The Scene is known for its aversion to public file-sharing, but nonetheless it’s in large part responsible for much of the material out there today.

The goal of most Scene groups is to be the first to release a certain title, whether that’s a film, music or software. While there is some healthy competition The Scene is also a place where lifelong friendships are started.

A few days ago, on October 17, the Scene lost Goolum, a well-respected member and friend. Only in his late thirties, he passed away after being part of the Scene for more than a decade.

As a cracker Goolum, also known as GLM, was of the more experienced reverse engineers who worked on numerous releases.

Through the years Goolum was connected to several groups which are now retired, some for more than a decade. To honor their fallen friend, the groups ZENiTH, Lz0, SLT and MiDNiGHT have made a one-time comeback.

Below is an overview of their farewell messages, which honor him for his cracking skills but most of all as a friend. Our thoughts go out to Goolum’s friends and family.

ZENiTH: THUNDERHEAD.ENGINEERING.PYROSIM.V2014.2.RIP.GOOLUM-ZENiTH (NFO)

ZENiTH, a group that retired around 2005, mentions Goolum’s loyalty and the love for his daughter.

“Goolum has been in and around the scene since the Amiga days but had never been a guy to jump from group to group, but stayed loyal and dedicated to the few groups he was involved in.”

“We are all proud to have been in a group with you, to have spent many a long night sharing knowledge about everything, learning about your daughter who you where very proud of, and all the projects you were involved in.”

Lz0: CEI.Inc.EnSight.Gold.v10.1.1b.Incl.Keygen.RIP.GOOLUM-Lz0 (NFO)

Lz0 or LineZer0, split from the Scene last year but many of its members are still actively involved in other roles. The group mentions the hard time Goolum has had due to drug problems. LzO also highlights Goolum’s love for his daughter, and how proud he was of her.

“We all knew that he struggled in life – not just economical but also on a personal level and not the least with his drug issues. One of the things that kept him going was his wonderful daughter whom he cherished a lot. He often talked about her, and how proud of her he was. He was clear that if there was one thing in life he was proud of – it was that he became the dad of a wonderful girl.”

“We’re shocked that when finally things started to move in the right direction, that we would receive the news about his death. It came without warning and we can only imagine the shock of his family. It’s hard to find the right words – or words for that matter. Even though it might have appeared as that he was lonely – with few friends, he knew that we were just a keyboard away.”

SLT: PROTEUS.ENGINEERING.FASTSHIP.V6.1.30.1.RIP.GOOLUM-SLT (NFO)

SLT or SOLiTUDE has been retired since 2000 but returns to remember Goolum. The group notes that he will be dearly missed.

“You will be missed. It is not easy to say goodbye to someone who you have known for over a decade, trading banter, laughs, advice and stories. You leave behind a daughter, a family and a group of friends, who will miss you dearly.”

“As the news have spread, the kind words have poured in. Solitude is releasing this in honor of you, to show that the values we founded the group on is the exact values you demonstrated through your decades of being in the scene. Loyalty, friendship and hard work. Our thoughts are with you, wherever you may be.”

MiDNiGHT: POINTWISE_V17.2.R2_RIP_GOOLUM-MIDNIGHT (NFO)

MiDNiGHT hasn’t been active for nearly a decade but have also honored Goolum with a comeback. The group mentions that he was a great friend who was always in for a chat and a beer.

“Life won’t ever be the same again my friend. We could sit and chat for hours and hours, and even then we knew each other well enough that nothing more was required than a beer, a rant and a small *yarr* and we’d know it would all be good.”

“This time it’s not good mate. I am here, you are not. I can’t even begin to express how this makes me feel – except an absolute sadness.”

…

RIP Goolum 1977 – 2014

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Apart from having some of the most extensive music libraries on the planet, they are ridiculously cheap. As the screenshot below of the current US #1 album from John Mayer shows, each track is being offered on the Russian site called ‘LegalSounds‘ for a little above give-away prices. A whole album costs just over a dollar.

These music download sites are perhaps understandably a thorn in the side of the big record labels – when they offer a track for 9 cents they clearly aren’t playing by the same rules as iTunes for example.

These sites counter by maintaining that they operate legally under Russian law as they pay the necessary fees to a local collecting society.

