Impressions of the Chinese warez scene

    * a lot of letters, sometimes politically incorrect, the text was on the table for 5 years.

    image The first meeting with the representatives of China on the Scene took place 2 days after my “ entry ” into the same Scene. I needed access to the then popular warez-FTP “ Typhoon Epicenter ” (I found out later that it was located in Hong Kong). Of all the friends and acquaintances, only one person could organize access - “a friend of a friend of my friend ”. He turned out to be Chinese by faith and passport, and for some time we talked closely. It was after meeting him that I began to relate to the Chinese with passive interest.

    These are crazy in terms of bringing their skills to the absolute. Actually, we respected them for this, because they had " brains ""which we sometimes lacked - not in terms of intelligence, but in terms of personnel. And there were a lot of them ... damn many.

    Most often, the Chinese evoked 3 types of emotions in us: respect, envy and irritation. In the years 1997-2004, any pirate , rolling the "Best Soft 200x" blanks, would give a kidney for access to a pair of warez servers in China.

    Respect


    Maybe this is the education of the Communist Party or the trait of all Asians, but they know how to work. If the Chinese team gets down to business, then we can safely assume that it will cope with the task (sooner or later, one way or another, honestly or not). We respected the fact that they could spend months on one task and issued a solution to which others with the words “ let it go to Tagil ” did not reach because of a lack of patience. But, in my opinion, they are weaker in defense. Most of their PE packers were removed immediately, but, of course, not all. NSPack and Upack immediately come to mind , which in themselves are not bad, but they have nothing to do with protection.

    rorWork is in their genes. “ Professional slaves ,” as one member put itCORE Several times I had a need to write one or another instrument, but my knowledge did not allow me to realize everything that was needed. Then I turned to the LWK team (Lifework Krew) and within one day (!) They sent me a project written from scratch only on my TK curve.

    By the way, one of the LWK members was involved in such an association as China Serials 2K . They often organized their communities in support of an idea and did not allow it to bend after the " official world funeral " of this idea. Even when S2K died worldwide , in China this base was updated regularly. You can call it the " law of Chinese jelly"- when they get to China, technologies acquire a very large reserve of inertia.

    Another reason for respect is the almost complete absence of “ show-offs ” among the majority. They quietly and calmly rejoice in their success. You respect it at first. But there is a minus here - drunken devils are found in the pool. Due to the fact that they are quiet, even if the Chinese communize something for the glory of the Communist Party, then they are very reluctant to admit their guilt and mow down under the morons, pretending to forget even the Chinese. In the theft of other people's ideas, they seriously succeeded, more on that below.

    Envy


    There was something to envy, because they had and have the largest servers with warez - at least. But usually envy extended to hacking tools. As soon as the next supercryptor appeared, then after a maximum of six months, the Chinese had an unpacking tool ( iPB - tough guys). And even though this tool was crooked, 40% of executives beat it, but this was enough to crack even distributions of the cryptor itself.

    ipbThe Chinese were very reluctant to share their best practices, although sometimes they condescended to the public releases of various tools. At the same time, they could easily put protection on the public release. And I had to break ... sometimes for a long time.

    Another reason to envy them was their forums, where the very tools, articles and releases were laid out. There are two types of Chinese forums: public and private (which are allowed only by invitation), not indexed by search engines and even in Chinese. Among “non-Chinese” units manage to get access to private forums. It was the case, guys from the Czech Hacking League of Class tried to hack one such forum. Attachments were their goal. Hacked, but very upset when they saw that all the attachments are rar archives with passwords that change every week and are announced on the forum channel in IRC, where access was definitely ordered. Another way is to use one, miraculously received account for collective reading. But the administration of the forums (at least those 2 where I was) quickly stopped this practice, seeing that the user visits the forum either from Sweden, then from Kazakhstan, or from Ukraine. Readers had to set a VPN. :) Particularly cunning tried to deflate the entire archive of the forum through Teleport. It didn’t help. Maximum 2-3%, after which the automatic ban is forever almost the entire subnet.

