The Daves Collective

The most terminally stuffed-up warez release... Ever!
2003-11-28 12:04

How did this start? Well I saw something in alt.binaries.test that looked like a bit of a laugh. Yes I shouldn't, but once in a while, why not. So I dl'ed it. Thats where the fun starts.

Actually it was posted twice. The first pass was labelled '(01/85)' to '(85/85)' and the second was labelled 'Repost (01/85)(01/85)' to 'Repost (01/85)(85/85)'. Hmmmm. Went for the 'Repost', like you would. Tried saving them. Lots of errors. Looked at the raw messages. It's yEnc and PAR2 (the mark of the Beast IMHO). The 01 was the PAR2. 02-13, when joined, make part1.rar; 14-25 make part2.rar; 26-37 make part3.rar; 38-49 make part4.rar; 50-61 make part5.rar; and 62-4 make part6.rar. 65-6, 67-70, 71-77 and 78-85 are the usual PAR2 junk. Nice subject lines maestro.

What's in the rars then? Another set of rars, part01 to part04. Idiots.

What's in *that* set of rars? Looked at the first one. In there was, woo hoo, *another* part01 - but this one was a self extracting .exe. In *there* was -

• a setup tree (hoorah!);
• an HTML file with content in Chinese plugging the warez group's webshite, and a bit of marquee text in English scrolling along at Warp 6 plugging some crap HTML editor;
• two .txt files with Chinese names and Chinese content;
• a .txt file with Chinese name and pseudo-English content, to wit, a mostly uninformative .nfo.

But on closer inspection *this* rar wasn't complete - it needed (at least) a part02. Well, to cut the story short, using this triply-wrapped part01 with the doubly-wrapped part02-04 finally yielded a complete setup tree, including a *second* copy of the html and text files and a proper .nfo from the originating group. Sigh. Lusers. Predictably the warez-lust had long since left me, and I couldn't be arsed actually installing any of it.

Is it too much to ask that warez should be customer friendly?

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