Oh...

If those RCMP folks came knocking on your door around January 22nd 1999. Hi there. Long time. It was fun chasing you, but I didn't enjoy the rm -rf.

yes -- at the height in the late 90s, i made a friend named chucky while playing quake online. he was just a terrific guy, older than me but treated me with respect, we would hang out IRL and he would hook me up with games after he had finished them. later he went offline and i found out he had been the leader of RISCISO and had disappeared during a criminal prosecution. hope things are well with you sean

The question is whether you find it ok that the FBI comes sniffing after you. Personally I don't find it ok at all. I don't see any of that as a crime either. The legislation is clearly written by corporations and lobbyists acting as lawyers. That's another reason why I think open source is preferrable - that way they are replaced indirectly by not depending on them in the first place, meaning, as a trade-off towards how the society is currently structured. Hopefully it will become more sane again in the future. Back then, though, say in the 1990s or early 2000s, the "vibe" of warez also was "look how great ILLEGAL can be".

Being of that age, hearing about and then using ethernet in the dorms was sort of like discovering Oz after living in Kansas. I had so many questions! How did they manage all that traffic? It was like having a firehose after using an eye dropper all your life.

Ahhh mIRC, jolt cola and an EDU connection at 3AM...

Indeed. I remember that back on my old win-days.

I switched to linux in 2004 or so. All those old use cases kind of vanished or changed. Perhaps the subset of software is more limited on linux, since Microsoft also builds - and exploits - a platform for commercial success, but I see more and more linux-specific applications too, typically using qt5 or qt6. Which is interesting considering linux does not have a huge share here. I guess there does exist some market value here.

I just can not really see myself using or needing "warez" on linux - the use cases are sooooo different now. For multimedia there are very few use cases not covered by ffmpeg and mpv. The only thing I'd like is something like avisynth, but more like a domain specific language that is even shorter. I remember back in early 2004 or late 2003 I was still writing avisynth scripts to modify video data on windows. Linux pipes never really went into an object-oriented approach and view onto data.

You omitted 300, 1200, and 2400, youngster. And the joys of xmodem, ymodem, and zmodem.

Razor 1911! Now here’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time, but teenage me was very grateful to.

The .nfo files alone, distributed with most releases, carrying the most elaborate of ASCII art. I distinctly remember the aesthetics you mention.

Be sure to check out keygen music, still updated

https://keygenmusic.tk/

> I skimmed through hoping to see examples of the “aesthetics” […]

aesthetics is an umbrella term for the "[…] norms and rules of participation, […] forms of sociality, and […] artistic outputs." — think: sociology, culture, customs, and less visuals. reading chapter five (aesthetics), perhaps unsurprisingly the chapter where the author dives deeper into the topic, is certainly advised.

NFO files (both image and text) for current releases and ones going way back can still be found on xrel.to

Some of the chiptune musicians are still active. Dubmood made it onto the Hotline Miami (2012) soundtrack.

ftp.uu.net was a bit of a wild west for a while before it was eventually pulled.

that handle shows up in the siteops line of site.nfos/TG-the.gateway.XXXX.XX.00.nfo from warez.scene.nfo.collection.v1.0.24351.shroo.ms.zip (https://defacto2.net/g/shrooms-ftp)

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