I have been using them since late 2009. Before that, I relied on IRC channels and UseNet groups to acquire my illicit goods. I avoided The Pirate Bay like the plague, because 9 times out of 10, it contained viruses. RARBG.to fixed that by forcing all torrents to be approved by staff, most of which they would only upload if it came directly from the scene. Just a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to play Black Ops again, so I looked it up on there, and the original SKIDROW 2010 listing still had users using it and posting in the comments about it. I went to logon today to grab the latest episode of White House Plumbers, only to be greeted with this sad text:
I always wondered how these sites manage to pay the costs, ad-networks pay terrible and their audience isn’t exactly the paying kind. Now I know they can’t
I always wondered how these sites manage to pay the costs, ad-networks pay terrible and their audience isn’t exactly the paying kind. Now I know they can’t
In my youth, when I used to run topsites for certain warez groups, we would just hijack university servers and turn them into zombie machines or find weakly protected and very fast FTP servers and use them. NetBIOS was a hell of a drug. I'm still surprised that rarbg managed to operate for as long as it did. The Bulgarian police said they were going to try and take them down 2 years ago, and either they finally succeeded, or these guys just really capitulated to real world problems. It's not like you can go to Amazon or Google and be like "Ayy lmao let me get an EC2 cluster for my super illegal torrent website." I really wonder who they're going to for these kinds of servers, and obviously they have to be charging a premium for the risk they're taking.
I never got caught for any of the stupid shit I did, but I knew when to get out. Maybe they did too, who knows.
