> That job put me in contact with a criminal gang who went on to supply with me dozens of GBs of stolen hard drives that I used to create what was probably the largest warez FTP
Statements like this seem to agree with the anti-piracy groups' narrative about piracy being closely related to organized crime, a claim that initially seemed questionable to me.
Back in the VCD/SVCD/DVD/PS1/PS2 days, piracy was absolutely heavily interwoven with organised criminal gangs. I couldn’t comment on the current state, but I’d be surprised if there was enough money in media piracy for organised crime to even glance at it, given the vast and easy profits now available in narcotics and fraud.
“HK silvers” were industrially pressed and printed CDs and DVDS you could buy in any market street in SE Asia. Later they started flooding into Europe. For a few years you’d often see illegal DVD sellers outside supermarkets in the UK with all their warez spread out across the pavement for sale.
There was even a local enterprising porn DVD seller in our local area that went around all the local pubs flogging pirated porn DVDs to the inebriated chaps just before closing time. Illegally pressed pirate disks that he purchased from another criminal who mass illegally imported them for resale. These weren’t disks he burnt off with his home PC.
Many of the large FTP sites when I was involved in the piracy community 20 or so years ago certainly seemed to have nefarious links as well if you dared to look or think (so you generally didn’t). Sure, some were just illicitly set up on fast college/university networks by enterprising students, but there were certainly many running around that time that were funded by organised crime.
*edit - I mention above I doubt organised crime is interested in media piracy now, but on reflection I suddenly realised how I’m probably quite wrong on this. There are plenty of illegal IPTV services (re streamed PPV, commercial channels, streaming providers) being illegally sold through the same people & channels as narcotics.
I am very annoyed by TV and streaming services. I have a very nice TV which I specifically chose because it had Google TV builtin, so I wouldn't have to suffer through any third party TV interfaces.
My gosh, it is not very good. I get advertised TV shows I cannot watch all the time. I have legally purchased several streaming services (netflix/disney/prime/apple/etc.) but I have to open each service as a separate application to just browse.
I do not own a TV license, but I will be advertised shows on iPlayer which I _legally_ cannot watch.
My friend has an illegal IPTV subscription, something in the order of $100 for 12 months of access. This has one single interface that lists thousands of live channels, across multiple countries. It has streaming content from every paid streaming service in one searchable / sortable / listable interface. The provider also has their very own branded 'streaming service' which has content in true 4K HDR. Films ripped from 4K disks in full bitrate.
With the rise of Steam / Netflix I have only not paid to consume media when it was not available in my region, now we have another half-dozen services the content has become fragmented.
I currently pay 4x for 1/10th of the service my friend does with illegal IPTV.
Piracy has become attractive again. I'm not sure how this is going to get solved.
Really I want a service where I pay my $10 a month and can stream/watch _everything_ and the royalties just get paid to the content creator. Much like Spotify does for music. I wonder if we will get the same content fragmentation in music streaming in the future; Swift's new album only releasing on Tide, for example. I hope not.
Well, I had personal contact with several large-scale pirates, and AFAIK, they were not involved with organized crime, they were merely well-placed to do high volume transactions.
My first job I had a peer, a low-level contracting employee. We worked in the NOC of a regional ISP. Therefore our backbone was a powerful T1-T3 in the early 90s, and we had comparatively massive storage capacity. This fellow was basically college-age, and he amassed a gigantic repository of pirated software which he termed "AHAB". Most of the other staff in the office knew about his AHAB repository, and he distributed the stuff via anonymous FTP. Often we would partake in such AHAB hauls, but I tried to stay away and stay ignorant of the inner machinations of this stuff. I was ostensibly a legit employee for a legit ISP.
Then not too much later, still mid-90s, I went to work for a VAR of SPARCstation clones. The IT boss guy was a prolific pornographer. He was well-known on the relevant Usenet groups by a pseudonym. I had no trouble figuring out his identity, and his office was obviously set up so coworkers couldn't find out about all the porn he viewed on the job. His big Sauder desk was facing the door and the monitor was not visible by anyone in the room except him. So he also took advantage of the employer's decent Internet connection and our sizeable Novell storage network, to store his porn and trade it, I guess for free, with other Usenet posters.
I'm curious--when you say "a prolific pornographer," do you mean watcher or, uh, performer? Reading it I think the latter but it sounds like you mean the former.
Those FTPs were not publically accessible -- the users, numbering in the dozens or hundreds at most, were software crackers, dvd rippers, couriers, etc. So normally a 'top site' FTP would see a steady incoming flow of brand new pirate material that the site owners could use in the money-making side of their operation.
They ran a legit front business of fitting double-glazed windows I discovered one day by accident, when I ran into them mid-install at a hair salon lol. I'm guessing it gave them some access to the buildings they were stealing from, and at least the opportunity to scope out jobs. The stuff I was buying was mostly commercial, sometimes Sun equipment, etc.
I eventually got raided by the cops and they took all the stuff at my house, but not all the servers which were shoved directly on the JA.NET.
Funnily I would rip off the criminals. Especially on hard drives. They would bring me bags of HDDs and they would say "Hey, we got this 5GB drive for you" and I would bullshit them, "No, that's a 500MB, you're reading it wrong", or "That's unformatted capacity.. it's only 3GB formatted mate".
This was in the 90s before torrenting was widespread. Decentralizing filesharing means criminal groups aren't needed and can't easily make a profit off of it.
Statements like this seem to agree with the anti-piracy groups' narrative about piracy being closely related to organized crime, a claim that initially seemed questionable to me.