IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

Back in April 2004 we reported about a worldwide anti-piracy sweep named “Operation Fastlink” where members of the APC group (and other warez groups) were being arrested.

Mark Shumaker, 21 years-old, was a member of the APC group and also led the Apocalypse Crew’s Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel. The group specialized in releasing music not yet available to the public.

Shumaker has pleaded guilty and faces up to 5 years in jail and a USD 250,000 fine. Fifteen other members have been convicted already.

Many people wish to have their own IRC network. Once a basic network is setup they advertise the network to gain users, in the hope many will find and start using it. But what if they abuse your good intentions and start using your infrastructure to host bots engaged in illegal activities? Then things can start to become a real life nightmare. In this article we follow Dewd, from network admin to a suspect criminal with a 10 year prison sentence hanging above his head.

In May 2002 the FBI and law enforcement agencies worldwide arrested members of the DrinkOrDie warez group in an operation named Operation Buccaneer. One member, Hew Raymond Griffiths who was arrested in Australia and transported to U.S.A. received a 51 month jail sentence for his part in the warez group.

Originally started in Russia in 1993 and operating from a channel on EFNet, the group quickly became a group with members worldwide. It specialized in cracking software, but also released films and music.

Tuesday morning at around 10 AM police entered the homes of about 300 individuals in Germany, Austria, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic. Thirty individuals have been arrested in this action and 20 servers have been confiscated.

According to the German anti-piracy organization GVU the goal of this action was the top-level warez organizations, the so-called ‘top servers’. It are these servers where pirated movies, software and music are first available to a selected few after which they spread down the line and become available to the general public on p2p networks, news groups and IRC.

IRCSpy, a website build around a searchengine that indexes downloads being offered on IRC, released AutoXDCC today.

“This new program has been in the works for the last few months by the staff here at IRCSpy. AutoXDCC makes downloading via XDCC using IRCSpy as easy as one click. There is no need to copy and paste troublesome commands into your IRC Client”, author Xanthus announced on the IRCSpy website.

Once you have completed a search on the website, and want to download one of the results, clicking a special icon will add the download in the AutoXDCC program.