All About "The Scene"

All About "The Scene"
A Article and Guide by InvitesCentral Moderator IId3fi13rII
NOTE:This guide is copyrighted to InvitesCentral and only IId3fi13rII and the Admin of InvitesCentral (markupmaster) have permissions to mess with it and post it at other places.

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Introduction
You have seen the word everywhere. Most popular trackers including scenetorrents and scenenaccess have the name in their tracker title. At torrentleech, you see that the NFO file has to be at nforce.nl or vcdquality or else the release can not be uploaded.

But what does the word really mean. You are in the right place because in the following paragraphs, I will be explaining everything you need to know about the scene. Every aspect of the scene will be listed so keep reading and expand your knowledge. This is stuff that most of you probably do not know and learning it now is going to help you in the future and in the future of the p2p community.

There are actually 4 different types of Scenes. I will not list them as the only one we will be looking at is the Warez Scene which speculates in the branch of stuff that we are into. Mostly illegal shit. Lol.

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"The Scene"
The main definition of the scene is the pretty unknown worldwide network where people trade pirated goods, like dvd's, movies, games, applications etc. The word "Warez" refers to goods that are under copyright that are in violation of the copyright laws.
So the scene is basically the community of people that trade all these illegal goods over the internet for no profit but just to share them with the world.
It does not involve the selling of them for-profit.
So you're probably still like WTF is the scene seriosuly?

The scene contains releasegroups and solo releasers that release pirated goods.
No, they do not release their stuff on sceneaccess when right after they rip the DVD.
The Scene is very underground. It is kind of like a chain and starts with the releasegroups and topsites.



Topsites

Topsites are very fast FTP servers that have connection speeds of a considered minimal 10Mbps to a normal 100Mbps and have 500GB to many TB's of HDD space. They are extremely underground and nearly impossible to find. Administrators of topsites are very paranoid and change their ips frequently to keep from being caught mostly using ip bouncing. Also you dont just go and sign up. You must know someone who knows an Admin there because your ip will have to be allowed on the server or you cannot even connect to it.

But what happens at these topsites. Well this is where your Simpsons Movie from PUKKA was first uploaded. What you though PUKKA was actually a member of torrentleech? Lol. This is kind of a hard concept to pick up for some but its true and very real so listen up.

Release Groups and Releasers

Releasegroups and solo releasers connect to certain topsites and upload their release to that topsite. Then others called Racers race the release to other topsites to try to earn upload credit so they can get download credit (yess topsites do this also). Then they download other releases and try to get them to other topsites and get download credit at those topsites. And you see how the process works..
These releasegroups and topsites are the top of the chain and most of the content that you see on your private tracker comes from them especially the trackers that only allow scene material.

So you are starting to understand that our pirated goods are not just uploaded to all the private trackers. They work their way down the chain and as you have seen the beginning of the chain starts with topsites. Topsites are the core of "the Scene" and the network of underground topsites is where the scene lives. Without topsites, the scene would not be what it has become and releases probably wouldn't travel as fast.
Everything originates at topsites. Well not everything but usually everything. On Demonoid you might see a Diehard DVD uploaded by john123. That doesn't mean that john123 is a part of a topsite. It just means that hes a user at Demonoid and ripped the Diehard DVD for upload to Demonoid. Does this mean that john123's release is a scene release. Well yes and no. Technically john123 is in the scene but not at the core. He does not follow scene rules he rips the DVD the way he wants and thinks suitable. Therefore it is not an official scene release but it is a release in the scene. Usually it is a official scene release if it has the name of the releaser or releasegroup next to it or the NFO file will contain custom graphics and be very informative sometimes asking for help and certain things like that. Usually if a release is not a scene release there won't even be an NFO and there might not be a releasegroup or releaser name attached. As you probably can figure out, all the releases at places like sceneaccess, scenetorrents, torrentleech, and scenenetwork or any other tracker with scene in the name usually will only allow scene releases that follow scene rules and originated at topsites.

We will now work our way down from topsites to show you where the material arrives after people get it and share it on topsites.



FXP Boards

WTF is FXP? FXP stands for File eXchange Protocol. It is a vulnerability (an exploit) in FTP servers that lets them share data with each other-FTP SERVER to FTP SERVER. All this process needs is the command and off it is sharing its data with other FTP Servers. They usually use forum software such as vBulletin or IPB and usually use a credit system just like topsites. This provides very fast speeds and keeps servers very unknown in the FXP world since FXP usually uses hacked servers and hardware not set up for illegal activity.



