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[fracturedviolets]

So I have been someone who has been sailing the seas for many years at this point for software be it programs, video games, TV shows and movies, music, etc. We have all done it at least once. I had always been curious how this was done before the 2010s when my dad started to show me the ropes when it came to such a thing. For years I just assumed it was a far less spread thing given the internet is such a huge part of piracy now but the internet wasn't always a given even through the 2000s. One day while searching through loads of abandonware shareware CDs on the Internet Archive I came across something that finally became my answer and that would be CDs or DVDs being done up by groups mostly based in Europe or UK. I was quite surprised by just how much they could pack into just a few CDs or even a single DVD for the time. These discs include anything from pirated Adobe programs to stuff as simple as driver installers for computer hardware of the era. Intrigued I decided to download a particular groups releases because they seemed to do it quite professionally which I found some groups were able to do by what I will guess is being friendly with the staff of disc plants to make properly pressed discs instead of having to run an operation fully in a home. This group is known as Onyx. I couldn't find a huge amount of info about them but if someone does know a bit more about their history I would be very interested to hear about it. Most I could find about them is they were somewhere in The Netherlands given all the releases had a lot of stuff in Dutch with some okay but occasionally broken English. Below will be some screenshots of what you can expect out of these discs.

How the DVD covers looked


The usual content you can expect:

[epicness]

Pretty intriguing. I know that a lot of old Windows betas and etc. got leaked through the warez scene and sometimes ended up on these discs. Every so often a few new builds pop out of the woodworks from a new warez disc being dumped on IA or something lol. In fact I think that's where the weird super-early Chicago build came from, it was a mislabeled WfW build that was scene leaked.

Even besides that, it kinda intrigues me to think about how these places operated. I doubt it was nearly as easy to run high-speed infra then as it is now and trying to do that while also trying to keep your OPSEC in check so you don't get arrested must've been a journey of its own. Not to mention coordinating the sourcing, cracking, leaking, distribution etc.
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Reverse engineering nerd, occasionally other things
"epic/he/her/him/epic/epic/epic/epic/ness uses light mode" - tox 2022