that openly sells pirated software.

The law in Scotland says that you can only be prosecuted for copyright theft if you imply that the copy is an original.

A whole group of companies, Ocean, Elite, Martech, Activision etc clubbed together in the mid 80s to pay for a court case against some friends of mine in the Court Of Session, the highest court in Scotland. Scottish law is completely separate from English law, and is generally a lot fairer.

Their case was won, but settled solely on the products they had currently available at the time of the writ. And when you consider that the case took two years to come to court, this meant that the protection given was absolutely useless; because by that time everyone had the software anyway!

Another case was brought on the grounds that the copyright infringement was of magnetic information not the packaging, but this was thrown out by the judge because "it was too complicated for a jury to understand"

That's justice in action.

WHDLoad keyfile cracking
 

Well if you want to see a really complex protection which has over 200 keyfile check parts to it and if you fail it deletes your s:startup-sequence etc, by all means do it... I don't think anyones done a proper keyfile crack for it which actually works properly. The old dodgy ones generally crash the game after a while and stuff like saving in a game is almost guaranteed to crash the computer with a crack or fake keyfile.

Sweet protection! Makes me want to look at it (but I won't. Lack of time, and interest :))

back in the day
 

i still have my C64 modem (in the box), those were the good old days!!!

i remember going to a m8's house, pretty much the day i got my 500, he had a couple of disk-boxes full of stuff;) , we then went around to his cousin's house (uk member of scoopex), F**K me did he have some disks!

in his study contained..... 3 amigas with quad copiers, various tape streamers and 5 full sized filling cabinets of Amiga disks, i was like all my christmas's at once....

he had a direct link to 5 very good BBS, which were never down, needless to say, i never had to bother to connect myself.

a couple of days l8r, me and my m8, cleared the local computer shop out of their entire stock of floppy disks!!!

all u need now is a burner and a few cdrs!!! oh yeah and broadband connection;)

Urrrm yup, went to court nearly 3 years after I was raided.... really quite pointless as the "good guys" got no publicity and it was estimated that the whole thing cost the UK taxpayer about £500,000 (yes £ 1/2 million)... A QC, A Barrister, A Solicitor, Expert Witnesses, 10 days of Crown Court time...

The guy from the local Fraud Squad said to me (off record) that this was so sad as it was just one bunch of nerds raiding some other nerds and he wanted to deal with real crime!!! :-)

Re: WHDLoad keyfile cracking
 

Ack!

Now I understand Amigaboy's comment. I didn't mean thàt. I meant that I'd try and get into the floppy-to-HD coding stuff, and try and circumvent/patch the diskloading routines.

Now don't think you'll see something coming from me in the near future. I just want to look into it, 's all :).

But no, it doesn't interest me anymore to delve into and try to defy keyfile checking routines, CodeTapper.

(Although - no offence intended - I don't really believe what you said about the 200 routines and the startup-sequence deletion. You wouldn't really want to write 200 routines, now would you? You'd rather concentrate on making the software work. 200 routines equals 200 possible bugs, so you'd spend a hell of a time creating that. Also, the routine for deleting the startup-sequence could easily be circumvented, so what's its use?).

I searched the WHDLoad executable yesterday (can't remember which version. It was old though, about 1999) and I found no occurence of startup-sequence anywhere.

Is what you said really true Codetapper? Was it only put into effect on a newer executable?

I have read reports from angry users of the fake keyfile (on Wagi's board, matter of fact) where they were pissin' and moanin' about their startup-sequence file being deleted. And I have seen postings of the fake key with warnings to not use it. That was all the enticement I needed to download the key. Never used a fake WHD key before or since, though. I just had to have it because of the controversy. I collect viruii, too. But then, I collect everything, don't I?