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Not what it seemsThe Scene today
The scene today has change dramatically, mainly because the difference in which we use computers and the internet compared to 20 years ago. Rather than being friends sharing files for the love of it, it’s a large scale business. The scene rapidly deteriorated from a set of low key private networks to a vast industry of illegal file sharing servers.
the.scene.today
The Scene is no longer kids sharing their files from their local FTP’s. Vast servers with terabytes of data plague the internet, distributing the file releases. A mindless routine of distributing files as quickly as possible with the fastest servers getting the data first. However do not believe for one minute that these are hacked university servers or small business servers. Groups of individuals spend vast amounts of money for the privilege of being involved in the scene.
The majority are usually paid hosting for which they rent the servers on high speed 100mbit – 1Gbit lines, with large arrays of hard drives. Such server are the low end of the pecking chain, as anybody can get involved in such endeavours, all it takes is credit card and a few hundred dollars a month and you are up and running. The next step up is collocation, this is where you build your own server and have it connected within a data centre, this is readily classed as being more secure as the drives can be more easily encrypted. Further steps up are those hosting servers in their own houses on high speed lines, usually 10Mbit, 100mbit or Gbit in Japan or Sweden with massive home built servers Terabytes in space. Finally there is the king of all sites, business servers: usually very securely locked down and almost untouchable.
So why do these people do it? What would drive somebody to break the law, risk huge fines, even jail sentences! For some its money, pirate movies, albums and TV shows can be easily sold in markets for large sums of money and the faster you have the data the easier it will be to sell. Owners of some servers even sell “leech”, meaning they sell logins on their site to which people pay to download from them.
For others its fame, it may sound stupid, but some use it to feed their alter egos. They strive to have the fastest and best sites possible. They use it for friendship, for sport or just to no longer have to spend days and nights alone. Finally of course the obvious reason you have the hardcore downloader’s, who actually want the movies, games and music all to themselves.
I always wondered if so many people are involved why the authorities never closed them down. One opinion is that there are too many to shut down, it’s easier to stop the source than try and arrest all the small players. However the scene is extremely organised. Each site has heavy encryption methods, most have IRC channels which are encrypted by blowfish and private keys so nobody can interperate what they say. Some even go as far as to having their own private IRC networks purely for the site.
In the scene each site is given a name, usually 3-letter acronyms (example, TBS – The Best Site). Although it is possible for a site to have any name it pleases. Each site tends to be made up of several parts, the physical FTP server(s), an IRC channel to which an IRC eggdrop bot outputs the filenames of all data uploaded onto the server and several users of the site. These bots are like advertising, they are very colourful and sometimes funny to try and attracted more people to the site.
The FTP servers are usually setup on secure Linux servers, the top sites using software called Glftpd, known for being very secure and robust. This FTP has specific scripts and commands built especially for the scene. It is the most popular FTP software amongst scene members. Lower end sites tend to use software known as DrFTPD, this is a newer concept which allows multiple servers to be linked together creating the illusion of one large server. This is very scalable allowing for huge amounts of hard drive space and bandwidth. However DrFTPD is known not to be as robust and reliable; however in some cases its benefits outweigh this fact.
Each physical file is grouped into a category, for example games, movies, TV, mp3... and so on. When people upload the “releases” they create a new folder and place the files into the correct section. Each site will usually have multiple categories to which people can upload. Each category has its own strict set of rules; these are known as the site rules. The site rules are only specific for that particular site, they may example be “only movies released after 2007” or “only prime time TV shows”. The reason for this is so that people only upload specific popular releases, which saves hard drive space and bandwidth on the servers.
Each release also has its own set of group rules. These are global rules across the entire scene and all groups must adhere to these very strict guidelines. The rules are generated by groups of individuals and signed by “Release groups” which makes them official. These are specific rules about the quality of the files, how they are packages, the name of the files. Everything is very specific and this guarantees good quality working files to be distributed amongst the servers.
If these rules are not followed then two things can happen, site nukes or global nukes. Don’t worry this doesn’t involve explosions. If a global nuke occurs then the “Release Groups” that created the files are given a bad name, and in most instances if they make too many mistakes are no longer allowed to release files. If a site nuke occurs then the people who uploaded the files are punished, this can usually be they lose credits or if they make too many mistakes are deleted from the server.
A credit is a quantified figure of the amount of data you are allowed to download. You see bandwidth costs money and most people are not allowed to download all the files they want. Each user of a site is usually given credits, for example 100Mb of credits means they can download 100Mb of files before having to earn more credits to download. Usually credits are on a 1:3 ratio, so for every single Megabyte you upload you get 3Mb of credits. This gives people incentive to upload more files to the site. For some very special few they are given something called “leech”. This means they are allowed to download as much as they want for free. This is often a sign of respect and gratitude or the users pay money for this privilege.
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