Socio-cultural diversification

While the term ”Nerd“ in the past has been often used with a negative connotation, nowadays ”being a nerd“ is super cool and everyone suddenly refers to himself as such.

The “Nerd“-character became all trendy and hipster, and generally socio-cultural tolerated. THIS SUCKS! Everyone, who watched a single Star Wars Film or can remember that William Shatner has something to do with Star Trek is calling himself a nerd. The stereotypic Horn-rimmed glasses have become a mode accessory. TV-Series like The-Big-Bang-Theory gave the nerd stereotype a very certain attention but also a sympathy boost.

The connotation and terminology of ”Nerd“ or ”being a nerd“ has tremendously changed. If we think back to the (good) old days: A nerd is -by definition [1]- a person with a common interest in science and technology With a huge sense of interest. Often the Nerd-Stereotype is attached to certain grades in school, high intelligence or knowledge about general computer science. Old-School Nerds know Linux, Math, the periodic Table and can read large numbers in binary. Old-School Nerds are always right. Old-School Nerds do not just memorize Star-Wars, they memorize the Books as well. Old-School Nerds are always right. Old-School Nerds are totally creepy, anti-social, Nerds have cool Gadgets!

Cinema in Tonga shutdown by German Police

Today around 14:50 GMT the popular german moviez site "kino.to" went down. Press is reporting about the arrest of 13 individuals and is charging them for the foundation of a criminal association. While the website was target of numerous hacker attacks in the past, and i haven't found reliable sources to confirm that it was actually a official intervention (and btw no SPIEGEL ONLINE is really not a reliable source for me), it seems that it was an official act.

Requiem

However a short kino.to-requiem and future outlook on the warez scene. kino.to was a phenomena: It was longer present than any other warez site i have ever seen, usually this pages do not last long because - hey - the contain WAREZ! But due to a nice loophole in law kino.to was not responsible for the hosting of the actual contents. In fact there was a redundant variety of hosters, which shared a specific content.

Most of them i.e. megavideo have premium systems to pay the server bills. Furthermore kino.to provided a respectable stability: over the years it evolved into the casual warez plattform and yet did not go down. Super casual idiots could use kino.to without any problem, because it was easy to find. But kino.to was like a raised middle finger to all german or even international copyright laws. So it was clear that someday this would happen.

Will Warez become a hacker domain again?

As I wish it would go this way, we can not say this right now. There are a few options:

• kino.to is coming back, which is think is very likely, because of the TPB cases. They can do that as well. All casuals will continue to watch movies and whatnot in their little Flashplayer windows, hoping flash won't crash. All village idiots will be happy, and we'll have another case of this in a few years.
• There will be another pendant (hint: a few are still out there *nudge nudge wink wink*), which might can live up to the kino.to-legacy-traffic (i kinda doubt that). As they'll get more popular, its the same thing.
• Jurisdiction will actually change (not likely, or better not likely because law's people's watches are ticking somehow slower) + there is always a place on earth where this will be possible. If we can't even enforce weapon regulations or human rights all over the world, piracy won't be such a problem to circumvent.
• Remember the good old days of face2face sharing? if your friend had a film and made a copy for you... on optical drives? aww noo that would be degeneration..
• All the kino.to-retard-watchers will go back to watching videos in the cinema and buying stuff, which is kind of a mentality-thing, and won't happen... unfortunately..

Buffering...

I really hope warez will become a hacker-domain again... but i dont think it will. It will also nice to see whether the so called "hacktivists" will respond in some way, because SONY is kinda all hacked out atm I guess.

PS: Dear german police: iso-8859-15 is bad and so are layout tables! (But this might be an indirect confirmation, that it was made by officials)
PPS: Ah.. and there is still child pornography out there, I guess harmless porn-free warez sites just make better headlines.
PPPS: Angela Merkel received the "Presidential Medal of Freedom" today... unrelated irony?!