DraX opened this issue on Dec 15, 2001 ยท 20 posts
praxis22 posted Mon, 17 December 2001 at 2:14 AM
Hi, Oh it'll have an effect, it'll just drive them further underground. You've only to look at the resilience of Phrack (the hackers ezine) to know that somebody will pick up the torch eventually, if only for the Kudos of saying, "see, they didn't kill us after all" in Warez as in real life, "You're only as good as your last release..." I think that to anywhere at all with most computer realted crime, hacking/cracking, virii, "Warez" etc. then you need to actually destroy the "kudos" based mentaility that drives virtually everything in the scene, including the "Open Source"/Linux crowd. The mentality that says "see, it was me, I did it first" (and the body of people who afford such behaviour/actions respect) is the driving thing behind all of this. Why else would somebody release a game after two years of effort, (and numerous botched releases) unless there was both Kudos and pride at stake? To be honest, I don't think that's ever going to happen, the kind of people who naturally gravitate to the life are generally (but not exclusively) bright, atriculate & asocial loners, and while the new generation have far more style and elan that we ever had, (some of them even have girlfriends :) They are still people who don't have any real desire to "get on" in the real world, and who will be well paid whenever and wherever they do decide to try thier hand. A life of being alienated at school, does not prepare you for that. Trying to enforce conformity with ill thought out rules/systems is what produces "geeks" in the first place, so I can't image the powers that be addressing the cause at it's source. As for "Warez" web sites... On the one time I was lazy enough to look on the web, I found squat, nothing except a bunch of links that went nowhere or went to sites where you could vote for one crew or another. This after I'd just found out that the reason our ftp server had died was that a scatty (American :) astronomer had left a directory open and that had been used to host one of the most comprehensive repositories I've ever seen, (shame we couldn't keep it really :) It also explained why I (as postmaster) was getting email from Peru, (among other places) asking if I had a working copy of X because thier download had timed out :) Sarcastic replies a speciality :P I don't think that prosecution is going to stop them, it didn't stop the hackers, or the writers of virii, so I fail to see how it's going to stop pirates, has-been's or not. One would think that the US government, the worlds only superpower had better things to do with it's time. Still, each to thier own :) later jb