Ladies of warez

Usually, the word "pirate" means someone of the male sex, forgetting that among the women were dashing pirates. This article is about girls and their role in the warez-community of the 90s and 00s.

The girls on the Stage have always been, from the very beginning and until now, although the state of the Scene now is sadness and pain (when you see the Evolution team releasing iTunes rips, it rolls grief). If we talk about the number, then the girls on the Stage are about the same as in Counter-Strike or World of Tanks - enough.

Start

When the notion of a warez scene was only formed, there were few girls that could be explained there. At that time, the computers themselves were not yet so widespread, and there were only a few girls who would be interested in it. As a rule, these were cyber-feminists who tried to prove that women can also “drag”. Their role cannot be minimized, but their influence on the then state of affairs was minimal.
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Over time, when after many transformations the notion of a “warez-team” as such was formed, those of the girls who were interested in the tusovka, but lacked the knowledge to take the position of burglars, became couriers - this was one of the most common “ladies” positions . Behind her were the positions of a packer, a tester of releases, and a supplier of software. For example, in the early years a large number of such positions in many well-known CORE (Challenge of Reverse Engineering) teams were occupied precisely by girls:



And for quite a long time just such a status quo was established: “girls help”. Despite this, women still remained for the most part just a decoration for teams, BBSok, IRC channels and so on. They were used as “zamanuha” so that people would come to see the “lively pirate girl”. Unfortunately, usually after this, the chat rooms of the teams turned into a litmus test, which showed who was sexually concerned, who was a schoolboy, who was just a moron, and who could behave normally in a society of women. Some young burglars, who had white in their heads instead of gray matter, got burned on this - after inadequate tackles to girls-comrades, they were excluded from the teams.

The main motivating factor for the entry of women into different teams was exactly the same - getting access to Varesis, which, in principle, could be sold. Moreover, once I received something for free, I really don't want to pay for similar things. It is worth mentioning that the majority of women who joined pirate groups had something in common - the character traits inherent in men, because the “girls-girls” were never interesting. And some of whom we’ll talk about below have even had ambitions that their fathers would envy.

And creative came

Time went by. With the growth of the global speed of access to the Internet and technology in general, teams have the opportunity to make releases more interesting (although it is the competitive aspect of the Scene called “who will make the release of a smaller volume in diskettes” remained one of the main ones). It was then - in the second half of the 90s - teams began to pay attention to the wrapper of releases and the distinctive features, i.e. graphic attributes (and with it cracktro, intro, patchtro, etc.). Logos were drawn, the loading screens of the games were cut, the wallpapers - the hirez-art scene began to take shape and “suddenly” it turned out that if there were girls in the hack and they were inferior to the guys, then there was definitely no creative. It was in this that a large number of girls found themselves, who began to occupy design positions in different teams. By the way, in part, this was due to the fact that the design was considered not to be a man’s occupation at that time (which cannot be said about the further history of Artstena). Here, for example, the composition of the GFX-department of the TCA team (The Cracking Answer):

So the girls moved from being present as decoration to full participation in the life of the teams, because the demand for graphics was huge, especially when it just started to appear. This gave those who owned graphic editors a tool of influence; however, the hacker girls were still depressingly few.

Ladies only

Somewhere around the same time, the first women's teams began to appear, where the majority of participants were women . The most famous of these teams was TEAM GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Warez) with the motto “ we release more than just eggs ”. The absolute majority of the team were really girls, and the top management was strictly feminine. It would be strange to believe that women will have everything as well as men ... and there were differences.

For example, as Playboy magazine has “Playmate of the Month”, so TEAM GLOW had its own “man of the month”, which the girls chose based on the merits of this or that guy in front of the team. Someone drove 10 shells for free? Or maybe sent two laptops to top management? Gave 50 of his releases this month to the team? Gave 2 gigabytes on FTP? In general, there were different ways to become the "Man of the Month" and for this title there was a real struggle.

But this stuff. As I said, burglar girls at that time were still very few and this led to the fact that, for example, TEAM GLOW and TEAM AMZ (Amazons) outsourced from 50% to 80% of the work on directly hacking software. Ie, hacked software after all by guys from other teams or singles, after which they transferred their releases to girls who were engaged in testing, packaging, graphics and distribution. In this case, of course, the name of the original hacker was preserved, but the release came out on behalf of the team. The scheme turned out to be simple and not only the two groups mentioned above actively used it.

Of course, such teams (due to the male nature) received various preferences and concessions. It was not customary to mention this, but everyone knew and saw it perfectly. In addition, men tried to get into such teams (those who were not embarrassed to be in the “girl group”). And the number of applicants allowed the management of women's teams to choose their own men, and not just take everyone. Thus, for example, at all the same GLOW at a certain time such famous guys as thatDUDE , SiraX , thesaint and Skitz , who would not have refused not only the women's team, but also the men's team with their hands, entered .

Actually, not only individual guys wanted to be friends with such groups, but entire teams “rolled up” to the girls. This was expressed in different ways:

- shared releases;
- allowed to use their couriers for the delivery of female releases;
- allowed female teams to their boards and even received xHQ status in consequence;
- shared knowledge, tools, patterns of patches;
- poems were dedicated in .nfo;

... and the most interesting thing - sharing software vendors.