For the purposes of this post we won’t concern ourselves too much with the legal issues, but rather where these sites are getting their music from. Something tells us it’s not coming from the labels, and here’s why.

When music is released unofficially online, audio filenames are formatted in a certain way.

The first part is the name of the artist, the second the title of the album, track or performance, the third denotes the source (in this case satellite – SAT), then the date, and the last section gives the name of the piracy group who released it online.

Of course, apart from the name of the artist and the album, none of these descriptors appear in music released on official sites – unless they’re Russian, that is. From searches done on some of these Russian music stores it’s absolutely clear that they’re ripping music from both torrent and Scene topsites.

The group 1KING shown in the random release above are well-known online for releasing unofficial rips of radio shows, yet bizarrely a few of their releases are available on sites such as LegalSounds.

So what about other terms associated with unofficial/pirate releases?

When a warez group release some music onto a topsite but fail to meet some Scene criteria by breaking rules, other groups can come along with a better version – a so-called ‘PROPER’. They put this word in the description of the track to show the fact. A search for this term on our trusty music site shows dozens of ‘PROPER’ releases. You won’t find those on iTunes.

The word ‘ADVANCE’, which could be used to denote an early leaked copy of an album, would only be used in an unauthorized track filename. Yet here are plenty of tracks, apparently advertising the face that they were being sold before they came out officially. Nearly as many appear if we search for the term ‘BOOTLEG‘.

But when it comes to selling music, even at rock-bottom prices, some of these sites will sell anyone’s, even when its normally free. They’re currently selling Dan Bull’s album ‘Safe’ in low quality 128Kbps, even though Dan gives it away to any fan.

Other artists trying to build an audience by giving away stuff for free include Ophed on the Etched Trauma netlabel. They also found their music on Russian music sites with a price tag attached.

“I understand them selling Beatles or Springsteen but I wonder what on earth they were thinking ripping off a small Greek Netlabel and a Québécois artist,” the label said in a comment.

The answer is probably “they didn’t actually mean to,” as this very odd final example shows.

Without going into huge detail, Scene groups often ‘discuss’ things between each other via news releases on their topsite servers. These releases mostly take the form of short text (NFO) files, but every now and again they take a more unusual format.

In 2010, there were presumptions that a Scene release group called DV8 had changed their name to SiRE. It wasn’t true, they were different groups, but to highlight the fact someone took a music track by some random artist, gave it an interesting title, and released it on a Scene topsite to put the incorrect rumor to rest once and for all.

As can be seen from the screenshot from LegalSounds below, the message spread a little further than first expected – and it’s now worth 9 cents.

So, if LegalSounds paid the licensing fee for this release, who got the money?

Not Lolfag, that’s guaranteed.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Maybe in some ideal, utopian world that doesn’t obey the normal laws of society and human nature that might be possible, but this is 2010 and the days of staying completely under the radar are long gone.

One only has to look around the most prominent half dozen torrent invite communities. There is always someone spilling the beans on even the most supposedly low-profile of locations – often with the full knowledge of the ‘secret’ site’s staff. The facts of life on the web are simple – if you’re on there, have a URL and you invite people to your torrent site, word spreads as easily as the files being shared on it. Hollywood and IFPI can’t stop that free flow of information – and neither can site owners.

Although there are plenty of smaller communities with a few hundred members, a large proportion of the more visible private sites – despite what some of their users may think – could not survive without a level of publicity since members are kicked out all the time. These sites, one way or another, nurture their image and desirability using things such as the apparent exclusivity of their community, the size and quality of their swarms (which by necessity require a decent number of contributors) and their efficiency at getting the best material first.

In recent times, the ability to get the latest releases first after they have pre’d (been released onto the net) has become one of the major bragging rights site staff and members use to demonstrate that their community is ‘better’ than that of their competitors.

So, in common with members of the Warez Scene who also have their own races to see who can be numero uno, many torrent sites are involved in competition too. Their rivalry is tested in something called a TRACE (Torrent Race). Thanks to a website that has been running for a few months now, the results of these races can be discovered without using IRC channels, making them even more public than they used to be.

