-TCB!-

[n00w]

Thank you for your kind message. I’m going to send you an e-mail.

 

Belgium: I’ve had some contacts there but not so many. In particular I’ve been a member of Fusion for a short time. Apart from those I’ve already mentioned: Duncan / The Band (Jean-Claude). He was group leader and founder. I’ve met him 2-3 times at parties or at others’ places (can’t figure out exactly, definitely did too many things and met too many people at that time). RAM (ex-The Band) and The Red Baron were the coders of the trainer menu used by Blackbird, but I didn’t know them personally.

 

Joey Beltram: Funny. I’ve met the real one (the DJ from Brooklyn) twice at rave parties in France, one which I’ve attended with Maximilian, and the other one with Spirit (Quartex). I’ve even made street art with NY DJ Frankie Bones and his brother Adam-X at the second one, held in an abandoned factory in Asnières near Paris.

 

Organizing a meeting :-)…: although France was one of  the worst countries in the world for hackers/crackers (Foxy posted a lot about this, I could bring in more details – I got busted only one week after him!), here we wouldn’t need the equivalent of a Royal Pardon, except for the late sceners who continued after 1995. Thanks to having stopped everything in 1993, I don’t risk anything anymore for what I did in the past. The statutes of limitation were only five years for the category involved, before the new criminal code (Code Pénal) was voted in 1995. Then they became thirty years, which is a lot. But in France we have the Principle of Non-retroactivity of criminal law, which in particular applies to the statutes of limitation if they are prolonged by the new Law. If they had been reduced, the new delay would apply. That’s something which has been legally and formally established by the French Court of Cassation (equivalent of a constitutional court) in two steps at the beginning and middle of the 80’s.

 

Deature: I didn’t know him. Not as if I were like these Skid Row leaders who didn’t know their members… well… maybe… or maybe I was just as bad as Skid Row! After all I’ve been twice a member of that group. But I have an excuse for Deature, I was probably no more in charge of the whole activities at Delight when he became a member. Once I had decided to put a final period to my borderline activities, I just kept responsibility for the demo activities of the group.

 

Anyway I will add him in our all-times memberlist which I’m currently editing on our new unexotica wiki page.

 

Btw, I still live in Paris. Would be pleased to meet you one of the next times you’re here for business.

[DeaTure]

Heya fellas, since my name just popped up I would like to clear up that I was never a member of Delight so there is a reason why Francis don’t know me 🙂 

I am also no longer active in any way with the scene and being a games programmer today it would not really be something i would dare to do either even though I have very fond memories of the time.

I started my scene career in the demo scene where me and some local friends ran a group called Humanoids and when that group were no more I slowly moved towards more piracy oriented groups as more and more of my friends on the scene were also converting.

When I started talking with TCB I was running a little group called Kingdom and we affiliated TCB’s bbs in belgium called Metal Impact later we both joined Quartex together with a couple of other Kingdom members.

Today I am living and working in Switzerland and I have of course contact with a few ex-amiga sceners here 🙂

[Gonthar]

Hey TCB,

Can you drop me a line? mace501 at hotmail dot com.

Thx mate!

—————————–

#3070 -TCB!-:

[…]

Never met with anyone from The Band until 20 years later over here on the forum I met Gonthar.  They you had Anthony/The Silents (biggest copiers seller in Belgium) & Cenobyte/Crystal (cc reseller) + Crazybyte/TSL (later Purple Haze/GOD) all based in Antwerp.

[Annatar]

#2999 -TCB!-: plenty of “ways to communicate” (i.e. bluebox for the Germans and a steady calling card supply from Killerette & Phonestud)

Wait wait, what? Who are “Killarette” and “Phonestud” now? Never heard of ’em!

And why did they need calling cards in the first place? Blueboxing in Europe was pioneered by Agile on the C= 64, and Razor 1911 continued in that vein… why didn’t these guys use Blue boxes?

Towards the end of the Golden Era, we used PC-buckets with DOS and SoundBlaster to BlueBox our way into Zion’s hideout, so why were these guys so dependent on calling cards?