There were quite a few women 's teams, these are already mentioned GLOW and AMZ, and also WiA (Women in Action), FF (Femmes Fatale), BNS (Bonnies), ROT (Reign of Tits) and more 9. Only half of them were hacking. itself or at least took on most of it. And from this half only a few, including WiA, tried to share knowledge in the form of tutorials, articles, any public tools, and so on. Closer to sunset, the Scene's harema in its classical sense, strong burglars began to appear who could not only patch or write keygen, but also teach others about something.

Ladies of the decade

Of course, all women's teams held on the personalities of their leaders, but a number of teams at various times could boast of girls in their top management: iNT, CNT, MDM, PC, EVD, ART, TQSR, TFT, CiA, PLC, M8, MFD, WkT and many others. And besides all these wonderful women, it is worth telling about a pair of concrete ones who left a mark in the warez-community if not more than men, then definitely not less.

Nitallica

It’s worth starting with Nitallica (Nicki), which, thanks to its friendliness, openness and ability to “manage projects”, was for a long time one of the key figures in the scene that many people turned to for advice.

In the early 1990s, Nitti was known in narrow circles as an activist of the warez scene, a gfx-artist and, let's say, a press attache of several pirate teams who were responsible for their public relations on boards, in conferences, via mail, and so on. . But real “fame” and respect came to her when she became at the helm of one of several truly legendary teams - Phrozen Crew (about which I wrote earlier). This happened in 2004, after the previous leader - tKC - retired.

Being at that time already 8 years in the PC, Niki could not just leave the crumbling team and did everything to reunite her. After going through the "restructuring" and losing a lot of its members, distribution channels, suppliers and influence, the PC, under the leadership of Nitalliki, existed for another 4 years, constantly releasing new releases. It was for this crisis management that she rightfully enjoyed the respect and love of a large part of the pirate community.

But her achievements do not end there. Having dealt with the Phrozen Crew, Nicky set to work on the public Internet, which by then had become the main pirate platform. She organized the so-called Nitallica's Web Ring - a large network of sites that were united by one theme - warez. This network included both Web-based warehouses of releases, and sites with educational materials, sites with graphics, just informational sites with news Scenes and so on. The authors of the sites talked to each other and helped each other by sharing audiences (which were often polar). The web ring enjoyed steady popularity with users interested in warez.

In the 15 years that she dedicated to the Stage, this girl sysadmin from Alabama influenced a large number of destinies and people. By the way, she maintains a personal blog , where she shares her sysadmin’s everyday life, and www.nitallica.com redirects to her. :) By the way, some other former Phrozen Crew members hang out at Geekdrop.com , who founded one of the once PC leaders.

Lena

Another separate place in the history of the pirate community is a girl under a very original pseudonym Lena , or lena151, from the SnD team (Seek'n'Destroy), which, surprisingly, is still alive and released .



She received recognition for writing more than 40 tutorials on reverse engineering. But she was especially loved for video tutorials that were laid out on Youtube. Through her lessons, many new people came to the cracker public community, who cracked their first applications precisely because of Lena. Although the content and style of presenting her lessons to many people raised questions , she was the pride of the SnD team. Many web teams expressed their respect and recognition in the .nfo files.

In many ways, Lena was the driving force behind the Tuts4You site, which, along with New2Cracking, for a certain number of people became a window to the world of cracking. Lena was one of those women who could be called a professional hacker. She started as a cracker, not a designer or, say, a courier. She was engaged only in this and in her knowledge could compete with the elite web teams. When, in the mid-00s, a layer of teams was formed that focused on reverse engineering training, for example, L2C , ARTeam, T53, and others, Lena was their guideline. And how many Hindu video clips that teach hacking appeared on Youtube after her series of lessons ...

Tirique

The third fatal girl with a male name Tirique is the founder of several audio-pirate teams, including GFTU (Girls Faster Than U), STMP3 (Sexy Time MP3) and a couple of others. At various times, she was a member of several other groups, including even one with the name Mademen . :) She became famous in audio pirate circles for writing various tools for her teams: from release makers to Lame Encoder GUI. Her teams had an interesting profile. For example, GTFU was engaged in the release of only music played by women, and STMP3 produced only “bed music” for ... sin. At the time of the dispute, at the same time with the leader of the BDG team (Beer Drinkers Group) passed one of the IQ tests, overtaking by 15 points. Tyrik had a sparkling (often sarcastic) sense of humor for which she was loved by many on #EFNet. In addition, she was a real magnet for men because of her beauty (unfortunately, there were no surviving photos), which caused many sceners to break the pattern on the basis of the stereotype “beautiful means not smart”.

By the way, the fair sex was in our teams. For example, TQSR had Kioni to which only the blind did not roll up their keygens, while RPA had Digital Scream . We can say that in every 3rd national team there was at least 1 girl.



There were many other interesting ladies (taylor ^, .j, miss melody, girlie powa !, humble tess, unicorn rider, stryx77, wildwendy, dominata, flwsbabe and many, many others), but if you list everyone, you’ll have a whole book, and the purpose of this article is only to show that the girls on the Stage were, and even achieved great success, while remaining cute, beautiful and beautiful creatures.

Of course, it is worthwhile to distinguish girls scenery from the so-called “scene-whores”, who, not having the opportunity to become popular in other circles, use their gender trait as a tool to attract attention in the IT community. There are many, but this article was not about them.

PS