Ever thought what goes on in the mind and life of a scener(pirate)?

 

Ever thought what goes on in the mind and life of a scener(pirate)?  Watch The Scene series and see the first season first.

 

I was(am) a big fan of 'The Scene', a mini series that you can freely download and watch online, and stumbled back to their site today. This series is an awesome creative work about the life of pirates and it started the cycle of thought in me. I have researched this subjects many times and wanted to write a post about it as it is a very interesting world as well as a community of exceptional talent.

‘The Scene’ refers to the online piracy world including the real world aspects of it and the Sceners are the people who make warez(pirated stuff) available to us i.e. the public. They put themselves in real danger and, if caught, are exposed to very real consequences. This is not to be confused w ith hackers as that is a whole separate world and much more evil ;).

 

Organizations and Governments all around the world spend millions of dollars to try and stop piracy both by developing newer and difficult to pirate protection systems and legal teams to catch the culprits but we, the people, still get everything without paying anything. All due to the sceners.

We find it so easy to just go about downloading anything in sight, but the story of how that ‘thing’ found its way to the public sharing sites is a long and interesting one with all sorts of organized crime like aspects to it. Generally speaking, releases(warez) are created by a Release Group. In such a group there are sources and couriers, like someone in a DVD printing factory who will sneak one out to send to the encoders who convert the original stuff and package it into online deliverables via top-sites and uploaders. After going thru all those ranks of the group do the files reach out in the public. There are also the Primes  who are people who donate hardware to the top-sites for access rights on their servers so that they can get the very best releases, post requests for special items and to get the rights of bragging that they are the first ones to enjoy the releases.

Why do they do it. The most common reasons are along the lines like – they can do it so they do it, for the fun of it, for the thrill of doing something wrong and getting away with it and also for the fierce competitive world that The Scene is. Scene lifes are made and  destroyed based on who goes thru the process of obtaining and releasing an item first and in the correct way, leaving the others sulking in the dust behind them.

Despite what you might thing, The Scene is cut-throat and yet self-regulated community i.e. has its own rules and principles which the participants must follow or be removed. Without trust between the members of a group they would be caught easily or simply not live up to the competition. Due to the high risk life of a scener they use sophisticated anonymity and security software to fool anyone looking for them. They spoof, hop, run in circles and spew garbage leaving very little if any trace behind them. To this effect, there are a lot of methods that have evolved to keep some measure of control like release lists, where bad releases are nuked and access controls mechanisms to keep the blacklisted out, most of which the common man cant get a glimpse of.

 

The most hardcore of all sceners live a very secretive life and definitely are not the ones who like fame and exposure. It is extremely difficult to get in contact with such people even though be sure that they live among us. I like to think they live on a separate plane of existence :).

Now that you know a tiny bit about The Scene, next time you download ‘stuff’, take a moment to thank the uploaded and keep those speed limits off.

Cheers. Peace Out.

Links: Wiki 1 2 3 4. I was going to post a bunch of links here but it better to let you search it yourself and there is a whole lot of stuff out there.