And what about today? Telecommunications are cheap and abudant, and although the Shop watches tirelessly like the Eye of Sauron, there are still ways to encrypt. There used to be secret “tier 1” FTP sites in the past, I personally never considered them safe, but the more intriguing question for me is, how does the whole thing work today?

(Personal confession: I am too lazy and/or wary to search for cracks, and I buy the originals since I can afford them now, and I’m too scared of malware being embedded in cracks. I do have a guilty conscience every time I buy an original though, like I am betraying my heritage.)

PS: You forgot the period where Fairlight was pretty much putting out every single release 🙂

 In my experience: yes, there was a period where Fairlight put out lots of releases on Amiga, but it was very brief. Again, this is an experience of someone who was forced to live in isolation not of one’s own volition, and did not have the same resources as these guys did.

Added 10 minutes later:

#3002 -TCB!-:
I think all in all, GOD lasted a good 3 years and I have very fond memories of those times.  There is not a single MBA-program that can prep you for corporate life as being a group organizer for a little while:
– You need to attract the right talent/skills and retain them
– You need to coordinate all activities and drive for results
– You need to compete in an ultra-competitive environment
– You need operating income to cover expenses
– You need a distribution model and need to overcome logistical challenges
– You need branding/marketing/image/PR
– You need quality assurance

Bah, most people end up getting MBA’s just to move up the corporate ladder. I never went because after being in management, I realized that being a fat cat was against my core principles: I could never be corrupt and I despised the fact that the rest of the managers were incompetent douchebags playing “bullshit bingo”, and that being competent I was considered a threat.

Once I realized it is a rat race, and that I would have to become the equivalent of  an emotional whore, I ditched the whole thing, even though it paid shitloads of money. I could not be a slime like they were.

Running a cracking group is an order of magnitude better experience than being a manager in a soul crushing corporation. Take my advice, do not go into management unless you have the power to fire all the fucking bullshitters playing “Bullshit bingo”. They are fucking worse than the mafia, because these assholes have found a way to rob, cheat, steal and lie to one’s face without going to jail. (Smart, but terribly short-sighted, and very detrimental to humanity in the long term.)

Added 30 minutes later:

“Still, I recognize that as one of them, I’ve committed bad deeds with the consequences I’ve measured, so I’ve done a lot since then, and I will continue to support actively the fight against counterfeiting and piracy, in collaborating with governments, law enforcement and of course, with the right holders themselves.”

The whole “us versus them” is completely and utterly obsolete. There is no money in software, unless it is highly specialized software for running large corporations, which requires deep technical exprtise in Information Technology or computer science, or highly specialized software, requiring a Masters or a Ph.D. degree. Such software is usually completely useless to the general consumer and/or public; even if they had a crack, of, say EMC Networker or HP-UX MirrorDisk-UX, what would Joe User do with it? A backup tape library could easily run into a million Euros, sometimes more, and no Joe Blow has the necessary expertise or the money to buy an expensive HP-UX Itanium machine, just to be able to run MirrorDisk-UX…

…what you are writing is the world of games and generic applications, general consumer-grade software, which is being made obsolete by the free and open source movement. And even then, who runs software on their computer any more? The world is moving towards servers running applications and delivering the content to the web browsers:

“The network is the computer”

Finally.

Recognize that anti-piracy, in spite of pirates still generating some profit, is a dead-end because piracy itself will become obsolete. Free and open source software on free and open source operating system platforms is killing it. And there is no turning back. It is quite a waste of time to preoccupy oneself with stopping something which is going to die anyway because it has already become obsolete.

The writing is on the wall. See it! Read it! Realize it.

[n00w]

Annatar:

1. Killerette and Phonestud and all the other ones involved in this particular case (except for the German Kimble you know who) were U.S.-based. Most of them were sysops.

Edit: funny handle you have here. I bet you already know this and the rest also …

2. Using the bluebox in France got us all busted in 1991. No-one here ever got busted for using calling cards (at least during all the time when I was active). Do you know why? AT&T, MCI, Sprint… all of these were American phone companies, with no subsidiaries in Europe. Who was going to launch a complaint? They had to lure Max into coming on the U.S. soil for him to get busted, that’s the real story. Otherwise he would have never been jailed in Europe for that. France wasn’t safe for him because of Nintendo, that’s all, Spain was just safe for everything. Bluebox? A lot more dangerous as it equated to steal local (national) phone providers. I bet you were in a country where they didn’t care at all, or at least they didn’t while you were using this.

