/cyb/ - cyberpunk and cybersecurity

Tell me more OP and please cite sources.

Here's The Rules: https://scenerules.org/
reading that has a lot of insight about the scene (also back to 10 years ago).

sadly groups like yts repeatedly soykaf on the rules and made it acceptable to not follow them.
kinda sad, they wouldn't have gotten away with that 10y ago.

Because the OP was needlessly cryptic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911
>Razor 1911 (RZR) is a warez and demogroup founded in Norway, 1985. According to the US Justice Department, Razor 1911 is the oldest software cracking group that is still active on the internet.[1]

>>1239
>cryptic

you mean there are actually lains who have never heard RZR before?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5CNlMGcARA

>>1240
Been a while since I gamed and when I did I was a normal person that played uncracked games. Razor 1911 seems very trustworthy though and when I get some new hardware I'll definitely try their warez out

How are release groups related to the scene? Scene made those god tier demos. Does the scene means something else now?

>>1248

A release group, such as Razor1911, had people with multiple roles, such as suppliers, crackers, distributors and coders.

Suppliers supplied paid material, e.g. a domain-specific software copy from their company. Crackers removed the copy protection. Distributors distributed the release into an FTP topsite and used similiar ratio system as the Bittorrent trackers today. Other people then copied the software and distributed it further.

Coders, such as rez[1], were doing cracktros, keygens or other tools. A cracktro was a bonus program that was made to promote the group and to say hello to the rest of the scene. This comes from the times of Amiga or probably even before that. A small program, with a nice effect that is not so easy to make and some text. It was to show their skill in making a smart piece of code that was both compact, but also used smart rendering techniques to make it look good and keep it fast.

Additionally to coders, the demoscene division also had musicians (such as Lizard King, Purple Motion, etc.). The cracktro/demo production started to exist in parallel to the cracking activities. Many demoscene releases were made independently of the software releases.

Of course, most of the releases had the NFO file (an ASCII text) which had all the necessary info about the release inside.

Some Razor1911 crackers were busted in an FBI raid named "Operation Buccaneer" [2]. This put a bit of a setback on their group, but they didn't stop completely. Their demoscene division kept existing and they made some cool chiptune releases.

For more releases visit Razor1911 website[4], pouet.net[5] or defacto2[6]

[1] https://github.com/chiptune
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Buccaneer
[3] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9357
[4] https://razor1911.com/
[5] http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=158
[6] https://defacto2.net/organisation/razor-1911

>>1251

Thanks for the explanation and the links.

>>1262

Glad to help.

I forgot to mention there's an old mini-series about how the scene works:

>Welcome To The Scene - Episode 1 (S01E01)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIs_5nfJKu4
https://archive.org/details/the_scene_xvid_episode_1

And also documentaries about the demoscene:

>Demoscene Documentary series, episode 1: Early 1990 era - Moving from cracking to demos

https://youtu.be/J2Jz1bu2CcA?list=PLB80155C0CA46465B

(don't forget to turn on the English CC)

Cheers

>>1210
>>1251

This thread is the first place i saw the phrase "The Scene". I'm grateful to all lainons above, without this thread, i would never know such a culture existed.

I just wanted to share something a bit sentimental related to this and I hope here is appropriate.

After a long browsing session, I managed to find a forum related to demoscenes that once people organized events and other activities in my country.

However, the website was dead, the last post on the off-topic discussion, 2 months ago.

It was a post of an admin. He was promoting his 10 year old sons youtube gaming channel. Some posts had ads seeking game developers etc.

I wonder whether the demo culture in my country died due to the members growing old, having children, and settling into normal lives, or being overwhelmed by the millenial, low quality, high definition internet.

I hope we'll still remember lain when we're 34.

>>1299
A lot of communities or their members moved to more centralized and generally more populous platforms like facebook. It may sound mildly shocking if you don't have an account there and can't keep an eye beyond the shallow surface.
I wouldn't be surprised if the members of the website you are speaking about ended up there creating private groups or whatnot.

You can find interesting documentary about software cracking in bbs era on postman tracker (i2p)
just search HPAC

I was part of the scene about 15 years ago. Was pretty cool with many nice people, even irl meetups and such things (of course some soykafheads too but who cares). I was in for the fun and some dabbing, but quit when my friend who lives down the street and did exactly what I did had his house searched by the police for distributing warez and soykaf. I like to handle things on my own and not be dependend on some eastern european ftp site owner. Still know some of the people though. Good times.

Used to have tons of Amiga games cracked by Paradox back in the day. Good times.

How does one find their way inside a scene group?
I always wanted to become part of a scene group, so I started learning reverse engineering back when I was a teenager. Never got to do much, except cracking simple programs like winrar
Then I got a job as embedded devs and never made it to scene.
Would have been pretty cool to be part of something great. Maybe even release a game as part of a group.

I was never part of the scene, but was a part of the torrent trackers ScT, SCC, XNT, TheGFT and many 0DAY general. Back in the day people didn't mind downloading a series of archives to unrar and watch a movie.
Recently HD movie and FLAC music trackers have surpassed the quality and attention to detail of the Scene, however the old goats still remember the good old days.

A huge part of the scene was the Demoscene subculture which focused on the computer generated artwork, including but not limited to GFX, music, demos and programming competitions. Scene groups often had (and still do) their own distinct style of NFO artwork and drama. Much of the drama and blame has been archived on https://scenenotice.org/
A good resoruce for old BBS ASCII art, music, demos and artpacks is http://artscene.textfiles.com/

A personal favorite is this demo by FAiRLIGHT
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54603

>>1299
>I hope we'll still remember lain when we're 34.

Oldfag here (37). Keep loving what you love; you'll always find like-minded lainons like you out there. You'll grow old with them.

I thought I remember reading somewhere that the scene started making it a standard that you can't include cracktros with a release. Does anyone know why? I always thought that was cool. Dunno why you would want to ban it.

>>3215
scenesters becoming boring old people I guess

>>1299
>I wonder whether the demo culture in my country died due to the members growing old, having children, and settling into normal lives, or being overwhelmed by the millenial, low quality, high definition internet.

I've been there. You get some job that requires 50 hours a week from you, and a girlfriend you go out with on the weekends. Suddenly you only have time to watch movies or play games for a few hours every day. You become so busy you don't even notice this is happening until you look back after 5, 10, 20 years, and think to yourself "holy soykaf, what happened?" But then you have bills to pay and kids to feed, so you can't just drop everything and go back to the old life.

Anyway right now I'm single and also between jobs, so here I am again lol.