Chapter 6: Sites

Overview

Sites used for warez (exaggerated plural derivative of software) have long been synonymous with the underground world piracy. These are the dark, shady corners of cyberspace where it all begins.

At the start of the piracy scene, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were used to distribute information; however, analog phone lines soon became obsolete, Ever-growing Internet technology offered pirates additional bandwidth and resources.

BBS comprised of ten 19.6 Kbps lines were considered special, because they held ten users simultaneously. These days, warez sites can hold 50 users, all sharing a100 megabit connection (at a bare minimum). Much has changed in the world of technology, and piracy has evolved with it.

Logging into a true warez site is like walking into a toy store and becoming a kid again. Everything you could ever imagine is right in front of your eyes, and free for the taking.

Movies, games, applications, books, playstation2 games, you could queue up a few hundred gigabytes to download in a matter of minutes. Sites may have five or ten terabytes of storage available, all full with new releases. You could download solidly all year and never get everything.

Comparable to finding the cheat codes to life, piracy makes everything possible, it makes everything available. You could never justify buying all these games to yourself, or your wife. But here it all is, free. Neatly packaged with text files describing what each release is, you could spend hours wondering the digital warehouse of software like...