Edit: when you placed a call through a carrier switchboard located in the U.S. you were on U.S. territory submitted to U.S. laws. When you emitted control frequencies in order to takeover a switch to get an outgoing line while calling a toll-free number, the equipment was generally (besides a few exceptions such as MCI bluebox) located in your own country. If you don’t get the point, ask a lawyer.

3. Today. Well today is another story. Free unlimited calls to 40+ countries through fixed lines/VoIP have been common offers by phone companies for years. Otherwise use Skype, Google Talk or whatever. Today is another story for software too, so your pro-open source rants are funny reading (the more so as they are now a bit dated with cloud applications, pay-per-use, etc.). And what about the corporate software like ERP, CRM, whatever? Again, funny reading, completely out of the subject.

Edit: the network is the computer was already buzz at the end of the 90’s. Today ubiquitous/pervasive computing is where we stand. We could discuss somewhere about what will come next. Interesting discussions.

Anyway whatever to which extent you may be right or not in your views, having supplied, cracked and spreaded games the way we did it at the special time we did it, did some harm to game software companies and the Amiga platform as a whole. I’m not talking based on doctrinal views towards a more moralized worid, but only based on facts I can heavily detail. Which game companies died? When and why? Thalion, Silmarils, etc. The Amiga? Well of course the main reasons of its collapse were the greedy men behind Commodore: Irvin Gould, Mehdi Ali… but losing game developers to PC and consoles couldn’t have fuelled up the business prospects.

That’s how it happened. Later I’ve had the occasion to discuss with a few game developers who had been fired due to their employer’s (game companies) bankruptcies. Some got nice indemnities, others not. Ok that’s life, we can say that we do not care, or we can endorse responsibilities for our deeds. Also we could have dealt drugs, or trafficked human beings, which would have been far worse. We didn’t do that, so let’s keep it in the right proportions.

They “come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

[Annatar]

#3200 n00w:

Annatar:

Edit: funny handle you have here. I bet you already know this and the rest also ..

What do you mean by “funny handle”?

2. I bet you were in a country where they didn’t care at all, or at least they didn’t while you were using this.

I was in a country where Blueboxing came late – like thirty years late. We used Soundblaster cards inside of PC-buckets and some DOS-based software to generate the frequencies… our country went through MCI in Canada, actually it hit a satellite and we nabbed that trunk.

We spent some time on Accession and PRESTiGE boards, but this all came way, way too late. It was the sunset of an era. Most BBS’es were shutting down and things were moving to FTP servers on the Internet. Commodore was already in liquidation, but we, being isolated and behind-the-times didn’t know it.

Rapid catch-up will come by getting exposed to Sun equipment and Solaris, but that was the beginning of a new era. On UNIX, it was not necessary to crack protections because that was not a consumer world. It was a high-end world.

3. Today. Well today is another story. Free unlimited calls to 40+ countries through fixed lines/VoIP have been common offers by phone companies for years. Otherwise use Skype, Google Talk or whatever. Today is another story for software too, so your pro-open source rants are funny reading (the more so as they are now a bit dated with cloud applications, pay-per-use, etc.). And what about the corporate software like ERP, CRM, whatever? Again, funny reading, completely out of the subject.

What about corporate software? That is high-end software, if one wants to play in that space, sooner or later one has to register one’s own company and go legit. Once one goes legit, it’s either pay for licenses, or invest time & effort and build everything yourself with free & open source software.

Some software is so specialized and requires such high level of knowledge (like a masters or doctorate) that even when cracked is unusable or so niche that even with cracked copies floating around, they don’t make a dent in the software company’s bottom line. I worked for a few of those companies, so I know first hand.

  

Edit: the network is the computer was already buzz at the end of the 90’s. Today ubiquitous/pervasive computing is where we stand. We could discuss somewhere about what will come next. Interesting discussions.

