191 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
191 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
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Underground eXperts United
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Presents...
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[ Personal Essay: Bookwarez & Text File Scene ] [ By DIzzIE ]
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____________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________
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A Personal Essay on the Bookwarez and Text File Scene
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BY: DIzzIE [c]opyleft 2002
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0000oooooooOOOOOO()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()000000000oooooooOOO
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This is a little essay on my introduction to the psychedelic world of
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text/bookwarez, as well as my experiences and recollections of it. So let us
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start by how I first came about this uncanny treasure chest...
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It all started in the mid 1990's when I was living in Gothenburg, Sweden. I
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used to go with my dad to his workplace every weekend, usually on Saturday
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around mid-day, and come home Saturday night, in order to catch old reruns
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of Mission Impossible or MacGyver. The main reason I went with my dad was
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because I did not have an internet connection at home, and as a growing
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young lad in the new technology era, when I was without a modem I was like
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the junkie that hung around in the park down the street from my flat was
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without his twelve hits of meth a day....
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Having surpassed my school reputation as a class clown, into the more
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apt role of class sociopath, one of these Saturday nights found me searching
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the internet for prank ideas, as April Fools was soon approaching. I visited
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many-a-website, and had soon accumulated around 500pages of print outs
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dealing with pranks and general social monkey wrenching.
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Well, one link led to another, and soon I found myself reading things
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like versions of the infamous Anarchist'c Cookbook. Obviously, my
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misanthropic little mind had a series of orgasms over these great little
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files of destruction, and I hungrily began to look for more. My search terms
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in altavista were no longer 'prank files' or 'fun pranks,' but were now
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'anarchy texts' and 'how to make bombs." Once again, after following more
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pathways of endless links, I came upon a most wonderous site, anarchy-
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online.com. This site had all sorts of files on how to make explosives from
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bleach, how to master the arts of fake IDs, an array of survivalist files,
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and, of course, links. One such link, was to an ezine named CATS-lash. A
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Canadian based anarchy zine that had all sorts of text files published
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monthly, ranging from the popular subject of voice mail box hacking, to
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backyard booby traps. I became intrigued, and the long-sedated hamsters had
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suddenly took their first wiff of the glue bag and begun to run in their
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previously-rusted wheels. I began dreaming up my own ideas and usually
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testing them out mildly, contacted the zine owner, and became an official
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writer for the zine. This lasted for several issues, until to my dismay, the
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zine ceased to create new issues. This had been my first active
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participation in the text file scene.
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After CATS-lash ended, I wrote text files individually, generally on general
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mayhem topics such as how to have a wild night on halloween or how to make
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makeshift weapons such as hiding a knife in your watch belt. The first major
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file I remember writing was probably around 1999; after a particularly
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charged argument with the parental units, I retired to my room to write How
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To Kill Your Parents: The Complete Guide. Soon, my journeys led me to
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discover more and more websites that had vast collections of knowledge, some
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of the most memoriable ones were the Temple of the Screaming Electron
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archives (totse.com), anarchy-online.com, textfiles.com, and parazite's
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archives ("aka motherfukin undesirable content"). Soon, I stumbled upon a
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swedish text file group known as the Underground eXperts United (uxu.org).
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By this time I had written a healthy dose of underground how-to's and
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submitted some to uXu. I hung around with them for some time, writing a
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handful of files, but eventually stopped as the editor wanted me to "move
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on," with my writing, to regress to philosophical musings, rahter than
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practical how-to scam/mayhem files. Hence, I slowly drifted away from uXu
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and progressed to write more files on my own. I submitted them to some of
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the online storage banks like textfiles.com and parazite's archive. A
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craving for a wider range of readership, as well as for more texts by others
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to fuel my own knowledge, as I had by this time, successfully sucked the
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marrow out of most text websites, and had accumulated over 200megabytes of
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texts from websites, as well as about 80 of personally written texts, I
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began to look for more knowledge resources.
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Along comes a comrade whom I have known since third grade who tells me
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about a file-sharing type program by the name of Hotline. After an initial
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rejection, a general curiousity took over, as happens with any new idea
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presented to the mind of man, and I began exploring Hotline and the servers
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it had to offer. Soon I found various servers that were dedicated to text
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files; hundreds and hundreds of files that I hadn't seen on the web! I
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downloaded/read more and more files, and much like a crack addict, hungered
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for more and more gold. Upon signing on to one Hotline server, in the
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agreement (a file that shows up upon connection to most hotline servers,
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varying with each server), was a recommendation to visit the channels #bookz
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and #bookwarez on a program called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Having
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previously, briefly used this program for chatting with friends from middle
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school, I was vaguely acquainted with the workings of this program.
