Digital Underground - uXu - Underground eXperts United #uxu-608

### ### ### ### ### #### ### ### ### #### ### ### ##### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ##### ### ### ########## ### ### ########## ### ### ### ### Underground eXperts United Presents... ####### ## ## ####### # # ####### ####### ####### ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## ## #### ## ## #### # # ####### ## ## ####### ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ####### ####### # # ####### ####### ####### [ Personal Essay: Bookwarez & Text File Scene ] [ By DIzzIE ] ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ A Personal Essay on the Bookwarez and Text File Scene BY: DIzzIE [c]opyleft 2002 0000oooooooOOOOOO()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()000000000oooooooOOO This is a little essay on my introduction to the psychedelic world of text/bookwarez, as well as my experiences and recollections of it. So let us start by how I first came about this uncanny treasure chest... It all started in the mid 1990's when I was living in Gothenburg, Sweden. I used to go with my dad to his workplace every weekend, usually on Saturday around mid-day, and come home Saturday night, in order to catch old reruns of Mission Impossible or MacGyver. The main reason I went with my dad was because I did not have an internet connection at home, and as a growing young lad in the new technology era, when I was without a modem I was like the junkie that hung around in the park down the street from my flat was without his twelve hits of meth a day.... Having surpassed my school reputation as a class clown, into the more apt role of class sociopath, one of these Saturday nights found me searching the internet for prank ideas, as April Fools was soon approaching. I visited many-a-website, and had soon accumulated around 500pages of print outs dealing with pranks and general social monkey wrenching. Well, one link led to another, and soon I found myself reading things like versions of the infamous Anarchist'c Cookbook. Obviously, my misanthropic little mind had a series of orgasms over these great little files of destruction, and I hungrily began to look for more. My search terms in altavista were no longer 'prank files' or 'fun pranks,' but were now 'anarchy texts' and 'how to make bombs." Once again, after following more pathways of endless links, I came upon a most wonderous site, anarchy- online.com. This site had all sorts of files on how to make explosives from bleach, how to master the arts of fake IDs, an array of survivalist files, and, of course, links. One such link, was to an ezine named CATS-lash. A Canadian based anarchy zine that had all sorts of text files published monthly, ranging from the popular subject of voice mail box hacking, to backyard booby traps. I became intrigued, and the long-sedated hamsters had suddenly took their first wiff of the glue bag and begun to run in their previously-rusted wheels. I began dreaming up my own ideas and usually testing them out mildly, contacted the zine owner, and became an official writer for the zine. This lasted for several issues, until to my dismay, the zine ceased to create new issues. This had been my first active participation in the text file scene. After CATS-lash ended, I wrote text files individually, generally on general mayhem topics such as how to have a wild night on halloween or how to make makeshift weapons such as hiding a knife in your watch belt. The first major file I remember writing was probably around 1999; after a particularly charged argument with the parental units, I retired to my room to write How To Kill Your Parents: The Complete Guide. Soon, my journeys led me to discover more and more websites that had vast collections of knowledge, some of the most memoriable ones were the Temple of the Screaming Electron archives (totse.com), anarchy-online.com, textfiles.com, and parazite's archives ("aka motherfukin undesirable content"). Soon, I stumbled upon a swedish text file group known as the Underground eXperts United (uxu.org). By this time I had written a healthy dose of underground how-to's and submitted some to uXu. I hung around with them for some time, writing a handful of files, but eventually stopped as the editor wanted me to "move on," with my writing, to regress to philosophical musings, rahter than practical how-to scam/mayhem files. Hence, I slowly drifted away from uXu and progressed to write more files on my own. I submitted them to some of the online storage banks like textfiles.com and parazite's archive. A craving for a wider range of readership, as well as for more texts by others to fuel my own knowledge, as I had by this time, successfully sucked the marrow out of most text websites, and had accumulated over 200megabytes of texts from websites, as well as about 80 of personally written texts, I began to look for more knowledge resources. Along comes a comrade whom I have known since third grade who tells me about a file-sharing type program by the name of Hotline. After an initial rejection, a general curiousity took over, as happens with any new idea presented to the mind of man, and I began exploring Hotline and the servers it had to