Now you're interested! Thats right. FXP boards usually rely on Scanners, Hackers, and Fillers to infiltrate innocent servers and use them as grounds for illegal material. This lessens the risk of getting caught by anti-piracy agencies and adds greatly to the community. The Scanners are the people that scan multiple ip ranges of fast servers for vulnerabilities like open ports or easy to crack programs. Then they tell the Hackers the IP's and the hackers do the main work of exploiting the vulnerability to its fullest by installing a rootkit (a running process in the background thats not supposed to be there). The rootkit usually is a FTP Server application like SERV-U and will run on he victims computer making that computer a full-fledged FTP Server. The Hacker then will pop up at the FXP Boards and post the Username and Password of the newly hacked FTP Server. Now on to the last stage. This stage is where the Fillers will take all the pirated material he gets from other pubstros (the name of these hacked FTP Servers) and load it onto this Server. Once he is done loading all the latest warez, he will go back to the FXP Boards and post the download links.

As you can now see how FXP Borads work, this is a very illegal activity since it involves hacking into innocent computer systems. But nevertheless, this activity still happens on the world wide web anyway and is very popular amung many groups.

Now onto some more fun

[[IRC Trading]]

In the IRC world, there are two types of pirated channels that can be run and are usually run from people with lots of access to pirated material like FXP Users.
These channels include user-to-user (Fserve) channels that mainly use mIRC's file server function and other scripts to share data right off their hard drive. The second type of channels are the server-to-user (XDCC) ones which are usually set up with iroffer and can be hacked servers or servers that are used in FXP also. These servers usually provide very fast speeds by putting users on a qeue making users wait to download the material until there is enough bandwidth to supply the user with high speeds.



As you can see, a release has to travel very far just to get to these irc channels and I'm not even done yet!! Also I'm sure you can see that this is a chain that just keeps going all starting with original release on those topsites^.

NewsGroups



NewsGroups are very much like IRC mixed with Forums. They were mostly used to share information but soon the servers that held all that info started holding other things too like pirated warez. Ofcourse users found a way to transfer files through NewsGroups and soon all kinds of warez would filter through there. Now NewsGroups aren't that hard to access but to download things you will need a little more experience. Such applications needed to connect to these NewGropus are caped newsreaders and a couple of them are Newsleecher an Xnews. Now this next category might sound awfully familiar to you. Its called:

P2P

This the final stage of the traveling of a release. P2P users are actually classified into two categories--the kiddies (the 10 year olds who use Limewire and The Pirate Bay)--and the major P2P'ers that usually join private trackers and share invites to get into better ones. By most sceners, P2P'ers are looked down upon because they make material to easy to get to and the security is usually very low which can put the sceners at bigger risks. Also, P2P'ers are the most targeted in the media as being the "Dangerous Pirates" since they are the easiest to be busted by organizations like the RIAA and MPAA. As I'm sure you know how P2P works Bittorrent is used the most and can sometimes have very slow speeds. That is why lots of senior P2P'ers use private trackers which require you to have a certain ratio in order to stay a member. This in turn creates faster upload speeds since everyone usually tries to max out their ratio by uploading as much as they can of a torrent.

[IMG]http://wiki.shareaza.com/img/wiki_up/networks.png[/img]

As you have probably figured, P2P has the largest pirate base since it is the easiest to access by n00bs. But what most P2P'ers dont know is that most of they're releases come from very underground, smart, and extremely illegal sources .

