Those of you that are particularly net savvy will recollect
the beginning of the file sharing revolution: Napster.
Not the new, brand
spankingly legal “Napster.com”, mind – the Napster I speak of is the old Napster. How many of you veteran
file sharers can recollect your very first Napstered song? Was it (and sadly,
for me, this is the case) Robbie Williams and “Angels”? I thought as much.
Since then, pretty much everyone with an internet connection worth its weight
in rock salt has been downloading legally questionable, but nevertheless
wonderfully free, music and video files from Limewire, BearShare, Kazaa,
BitTorrent and the like. But, some of you may wonder, what did people on the
internet do before all this fancy
peer-to-peer and whatnot? It is in this period, before the advent of file
sharing, that the phenomenon that the elitists of the internet liked to call
Warez was upon us.
"Back in the day", "Way back when", and all those other
over-used clichés basically meaning “In the past”, people used to simply
download their stuff. People used newsgroups (known as Usenet, these groups are
hosted on your ISP’s server, and are generally much faster than most P2P
file-sharing implementations), FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and IRC (Internet
Relay Chat) to satisfy their need for an almost bursting downstream pipe of
illegal music and video files. In the case of Usenet, this involved the long
and laborious task of (take a deep breath before reading this out loud) downloading
a list of the newsgroups on the server, then downloading a series of headers
(like the subjects of emails) for each newsgroup post, searching for “X.mp3”,
downloading each file in collection (and in most cases, this file would be
fragmented between several compressed archives), decoding the files from text
files to binaries (1s and 0s), decompressing the files using a program such as
WinRAR, searching again for missing files, using a recovery program to recover
the corrupt files from the collection, scouring the internet for a codec (a
file that contains information on how to play a video or song), realising the
codec is long since out of date and that you need to repeat the entire process
again to find a different version of the same file so that it will play on your
computer, and so on. Not easy, eh? Kid’s of today have it so easy.
Those in the IRC boat had it much worse. Because there never
was a “standard” for downloading files from an IRC server, different servers
had different conventions for giving its users files. For example, one server
might require you to start a chat to a bot (a computer that will respond to you
automatically) to download a file. Others initiate a script that will send you
a file providing you type in the required reference, within the correct syntax,
at a full moon, whilst beating three eggs with your left hand. Also - and somehow
even more archaically - some servers may require you to actually interact with
a human in order to download a file.
How quaint.
The worst of the lot, though, simply has to be the FTP method. This was (probably) the first method of
downloading illicit files (most likely to be pirated programs “back in the
day”) ever conceived on the internet, and still remains the most difficult and
most problematic. The process is simple enough, once a user has found a
suitably innocuous outlet of Warez and Appz . Given, this is a hard enough step
in itself. The Internet has many parallels with the real world. The most
obvious of these is the networking that exists among the lower echelons of the
Warez community. It is often difficult to become a Warez trader and gain access
to the seemingly infinite supply of files, videos, and music that can become
available to you if you just knew the right people. Let’s suppose you have
managed to lodge yourself firmly into some underground group of “l33t d00d3s”
(that’s “elite dudes” for you and I). In exchange for some strange “pr0n”
(“l33t” speak for porn) video involving a canary you happen to own, you receive
an address along the following lines:
ftp://squirgle:mumsmeat@212.34.54.125:9000
What do you do with it? What’s a squirgle? You know very
well that you don’t want any of “Mum’s Meat”. What are all those numbers? Well,
the mind boggles that you’ve managed to make it this far without knowing the
answer to all of these questions, but I digress. This is an FTP address, and
you’re expected to connect to this sequence of numbers with an FTP client. You
can try, by all means, but the likelihood is that by the time you manage to
figure it all out the FTP server has been closed by the owner who has realised
his disk space is being hijacked by “l33t d00d3s” and their hordes in order to
host their many music, video and application files. So, no Warez for you.If nothing else, file sharing has alleviated some of the many
problems of getting hold of illegal items on the internet. No wonder the RIAA
and MPAA are sweating their socks off: file sharing has made it quick and easy
to find and download millions of illegitimate files on the internet. It is now
easier for your 8 year old daughter to download a copy of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”
(Parental advisory – explicit content, by the way) than it was for you to
actually give the Best Buy employee your credit card to pay for the computer
she got it with. Head’s up, world – you’re changing very fast indeed.