offer. Soon I found various servers that were dedicated to text files; hundreds and hundreds of files that I hadn't seen on the web! I downloaded/read more and more files, and much like a crack addict, hungered for more and more gold. Upon signing on to one Hotline server, in the agreement (a file that shows up upon connection to most hotline servers, varying with each server), was a recommendation to visit the channels #bookz and #bookwarez on a program called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Having previously, briefly used this program for chatting with friends from middle school, I was vaguely acquainted with the workings of this program. So I downloaded a newer verion of mIRC, an IRC client for Windows, connected to Undernet, and joined the channels (#bookz & #bookwarez). Once again, a brain-orgasm encompassed the inner linings of my skull with the sweet cum of knowledge. Lots of people had books they were offering, books that were sold at the bookstore, copyrighted books that I could get for free! Holy shit! All this knowledge right here, in a text file, without the need of dragging my ass to the bookstore, waiting in line, and interacting with live people. This was great! I gathered up the texts I had collected in my early website days, and started serving books and texts in the channels. My server became quite successful, serving about 500 texts a day. Then, after some time serving, people began to worry about the texts I was offering, they including manuals on besteality, necrophilia, murder, and the like....Eventually I was banned by the prudes on Undernet, but luckily found a place on another IRC network: nullus.net, and later dalnet. Both of those places took me in, and thus I began getting more and more involved in the bookwarez scene. I learned all about scanning books and using OCR (optical character recognition) programs such as Omnipage and FineReader (downloaded for free, of course ;) ). There were all sorts of texts on the servers people had: old, copyright expired public domain books, new bestseller and scifi books, scanned comics, magazines, audiobooks, certification manuals, computer books, howto files, political manifestos, and oh so much more to drive the curious mind to perpetual ecstacy. Yet all was not well in bookwarez land. There was more and more attention being paid to bookwarez on the part of law enforcement officials, more and more articles appearing in magazines about copyrighted works of bestseller's such as J.K.Rowling's Harry Potter series, appearing online for free. And what have I to say about the haters of the bookwarez scene? Fuck You. I have been around in IRC chatrooms for a long time, and have heard a variety of opinions about bookwarez. Many have said that they never even bother to go to a bookstore since they found #bookwarez, while as many, if not more say that they still go to the bookstore as much, for nothing can replace the feel of an actual book; while others go to the bookstore to merely buy books to scan and perhaps return them in a week, with the cover a little bent ;) . Obviously, I am a stingent supporter of the bookwarez scene. I believe that ebooks, especially free books, provide a greater access to those who are in countries/areas which are far away/don't sell books the person may want to read, hence all one has to do is log on to the net and find the book in #bookwarez or on newsgroups. I also believe that knowledge should be free, and to all of you who say that the author is getting cheated: 1) many people usually do buy the books, and just like having an ebook version, and 2) Stephen King on book piracy: "I really don't have any response to the pirating of books, other than to point out that the practice predates the internet by roughly 2,000 years. I am not even sure it is a bad thing." - Yahoo! Internet Life December 2001 Finally, I believe that everything should be free, that all money should be abolished, but that's another essay..... P.S. Final Thoughts on the bookwarez/ text file scene: * The bookwarez/text file scene today (2002): The text file scene thrived in the 80's and early-mid 90s and has now mainly degenerated into how-to files such as "how to defeat cd copyright protections" and "how to rip dvds," or into poorly written bomb text files that are usually stolen from the now largely outdated anarchist cookbooks written by people such as Jolly Roger back in the day. Yet there are still many thriving underground zines around, many of which are cataloged at scene.textfiles.com * On the other hand, the bookwarez scene is constantly growing. Every day I see more and more books getting scanned and posted on newsgroups and distributed on IRC. Every day more and more books are added to the vast treasure chest of knowledge that has been assembled. More bounty is added daily, and that makes me happy. --sign this file and show your eternal support for the bookwarez/text file scene. Signatures: ===== DIzzIE (North Carolina, USA) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- uXu #608 Underground eXperts United 2002 uXu #608 1991-2001 uXu ten years 1991-2001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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