When one first visits pre.corrupt-net.org and enters a title into the search box, it functions as any other preDB (Pre-Database) might, displaying a list of releases and a time and date of when they first hit the Internet. Since the movie ‘Inception’ topped this week’s Top 10 Most Pirated Movies chart, we’ll use that as an example below.

With the release format (DVDR/XVID) on the left, the penultimate far right column reveals the time when the release first hit the Internet. However, by clicking the green ‘TRACE’ buttons next to them, the list of which private torrent sites got them first can be viewed.

Using Inception.NTSC.MULTi.DVDR-THENiGHTMARE as an example, we get the following results:

What we can see here is that a site with the acronym of TL offered this particular release 6 minutes and 57 seconds after it first appeared on the Internet and was quickly followed by sites AL, HS, TBy, IPT and TB.

Many staff and members use acronyms when referring to their sites (ahem) in public, often for speed but also so that outsiders don’t know what they are talking about. But as a security measure it’s absolutely hopeless since anyone Googling ‘tracker acronyms’ can easily find out the full name and URL of the site in question.

When site admins give highly public interviews, as was the case with the owner of ‘TL’, the whole thing is made even easier. Many private sites say they want obscurity and many of their members believe that, but obscure sites don’t have tens of thousands of members and they certainly don’t race.

Rewind back more than a decade and a half ago and finding the latest warez releases on the Internet was a fairly difficult task to say the least, and if you had a reliable and safe source you were not only lucky but in the minority. Back then even the notion of a private tracker where one could sign up (let’s admit it, fairly easily) and get almost anything would be almost unthinkable.

These days everything is mainstream and as much as even the most 1337 inhabitants of private trackers would like to have people believe, nothing is off limits to someone determined to get in since everyone knows these sites exist. Of course, that’s by design, because if people don’t know they exist there would be no way to replenish their userbases.

And what’s one of the best ways to attract quality users to boost those constantly diminishing userbases other than relying on existing users to invite them? By having the top releases, first – and proving it with consistent TRACE results.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The situation revolves around that oddest of characters, Direct2Drive (D2D) – an online games store, owned by IGN, selling games over the Internet as protected downloads. Game code is modified to prevent the standard retail DRM from inhibiting game play (as there is no actual disc to check for) with Trymedia activation utilized instead. More importantly, since the code around the DRM has been modified and changed to a different system, regular patches from the game developers can’t be used. Instead, patches must be reworked by D2D to accommodate these changes. These changes are not always quick, a point D2D does try and defuse in its FAQ.

Thus we come to Rainbow Six: Vegas2 (R6V2) which, since its release in March, has had three patches released for it. The third, 1.03 provides a lot of changes, including new play modes, so legitimate purchasers of the game were eager to try it. The problem is, those that bought it via D2D can’t use it. This is the problem inherent in DRM. Those that buy the product are the ones affected, not those the DRM is designed to defeat.

After lots of complaining and attempts to fix things themselves, one Ubisoft employee found a solution. A zip file was uploaded to the help/support site, named “R6Vegas2_fix.zip”.

If D2D users patched to 1.02, then replaced the EXE with this one, they could then update to the new patch. However, someone ran a hex edit and it appears the fix was not Ubisoft code but actually a ‘no-cd’ crack released by the Scene group RELOADED, as shown here.

Since then, the zip file containing the fix has been pulled from the Ubisoft support site, so we’re unable to verify. The game’s community is as baffled by this as everyone else. Since the claimed origin of the fix, 10 days ago, there has been no word on it officially from Ubisoft, beyond a ‘Community Manager’ who states

We’re looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There’d be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable.

As soon as we find out more about this we’ll let you know.
_________________
Ubi.Vigil
Community Manager
Ubisoft UK

Although it is not unknown for a Scene release to be used to ‘fix’ a retail product, it’s certainly rare to have that fact promoted. That the ‘no-cd’ patch works, might have some relation to how brutal the Scene is when it comes to the quality of their work, especially in games. Whilst this is a validation that the Scene isn’t as bad as the lobby groups would have you believe (they fixed the game, and did it for free) you can bet that Ubisoft won’t be smiling at E3, and that they, and Direct2Drive, will continue to use DRM to annoy and inconvenience paying customers.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.