Conclusion

[i]So am I in the scene? If I upload a torrent that i totally created myself, is that a scene torrent? Dude, holyshit, these topsites sound so hardcore; where can i get in?[/i]
Technically, yes you are a part of the scene. But you are a part of the wrong side of the scene. Since the core scene hates P2P'ers, you are considered on bad side of the scene. Now if you upload a torrent to say blackcats-games that is a copy of halo 2 cracked so that the single player missions can be played, it is a release in the scene but it is not a official scene release. For it to be an official scene release, it has to have originated at a topsite usually. As for where you can find these topsites, I or no one else on IC (not even Markup on a very giving day) will give you any information on where you can access topsites or try to get you into a topsite. Not that we have information on them or are even a part of them (if you get that girl from Transformers to go out with me you will be a lucky person) so I wouldn't even start searching. Now you're a pretty big dumb ass if you think you can guess some names or see one on a site and try to connect to it. You must know somebody that can get you in and get ur ip address range opened on the topsite to let you connect to it. Its kinda like the topsites ban everybody until they accept a new member then they allow his ip. Also, once you get in, its not like you can just download a bunch of shit and thats it. You will have to upload and download things repeatedly. It's kind of like who can upload and download fasterst. Its just a race pretty much the whole time and from what my contacts tell me, its not really as cool as it sounds.

Anyway if you think about it, being part of P2P has a little more of an advantage since you get scene releases plus more since people usually can learn very easily how to upload there own stuff and usually upload pretty acceptable material that can usually be trusted especially if on a private tracker. Also, i wouldn't go Pm'ing the uploaders at SCT asking if they are part of topsites and if they can get you in cause they will probably contact the admin and get you banned. Plus just because they are an uploader does not mean that they are part of any topsites. It could mean they browse newsgroups and take things from there or they investigate IRC channels and download material from there.

TakeDowns and Security

But don't think that topsites are totallly unfindable. The Feds and other organizations across the world, have tracked down the ip addresses of topsites before and in massive Takedown's, seized servers and hard drives with pirated material on them. This is not very common and takes a very long amount of time to even get the names of these places. Even though, topsites/FXP Boards are probably the safest places to trade pirated material.



To add some more about how secure topsites try to be, I will list more procedures they use to stay hidden. Besides IP bouncing, there is SSL encryption on all ftp connections and usually users can only use certain clients. The users themselves use anonymous proxies just to be safe. Also, topsites usually have a IRC channel on very private and secure servers to inform their users. All connections to the IRC servers are fully encrypted through SSL and most communications and messages in the IRC channel are encrypted with an advanced program called FiSH which without the right keys, you won't even be able to view the text of certain messages.

Relase Databases



So you have heard of nforce.nl and VCDQuality from probably reading the "Torrentleech -what you need to be an- Uploader" page. What these places are are private communities (nforce and VCDQuality are really the only public ones) that track and list every scene release and contain the NFO and info about that release. These places are used by almost all sceners to see what has been uploaded already and what hasn't. It also helps them check for nukes and bad releases. This altogether keeps the material on the scene very reliable and usually never duplicated.

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Now you know pretty much there is to know about where your torrents usually come from. You understand the process which these files go through and how they are copied very quickly and spread very rapidly. You have learned how underground warez can be and that not all pirated materials are originated in torrents. I would say you're pretty smart now. I also advise you not to go around talking about topsites and FXP Boards as users of them are very strict about being very secret and private. I also wouldn't post things in forums about them or that forum complex will probably get Ddos'ed.

Now i will leave you with links to the Official Scene Rule NFO's and txt files for you to learn what is expected of the relasers and releasegroup to help provide the community with the greatest possible release they can.

- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/tdx-rules.nfo]The DivX Releasing Standards 2001
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/tdx2002.nfo]The DivX Releasing Standards 2002
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/txd2k5.nfo]The XviD Releasing Standards 2005
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/nsa_rip_rules.nfo]NSA Rip Rules
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/srr.txt]Standard Rip Rules
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/dvdr.txt]The 2002 DVDR Releasing Standards
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/tdrs2k5.nfo]The 2005 DVDR Releasing Standards
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/mp3_rules.png]MP3 Rules Dated 2005.03.03
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/svcd.txt]The SVCD Releasing Standards 2002
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/tv.txt]Tv Release Rules 2003
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/rules.for.custom.swesub.2k5.nfo]SweSub Standards 2005
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/psprules.nfo]The PSP Movie Releasing Standards 2005
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/xxxdvdr.txt]XXX DVDR Release Standards 2004
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/pda.txt]Official PDA Rules dated 2002.04.14
- http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/mvid.txt]Music Video Council 2.0 Final Rules
- http://www.aboutthescene.com/images/scenerules_gamerip_2004.gif]The Game-Rip Release Standards 2004
-http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/TSCR.Cover.Releasing.Rules.2004.READ.NFO.SPREAD-TSCR.nfo]The Scene Cover Rules 2004