What is Warez & does it still exist today? (Pirated Software)

I loved to read the *.nfo datas. Allways a little masterpiece of art! (I had use Warez for getting keys id lost) Beside the Trojans and Viruses it was very comfortable. Also reeliz, if u remember times where ruzzia was "good".

Before everybody had modems, pirated software was exchanged on floppy disks at school or friend's houses. People posted classified ads in local newspapers where they were seeking others to exchange pirated software with. There was also exchange by snail mail going on. Sometimes even internationally. Some people translated pirated software into various languages. It happened quite often that cracked software was beating the original software to the market in certain countries. At so called "copy parties", people got together with their computers and exchanged software. This looked similar to today's LAN parties. Occasionally software was cracked live at these events. And yes, pirated software was always a sure way to catch viruses.

Creators do monitor torrents and that's why you should always use a VPN. However a good paid VPN will also block malware and other threats from getting on your pc to begin with but a good security suite is also required.

computer aids lmaooo

Love the video. I started mailtrading in the late 80's. I had dozens of people from all over Europe that would send me disks daily, and I'd copy and swap the disks before sending them back some different warez. Of course sending hundreds of parcels a week would have been expensive, so we also 'stampfaked' our parcels :D That means putting Sellotape over the stamps so that the postmark could be wiped off, and the stamps reused over and over for free 😁.

Later in the early 90s I joined various scene groups. Most of the BBSs at that time were ratio'd, so you could only download x MB after you had uploaded y MB. With the right connections to the sysops though you could get unratio'd access :D As things moved onto internet and high speed connections then the core scene would use FTP sites to transfer the 0 day warez. All the techniques you list here are very much the bottom feeders of the warez scene and you'd very rarely get 0 day warez that way.

I pretty much stopped it all when DOJ busted one of the largest internet sites that was a discussion forum for warez, and I was on the admin team for. That was the isonews bust in 2003, and it was not fun times 🤪

I made some great friends in this period though and have some fantastic memories. Thanks for sharing your perspective on it all too 😊

Since real companies are stealing from us w no plan of action yet- copying and sharing seeems legal enough.

Late 90, while I was on AOL, I mainly went to “warez sites” where they posted the links to download all the pieces... I never knew about chat rooms distributing it.

I was in college at the time, so Microsoft FrontPage was one I would warez the newest version as well as whatever Adobe was doing at the time.

ah, the old days

Is mirc still around ? as in, is still used for these purposes ?