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Wow. Warez distributors got owned.
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| wwu.punisher |
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/0...ws_6094352.html
FBI launched "Operation Fastlink" and owned a bunch of distribution points and personalities in the warez world yesterday. Among those who went down were a 30 year-old from Belfast, a 34 year-old from Manchester, and a 22 year-old from Sheffield who are thought to be associated with the Fairlight team.
Looks as though Fairlight took a big hit, here. They also managed to nail Class. That's impressive, given that the Class team has been around for as long as I can remember. This is to warez what the RIAA has been to .mp3 sharing services. It's definitely going to send a big shockwave through the "underground".
Probably just means that those teams who weren't involved in the sting (i.e. Deviance) are going to beef up security and be a lot more careful about how they handle releases. |
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| Boomer187 |
heres the government link, http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2004/April/04_crm_263.htm
its the same crap over and over, it started dec 11th with operation bucaneer n stuff where they took out DoD. Then a few weeks ago there were a bunch of german sites taken out. Now this.
after everytime each group vows to beef up security, which to me is useless. If those people wanna survive, they need to stop selling warez and doing other stupid ass illegal things.
Selling cds is what brought this attack on. The feds catch onto someone selling, and it is like dominoes, you can think of it as the 6 degrees of warez, those closely related to those selling will get pinched.
And I think stealling credit card numbers brought on the german busts, however the operation bucaneer was pure government tactics.
Anyways, I guess the feds are sick of dealing with lowly Kazaa users and are trying to get at the sources. They have busted a few camera poeple in theaters in LA, and I think they are gonna go after more top sites.
Scary crap for those who are involved, Im just glad its not me :) |
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| wwu.punisher |
Yeah. To be a distributor right now has to be frightening. I'd electromagnet, crush, and burn my hard drives and hard copies if put in this kind of situation.
I think a lot of the problem lies in the fact that the feds probably cut deals with people they catch. For example, you catch a camera man in a theater. You tell him that you'll make sure he receives a light sentence in exchange for the names of the people who're buying from him that week.
BOOM. You've got multiple arrests.
It's a cycle that will eventually spin out... |
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| pooley |
| They were selling, that's the prob. To easy to catch... |
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| Swamper |
Fairlight was around in 1985 - on the Commodore 64.. they moved to the PC in 1988/1989.
This was all inevitable, as there was a big bust years ago as well... Things changed once the masses were able to get high speed at home (1997ish) - suddenly every n00b was a 'pirate'... In comparison, during the 80s, you would snail mail a letter & diskettes to potential contacts (very difficult to get these addresses) asking for trades and hope that maybe a month later you got something cool in return.
In the mid to late 80s I used to trade a lot of Commodore 64 stuff with people in Sweden, Denmark and Norway - I'd get cool ASM (assembly language) demos that had electronica in it and I started to get into that sound then. Graphics on the C64 were but the sound quality was pretty good in comparison. |
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| Thunder5 |
:nervous:
They will most probably survive..
As from what I've heard there wasn't many ppl busted. They only confiscated hardware and such. |
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| yujie__ |
| razor1911 got busted and still live on releasing very stuff now. other groups will probly take over for fairlight and others. what ever happen to centropy? |
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| placebo |
| quote: | Originally posted by yujie__
razor1911 got busted and still live on releasing very stuff now. other groups will probly take over for fairlight and others. what ever happen to centropy? |
Centropy still releases movies, just not that often. They are mostly internal these days. |
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| Boomer187 |
yea rumor had it centropy's camera man got arrested, yet they denied it a while after when they released a cam.
there will always be replacements, however I think the trickle down effect will slow up. Sites will become strict with who they share with, those people will (should) become strict with who they share with, and so on down the line.
and yea, I think almost everyone busted asks for deals if they turn in others. Hell who would want to go to jail for just sharing apps n stuff with others. most don't make money off of that, yet those that do bring the whole thing down.
oh, well. Hope no feds are reading this thread .....:wtf: :wtf: |
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| wwu.punisher |
Yeah. Class is old school. Myth is another old school team. Both of them based a lot of their work on ripping and manipulating, however, which I always thought was sort of goofy.
I did a paper in high school on how warez works. Doing the research for that one sucked. |
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| xKaoSx |
| quote: | Originally posted by Swamper
Fairlight was around in 1985 - on the Commodore 64.. they moved to the PC in 1988/1989.
This was all inevitable, as there was a big bust years ago as well... Things changed once the masses were able to get high speed at home (1997ish) - suddenly every n00b was a 'pirate'... In comparison, during the 80s, you would snail mail a letter & diskettes to potential contacts (very difficult to get these addresses) asking for trades and hope that maybe a month later you got something cool in return.
In the mid to late 80s I used to trade a lot of Commodore 64 stuff with people in Sweden, Denmark and Norway - I'd get cool ASM (assembly language) demos that had electronica in it and I started to get into that sound then. Graphics on the C64 were but the sound quality was pretty good in comparison. |
Were you in any groups? :D
I started CIA and wrote one of the more popular BBS's for the C-64.
Yea- Fairlight was oldskool- Selling stuff was plain stupid.
Notice it was mostly overseas where they think they are safe. |
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