Last edited by a moderator: Jan 27, 2017

i've met a couple crackers during the C64 and Amiga days and they were members of a notorious warez/demo group.

no idea about R2R but the ones i've known were quite similar to the stereotype of the total nerd 15-22 years old and they were all doing it just for fun and some pocket money and a few other little bonuses here and there, basically being part of the scene and having full access to all the stuff stored in the elite boards was apparently more than enough for their egos.

i dont know where they are now and i always wondered if there was a lot of money going on but having been invited in their homes i can say their rooms were a mess and their scooters were a piece of shit, as far as i know those making money were the couriers, the sysops, and the whole distribution chain (at the time it meant selling physical copies of warez on cassette and floppies so there was a cost involved in shipping and copying and medias).

people also used to meet face to face in "copy parties", and on cracked warez you could find the address and phone number of many warez groups or their P.O. box
i met these guys at a big computer fair and they also gave me the phone numbers of other groups, no big deal, hacking and cracking was still almost legal but some groups got busted for other reasons (pheaking in particular).

i guess nowadays it's all happening only online and it's totally monetized in one way or another, probably using darknets and marketplaces only accessible to the sceners.
so, are R2R making millions with their releases ? i dont think so, but there's certainly a lot of money exchanging hands in the whole Scene system.

i would see nothing wrong in top crackers making a deal with developers, if R2R dont crack UVI Falcon or Cubase for instance, why not ? they owe us nothing and we should be grateful for what we have already.

as for cracking the 5$ apps, i think they doing them a big favour, if your app is cracked by a top team it means it's worth being cracked, and by domino effect it will bring LOTS of collaterale sales, dont believe the BS coming from devs who got hacked, they're very happy of being cracked and they ask for more.

 

on R2R not being able to crack this or that : it's another proof that if there's money going on the pro-audio warez scene it's still not enough to motivate top crackers to invest time and dedication in cracking cubase or whatever.

i dont think modern crackers are in the game just for fun anymore, that was maybe true in the early days of home computing.
the best talents probably dont even deal with warez at all and they focus on high paying gigs in the network security field or cryptanalysis or defence stuff.

what we see as the gods of audio crackings are probably a bunch of STEM students with lots of time in their hands but they will soon move on with their lives.

i mean it's never been a big mistery after all, many leaders of top warez teams have been jailed in the past and their stories are public.
they were all involved in several shady businesses but none of them was making millions.

the only one making big bucks now are probably those running the top Torrent sites, the guys busted recently for running KickAssTorrent was earning 20-30 million $ per year.
i dont think the whole Scene can even dream about such numbers, eventually their biz is collateral with marketplaces and definitely illegal stuff, but not with warez alone.

or the guy running Mega.nz that is now under fire for having earned 2-300 millions with his old bitlockers.
and then again the whole russian mafia and racket around cards and carding and electronic scams ... that could be worth billions of $ alone, but then again how much R2R are worth ? not much i think, of course i might be wrong but...