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So I downloaded a newer verion of mIRC, an IRC client for Windows, connected
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to Undernet, and joined the channels (#bookz & #bookwarez). Once again, a
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brain-orgasm encompassed the inner linings of my skull with the sweet cum of
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knowledge. Lots of people had books they were offering, books that were sold
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at the bookstore, copyrighted books that I could get for free! Holy shit!
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All this knowledge right here, in a text file, without the need of dragging
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my ass to the bookstore, waiting in line, and interacting with live people.
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This was great!
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I gathered up the texts I had collected in my early website days, and
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started serving books and texts in the channels. My server became quite
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successful, serving about 500 texts a day. Then, after some time serving,
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people began to worry about the texts I was offering, they including manuals
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on besteality, necrophilia, murder, and the like....Eventually I was banned
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by the prudes on Undernet, but luckily found a place on another IRC network:
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nullus.net, and later dalnet. Both of those places took me in, and thus I
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began getting more and more involved in the bookwarez scene. I learned all
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about scanning books and using OCR (optical character recognition) programs
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such as Omnipage and FineReader (downloaded for free, of course ;) ). There
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were all sorts of texts on the servers people had: old, copyright expired
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public domain books, new bestseller and scifi books, scanned comics,
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magazines, audiobooks, certification manuals, computer books, howto files,
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political manifestos, and oh so much more to drive the curious mind to
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perpetual ecstacy.
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Yet all was not well in bookwarez land. There was more and more
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attention being paid to bookwarez on the part of law enforcement officials,
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more and more articles appearing in magazines about copyrighted works of
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bestseller's such as J.K.Rowling's Harry Potter series, appearing online for
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free.
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And what have I to say about the haters of the bookwarez scene?
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Fuck You.
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I have been around in IRC chatrooms for a long time, and have heard a
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variety of opinions about bookwarez. Many have said that they never even
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bother to go to a bookstore since they found #bookwarez, while as many, if
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not more say that they still go to the bookstore as much, for nothing can
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replace the feel of an actual book; while others go to the bookstore to
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merely buy books to scan and perhaps return them in a week, with the cover a
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little bent ;) .
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Obviously, I am a stingent supporter of the bookwarez scene. I believe
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that ebooks, especially free books, provide a greater access to those who
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are in countries/areas which are far away/don't sell books the person may
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want to read, hence all one has to do is log on to the net and find the book
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in #bookwarez or on newsgroups. I also believe that knowledge should be
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free, and to all of you who say that the author is getting cheated: 1) many
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people usually do buy the books, and just like having an ebook version, and
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2) Stephen King on book piracy: "I really don't have any response to the
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pirating of books, other than to point out that the practice predates the
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internet by roughly 2,000 years. I am not even sure it is a bad thing." -
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Yahoo! Internet Life December 2001
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Finally, I believe that everything should be free, that all money
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should be abolished, but that's another essay.....
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P.S. Final Thoughts on the bookwarez/ text file scene:
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* The bookwarez/text file scene today (2002): The text file scene thrived in
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the 80's and early-mid 90s and has now mainly degenerated into how-to
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files such as "how to defeat cd copyright protections" and "how to rip
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dvds," or into poorly written bomb text files that are usually stolen from
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the now largely outdated anarchist cookbooks written by people such as
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Jolly Roger back in the day. Yet there are still many thriving underground
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zines around, many of which are cataloged at scene.textfiles.com
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* On the other hand, the bookwarez scene is constantly growing. Every day I
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see more and more books getting scanned and posted on newsgroups and
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distributed on IRC. Every day more and more books are added to the vast
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treasure chest of knowledge that has been assembled. More bounty is added
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daily, and that makes me happy.
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--sign this file and show your eternal support for the bookwarez/text file
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scene.
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Signatures:
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=====
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DIzzIE (North Carolina, USA)
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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uXu #608 Underground eXperts United 2002 uXu #608
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1991-2001 uXu ten years 1991-2001
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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