> In hindsight though, it was flatout stupid to participate in illegal activities over unencrypted IRC channels and FTP sites
This also shocked me, and taught me a valuable lesson about politics. I had thought the warez scene was a meritocracy, but affecting change was so hard. Introducing new tools/processes/encryption was almost impossible. New standards IMO only seemed to happen because P2P was putting out stuff with great quality/smaller file size because of new encoders.
In the end, I still believe the scene has done more for consumers/media consumption than anything else (maybe youtube?). I doubt we'd see streaming offerings like this if it hadn't existed. So it was illegal, but also morally right.
And pirating remains the only way to receive a great education for free, for all.
concerning the educational aspect, i'm not sure what exactly you mean. while today e.g. software engineering knowledge is all out there, back then there was no github and stackoverflow and i had to learn a lot from books (basic, c, assembler). the freely available resources were lower quality, that is tutorials by crackers or demo scene coders.
i completely lost interest in pirated media these days as they provides minimal value to me. the few albums/movies/games which are relevant to me, i'm easily able to buy. the only exception might indeed be textbooks on specialized technical topics, which often aren't of interest for the warez scene audience.
maybe it isn't an issue anymore, but i meant education in a broader sense, not just software engineering.
i grew up in a remote village and the library was 45 minutes away on the bus. (also, thank god for child fares.) i loved that place. but it wasn't an english speaking country, so apart from badly translated novels and technical books that were 20 years out of date, the only good thing they had were CDs of classical music.
my exposure to technical and academic topics (anything outside the basic stuff they teach at school: philosophy, economics, psychology, "modern" physics, computer science, etc) as well as english/american language and culture is pretty much all down to the internet - and pirating.
and it isn't like i had a hard life. this was in a first-world country, so the education system was okay and i was completely healthy.
i agree that today, pirating might not be necessary - except if you're interested in music (jazz, blues, etc) or modern-ish films. the courses that american universities put out for free are absolutely fantastic. in fact, most of my bona fide CS knowledge comes from MIT CS courses which i worked through years later. because when you learn something yourself, it usually involves more experimentation and doing, and less formal theory.
This also shocked me, and taught me a valuable lesson about politics. I had thought the warez scene was a meritocracy, but affecting change was so hard. Introducing new tools/processes/encryption was almost impossible. New standards IMO only seemed to happen because P2P was putting out stuff with great quality/smaller file size because of new encoders.
In the end, I still believe the scene has done more for consumers/media consumption than anything else (maybe youtube?). I doubt we'd see streaming offerings like this if it hadn't existed. So it was illegal, but also morally right.
And pirating remains the only way to receive a great education for free, for all.