    Access to public forums was open to everyone, but even there they tried to restrict foreigners. Created sections for " English speaking public", But the most interesting topics, of course, were raised in the Chinese section. With the advent of automatic web translators, it has become easier, but still not easy. Moreover, each of your posts demanded the blessing of a Chinese moderator, and these people, who saw the world through a click, could calmly disapprove of your text just because they did not like your nickname. But this is more likely not envy, but annoyance, about him later.

    Revenge was "terrible." :) A significant weapon was their ignorance of Russian and English - they certainly did not understand the " Albanian Exig ". And it often helped. No seriously. For example, a couple of times “hot” public articles were written in “ Albanian"So that the Chinese could not translate. Although, it is worth saying that in these articles the Chinese were not presented in the best light ... therefore they wrote so that they did not understand.

    Irritation


    ftpMostly annoyed by the reluctance to let us in their hangouts, forums, servers. They tried to shut themselves off from the rest of the world. This is understandable, the people in China are full, their own huge party. Moreover, the language barrier is a problem for them. But, when you are banned from the Chinese forum just because you are European or Russian, it damn it. And when you see the tool that you have been looking for 2 months lying in your attachments on the forum, but you can’t download it, because Since your status is “ foreigner ”, you can safely bang your head against the wall. The Great Wall of China exists not only in the real world, but also in the virtual world, and you can learn a lot from each other.

    Another annoying habit - the people of the Middle Kingdom loved to take Russian (yes any) tools, translate the interface into Chinese, slightly modify the GUI and pass off as their own development. So, for example, it was with the Quick Unpack program that FEUERRADER wrote (in this example, his name was still saved, lucky) and many others. They put their logos, links to sites, some Chinese readme.txt and other rubbish into the archive without a twinge of conscience, the logo of a site is inserted into About, along with all the references to the author. After that, this disgrace goes into free swimming with a wonderful note inside: “ If you wanna re-release the software in another website, please keep this info file included, thank you". And this despite the fact that they themselves deleted everything they could.

    Quick unpack

    By the way, one of the reasons why Chinese hackers and crackers did not break into European teams was their lack of knowledge of languages. Units who know English at the very least are interested in what is happening in other countries. From time to time, teams from the Middle Kingdom open doors for new people. applyUsually this is connected with the search for crackers for some vacant places, and then the candidates may even be from Uruguay. Usually, Chinese teams fill in this way only specific positions, as they have all the rest. For example, the aSx command(Asian Sound Express) there were at least 4 divisions: software, pda, games and music. Many teams work only on the domestic market with local content, without even trying to get out of China. I will say more, 90% of Chinese teams are not known anywhere other than China.

    RVNBut back to the English language. Those who know English are more active. They read English articles, they themselves try to write something. They are usually more open to communication and collaboration. A certain number of English-speaking Chinese (those who can even connect a couple of words) settled in Russian teams, from REVENGE to TSL .

    Along with closed servers, the Chinese have a huge number of public websites where warez is laid out. All sorts of 9down, ttdown , vdown , 123down, etc., why they are so attached to the word "down" none of the Chinese could explain to me. The volume of pirated traffic that flows in China is enormous. These are terabytes of data, “hellish thousands” of releases. What kind of content is there? Half - mainstream software, music, movies. The second is Chinese music, software and cinema. But these are the details ...

    Total


    It’s time to summarize. The Chinese scene has always been a closed community as much as possible and what happened there we found out only by some screenshots of forums, logs from IRC or infrequent English-language updates of nfo-files of Chinese teams. Over the years, nothing has changed, and so far China has been hanging out on the sidelines, drinking rice tincture. Their human resources, the ability to work - this gives them a huge advantage, but the main thing that they still have not learned is to generate original ideas that are still borrowed from the rest of the world.

    The Chinese scene is a complete package of all emotions.

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