It was the buzz, but most people didn’t get it. Now when everything is fully networked, people finally get it, like 30 years later. And now when they get it, nobody wants a PC-bucket on their desk any more, except for the likes of us. The ordinary consumer is done, done, done with desktop computers. Done with that type of software. Done installing crap. All the ordinary consumer has to do is fire up a web browser, and the entire network becomes a throve of free applications, no OS needed. The network is the OS platform, the web browser machine of execution.

Ok that’s life, we can say that we do not care, or we can endorse responsibilities for our deeds. Also we could have dealt drugs, or trafficked human beings, which would have been far worse. We didn’t do that, so let’s keep it in the right proportions.

They “come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

 

Who?

[n00w]

According to Tolkien mythology, “Annatar (Q, pron. [ˈanːatar], stem Annatár-) was a fair form used by Sauron to deceive Celebrimbor and the Elves of Eregion.” I was just wondering why you picked up this handle. Maybe just by coincidence…

[Annatar]

It is not coincidence.

[Madj]

Can anyone (N00w for sure ?) tell us about the “FAST CLUB” in sartrouville, located in France, and used in many Skid Row cracktros. At that time, it was not supposed to be safe in France (92/93).

So what was the trick with this contact address in France ? Who/What was behind ?

[n00w]

And the response is Twin & Wacky.

Twin = Twinblitz, ex-Abuse, ex-Agile. Wacky = Willy of BomberMan & Willy.

Twin arranged the address as per request of Maximilian, before they were in bad terms – for some reason i know which doesn’t need to be developed here. That’s why the address didn’t follow us when we founded Interpol. Also the biggest case in France was for phreaking (bluebox) and it all started in September 1991. Twin was below the radar at this time, as was Max who arised at the beginning of 1992.

[INC]

#3247 n00w:
And the response is Twin & Wacky.

Twin = Twinblitz, ex-Abuse, ex-Agile. Wacky = Willy of BomberMan & Willy.

Twin arranged the address as per request of Maximilian, before they were in bad terms – for some reason i know which doesn’t need to be developed here. That’s why the address didn’t follow us when we founded Interpol. Also the biggest case in France was for phreaking (bluebox) and it all started in September 1991. Twin was below the radar at this time, as was Max who arised at the beginning of 1992.

Very interesting post, I just registered to post here, I got to this thread when searching for oldschool nicknames. I was in some of the boards mentioned here like UE / Mirage / Akira / X-Factor, etc. It was pretty interesting back then. I remember Quartex, Paradox and Skid Row being some of the strongest groups at that time. N00w I wouldn’t be surprised if you and I know each other, because most of the people you know I also knew, like Max, etc.

I was in the PC Scene but had lots of friends from the Amiga scene. I actually started in a group called Skillion that originally came from Amiga. Has anybody ever heard of that group? 🙂

Cheers

[bee]

Hello mate. I think Metal Impact was the first foreign BBS I dialed. Maddy was SysOp then, though.

xxx

[-TCB!-]

Yes, Maddy was the founder and original sysop of MI.  He probably ran it for 2-3 years before I took over from him.

[Subzero]

#1693 TCB:
a small group of people decided to hit the town. Phil, myself and I believe Metallica along with some other Skid Row-guys ended up in some african club and spent one hell of a night.

i remember that day … LOL 😉 

[thespecialist]

Really love those stories here 🙂 I was just a few years too young and finally mastered the art of cracking when the Amiga scene was already dying. But then again, I guess I count myself lucky that I didnt go down that road.

My only 5 minutes of fame were when I was the first in the world to hack the xbox 360. I never released the hack, I was just in for the fame, not the money, but I was contacted by some companies to sell my hack and I think one of those was Max, although I’m not 100% sure it was him (it was a spanish company). I see Max is still active in that scene and when googling Max another name came up, “GaryOPA” that I also still remember from my xbox hacking days 🙂

Anyway, wonderful read this thread and yeah I always wondered about that Amay pobox, too funny to read now that it was run by some non scene soldier, LOL

[Author]

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