
How the Fairlight pirate group from Malmö, Sweden, conquered the world - dragonintime
http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.444716/we-might-be-old-but-were-still-the-elite
======
skrebbel
Pantaloon is one of my personal heros. He used to tell his wife that he'd go
to a game developer's conference when in fact he was getting piss wasted at a
demoparty. Details, details.

EDIT: (I hope his wife doesn't read HN)

------
apu
_When I had just turned 20, I was in charge of business on four continents.
What managment class would have given me that opportunity?_

This is one of those things that still blows my mind -- how people operating
in supposedly "non-capitalist" enterprises still end up learning all the
things that are needed to run a successful business. (And perhaps they learn
it even better.)

------
wtvanhest
Is this website using frames? It is basically unreadable.

------
stefantalpalaru
"Any idiot could rip a movie and upload it to Pirate Bay, and they're even
making money from it. That's nothing but commercial murder of those who
actually make those items,” says Pontus Berg.

”We could be accused of having acted in a legal grey zone. But for national
finances, I believe it was a giant plus. The availability of demos and cracked
games was very important in the beginning for the sales of home computers,”
says Pontus Berg.

Early-onset dementia?

~~~
jopt
Well, it's a bit self-righteous, but it shows the difference between the old
scene where cracking was a technical challenge reserved for the able, and the
new sort of mass-market scene we have today.

I for one always cringe at the sight of technically illiterate friends who
keep up with bad sitcoms through uTorrent without knowing how the file system
(even the high-level abstraction of it) works.

When we debate IP law, hackers (rightly) accuse the establishment of not
knowing the technological reality of the laws they push. Judges and media
corporations legislate based on poorly construed metaphors of theft and
ownership. But the majority of today's file sharers have no idea what they are
doing---they live in the same world as the establishment. It doesn't hurt to
remember this.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
There's not much difference between skilled software crackers providing free
games to a bunch of clueless users and skilled encryption
breakers/rippers/encoders providing free media to a bunch of clueless users.

The guy sounds like one of the hippies turned stock market drones. What he did
in his youth was fine. What the damn kids are doing today is shit.

~~~
soulclap
I am pretty sure you were commenting on the 'ethical' aspect but just to
emphasize this: regarding the skills involved, cracking today's 'PC games'
copy protections is a lot harder than ripping or encoding will ever be. The
protections are constantly updated, coming with new ways of triggers and other
advanced protection measures in every version, making existing tools and
approaches break. It's a neverending war, crackers versus copy protections.

As far as ripping and encoding goes, there is definitely some 'skill' involved
as well (especially in video ripping/encoding and ensuring the best or 'right'
quality and resolution) but in a lot of cases, it is the same steps and
combination of tools each time. If we're talking audio ripping, it is
basically a one-click thing. You can't compare this to the amount of skills,
time and hard work required for cracking.

And although today's protections are much harder than most of what crackers in
the old days had to deal with, it has always been like that.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
True, but the difference in difficulty level doesn't grant him the right to
belittle today's forms of copyright infringement.

