this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Maybe this is just a regional thing, but 10 to 20 years ago piracy was everywhere and it was pretty accessible. You could download anything from common social media and forum links with out caring a lot about security. Games, books, music, programs. There where torrent clients dedicated entirely for music and videos, video players for pirated movies filmed by a freaking hero sliding a camera and a tripod to a local cinema and translated by another hero. You got sites to host shit without any restriction and anyone with a hand and a computer could access it. Just click and go.
One of those hosting sites, megaupload, the mecca of piracy got a few lawsuits because of that and the owner ended up taking the site down. That was a dark day and after that hosting sites started falling one by one. Torrents become increasingly popular. There were tons of them, commented and maintain, leaving messages for the christian behind you was a thing. 'Seed please, seeeeeed!' And shit. This isnt something that happened in my country, but as I understand, arround that time groups of lawyers tarted monitoring internet to catch people pirating things and vpns polulated everywhere. At one point some torrent sites started being raided (tpb, now accessed through a proxy) or just closed
Both abundancy and easyness to access pirated things have become increasingly difficult over the years... there are still places to go. In spanish, book repositories close from time to time now they have move everything to lib-gen. Standards? You could download them from TPB long time ago. Last time i had to dive in VK to get them, now i dont know what to do if I lose them.
Some things i say could be wrong*
Edit: another jewl from the golden age, i remember downloading MW3 a day before it got launched. Some dudes (teknogods) used a loop in the user agreement to make some sort of a server client, and of course there was no restriction for pirated versions. It was even better than buying the game. I live in sudamerica and always played with 300 ping (MW, cod 4) with teknogods it was closer to 30.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I guess I've gotten so use to today's pirating techniques that my perception of what is considered easy has changed. Reading through your post, I'm reminded of how much easier it really was back then.