The scene aka the warez scene is the pretty unknown worldwide network where people trade pirated goods, like dvd’s, movies, games, applications etc. Warez refers primarily to copyrighted material traded in violation of its copyright license. It does not refer to commercial for-profit software counterfeiting. First, warez is released by releasegroups, groups which are specialized in publishing warez. They copy a dvd or break the security of game, and will make it available for other people, as a so-called release. When these releasegroups finish a release it will be uploaded to sites. These sites are very fast private ftp-servers, and the first stadium in the distribution of a release. Eventually, at the end of the distribution, the releases are available for everyone on p2p-software.
The speed of this worldwide network is enormous. Within minutes a release can be copied to hundreds of other sites. Within an hour, it’s available on thousands of sites and fxp boards. Within a day or two it’s available on newsgroups, irc and in the end, on p2p-software.
Within a day or two it’s available on newsgroups, irc and in the end, on p2p-software. It’s not all one big happy family. The warez scene consists of certain groups/layers. At the top we have the releasegroups and the topsites. These groups are the scene core. The other groups officially are not a part of the scene. Though most people consist them as a part of the scene.
The scene isn’t just a distribution network, it’s far more than that. There are the scene rules which are there to guarantee good quality releases. If not, a release will be nuked. This means it will be marked as bad. Nuked releases are not spread well and the releasegroup will get a bad status.
Security is an important issue in the scene. Since their activities are illegal the sceners have to secure themselves, to be safe from the anti-piracy organisations (such as the feds, national anti-piracy organizations, etc) and avoid being caught in a takedown.
What is a release?
Original releases are rips of movies, programs, games and music, all released by groups specialized in creating these kinds of releases, so called releasegroups.
A release is the full package of a ripped game, movie etc. These releases are all created in a standard way, according to the scene rules. That way the tag and the included info file directly give you a lot of information about the release type, the source and so on.
First there is the actual content. Most big releases with the size of a CD or DVD are released as a cd or dvd image, mostly in .ISO or .IMG format. Basically an image is a complete backup of a cd/dvd. They can be burned (Nero, Alcohol 120%) or mounted (Alcohol 120%, Daemon Tools). Apart from the actual content it’s often packed into compressed files for easy spreading. Also it contains an info file which will tell the downloader all about what’s in the release, how it’s created and what the quality is.
To ensure the quality of a release, there are the scene rules which are set up by the releasegroups. These scene rules exactly tell how a release should be prepared for the scene. This is the big advantage of scene releases, you’ll always get high quality. The whole scene system keeps it safe, clean, and ensures high quality only.
Releasegroup in general
A releasegroup simply is a group of people which releases warez such as movies, games applications, or music on the internet. IRC is the group’s medium to stay in contact with each other. The size of a group varies, some groups have just 5 people, others maybe 20. Mostly the members of the group don’t know eachother in real life. Trust is a highly important issue. Since the group’s activities aren’t legal, the team members have to be able to rely on each other. If one member gets caught, the other ones are in big trouble too, so security has high priority. This means that for example they talk on private irc servers or through a bouncer, and they connect to their sites through proxy’s.
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For more information about the Scene , Nfo files , topsites , Warez and… visit these links:
aboutthescene.com/general/index.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_scene
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Warez
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsite_(www)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez
