As I have made clear so many times,, I am firmly in the camp that believes software should be free. I subscribe to Eric Stallman's philosophy that equates writing software to writing a cooking recipe. You do not expect your mother to patent the way she makes ogbono soup and then expect people to pay her for it. And so it is with software. You write a programme, and you share so that everyone benefits. In the last few years, I have remained solidly in the Free and Open Source Software camp, which means that I no longer pirate proprietary software for commercial gain.
Before that though, it was quite a different story. I used to, like so many others, happily pirate software, and sell to other users. There were so many methods of doing this, and it almost always involved visiting warez websites to either download cracks or serial numbers for the software. Many of these websites were passing phenomena, but some of them became house-hold names among the script kiddie communities that made money from selling software in Benin where I was resident at the time. The two most famous websites for getting warez were cracks.am and serialz.to. Cracks.am is still going strong to date, but serialz.to is now offline.
Normally I would not be worried about the disappearance of yet another website from the internet, that happens all the time, but in this case I am worried. However, this particular disappearance is total. Serialz.to appears not to have left a trace on the internet. You cannot find a cached copy of it in Google, there appears to be no news of it on forums or on any of the many other sites that I frequently haunt. Of all the major site comparison engines, only Alexa seems to have any trace left of serialz.to.
Frankly the disappearance is terrifying. There are so many examples of websites and/or web services which were not welcomed by the establishment being forced to make compromises or go offline completely. Kazaa, Napster and Loki Torrents all came, saw and got smashed. Napster became a poor man's iTunes, Loki Torrents was shut down, and someone is now trying to revive Kazaa along the Napster model. Witness the manner in which a sledgehammer is being used to silence the good guys at The Pirate Bay. But with all of these sites you can still find information about them on the internet. Google 'Loki Torrents' and all the results would be about that wonderful site even though it is almost five years since it was forced to shut down. However, google 'serialz.to' and the first result you get is the exact complaint I am making. Nothing else. This is crazy and scary. What made serialz.to vanish?
And what power does this entity have over the internet? Could this be the end of the freedom of information that the internet provided as we know it?
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