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Interview mit Blackzer0 von cracks.am
Cracks.am ist ein Zuverlässigkeitskünstler unter den Crackseiten: seit 1999 ist die Page eigentlich permanent erreichbar und fällt mit immensen Inhalten und clever gelöstem Content Management auf. Blackzer0, Admin von Cracks.am, sprach Mai 2004 mit importantpeople.net, das Interview dürfen wir an dieser Stelle wiedergeben.
ImportantPeople.net: Blackzer0, CRACKS.AM is one of the most popular crack-sites in web. How many users visit this site per day and where do they all come from?
Blackzer0: CRACKS.AM is currently visited by about 270.000 unique visitors from all over the world. That number of course varies depending on season, technical problems and many other different factors, however, it is always growing :) The main part of visitors comes from US, UK, Germany, Italy and France. The other part comes from all around the world, including even Vatican :) Some people think that sites like mine are visited mainly by visitors from third-world countries; I can prove it's wrong! The main part is from rich and civilized Western countries.
ImportantPeople.net: 270.000 different visitors per day?
Blackzer0: Yes it is, roughly it is from 250.000 to 280.000 within single week (less on holidays, for example)
ImportantPeople.net: That's very much, comparable to sharereactor.com, all right, let's go on: CRACKS.AM provides a huge list of cracks for nearly every new and old program - there's hardly an application for which one can't find the right crack, doesn't matter which version one posseses. How can you afford so much time to insert them all, and where do they come from?
Blackzer0: I am not sure when sharereactor.com was created, but CRACKS.AM is up and running since August 1999, and we had only 100 visits per day at the start ;) CRACKS.AM became really popular in early 2000, we have many visitors that use our site for the last 4 years.
Cracks come to CRACKS.AM in many different ways. CRACKS.AM was the 1st crack site that opened free crack submission over email, that was done to support and stimulate independent crackers and enthusiasts. Many crackers that are now famous have published their first amateurish works at CRACKS.AM. Currently we receive several hundreds of cracks via email per week! Other sources are common - official sites of cracking groups, FTPs and newsgroups. And regarding time... if you really like your job, you can always find time for it!
ImportantPeople.net: There are so many crack-pages out there, however, CRACKS.AM has become one of the biggest and most famous ones within the last years - what is the key to your success?
Blackzer0: CRACKS.AM provides really huge list of cracks for almost every software that was ever created, however, visitors need quality not quantity! Absolutely ALL cracks available at CRACKS.AM are processed MANUALLY, renamed, sorted, checked for duplicates and scanned for viruses and only after that uploaded. We never delete old cracks as the polls that I used to run on my website showed that 83% (!!!) people do need cracks for older versions of programs. And we don't keep 50 duplicate cracks and declare that we have the biggest collection of cracks on the net :)
Unlike very many other crack archives, we never just go leech tens of thousands of cracks, place tons of popups, then abandon the site and sit and wait for cash flowing. This is something we really hate. CRACKS.AM is constantly watched, regularly updated, checked for viruses every week as the new viruses appear, and we always listen to what our visitors demand. We do everything to keep our permanent visitors coming back and be attractive enough to get new ones! CRACKS.AM is the site for people and not for its webmaster.
Also, we were the first ones who brought several important innovations to the scene: manual crack processing with file renaming, email submission and what is the most important - a search written specifically to search for cracks. That was very convenient for crackers, as they didn't need to care about the distribution - make a crack, submit it to our website via email, and voila! That's very convenient for sharing rare cracks, too.
And finally, unlike most of other sites that run for several months then get closed or abandoned, we are up for almost 5 years and hope to remain up as soon as the Net exists! :)
ImportantPeople.net: With regard to the question whether a crack-page is illegal or not, many people's opinions differ very much. Can you tell us if your page is legal or not and how the laws regarding such a page are now and will be in future?
Blackzer0: That is, of course, my favorite and the most interesting question. Here is my opinion, and I am 100% sure I will have millions of supporters from the entire world!
In a country with free society and true democracy made for defending human rights and not big business, cracks and cracking cannot be illegal. Cracking has nothing to do with copyright infringement, as crackers do not steal, illegally copy and distribute the copyrighted material. What crackers do is called "indirect assistance in circumvention of copyright protection" in funny legal language and is declared illegal only in USA, because of famous Digital Millennium Copyright Protection Act or DMCA. We find that DMCA restricts freedom of people and infringes upon basic human rights such as freedom of speech.
For example, if an engineer finds a way to hack a bank's vault with some tool he invented and steal some money from bank, he has right to make that tool, give an interview to a newspaper describe that way in the interview, and give that tool to the reporter, too. The newspaper has right to publish the material. That is called freedom of speech. If someone uses that way and steals money, he will commit a crime and will be arrested. Same goes with cracks: cracker is the engineer and a crack archive website like CRACKS.AM is the newspaper. And it is the user who decides: to use the material illegally or not!
Many people think that software companies lose a lot of money because of cracks existence. This is wrong! Believe me, the people who download cracks apply them and use the software illegally, always do like that, and they would never buy the software if the crack didn't exist. They would rather look for another program or simply didn't use it at all. And what is amazing, VERY MANY people buy the program only AFTER some time they use cracked fully-functional version!
Let me repeat once more. I don't advocate software piracy and theft; remember, using cracked software without paying for it is ILLEGAL in all countries. However, no one should prohibit you downloading, storing and applying cracks, just remember to register program after, for example, its evaluation period is expired.
We think that US Congress will cancel the DMCA sooner or later, and thanks God the European analogue of DMCA was not accepted by many European countries.
ImportantPeople.net: At CRACKS.AM, all cracks are always accessible and available. I never have found a crack which doesn't work yet. Can you tell us something about the webspace where the site and the cracks are located?
Blackzer0: There are of course some cracks that don't work, some of them are buggy, some of them are old, however I am pretty sure that the vast majority of cracks published on CRACKS.AM does work perfectly. We do everything possible to have only good cracks, however, as you understand, it is not quite easy with cracks collection that consists of tens of thousands of files. That's why we keep absolutely all cracks and never delete them unless asked by crack creator; some of older cracks work for newer versions, some serials for beta versions work for final versions as well, etc.
CRACKS.AM servers and therefore all the content are of course located outside US and countries, which depend on US much. After years, we found a really good and independent host - HavenCo, which is located in Sealand. You may learn more about the provider at HavenCo. We are hosted at HavenCo for about 2 years. We are absolutely happy with their network and support and we do recommend HavenCo to anyone. The only problem is comparably high price for bandwidth, however, HavenCo promises to significantly decrease it soon.
ImportantPeople.net: Like most of the real huge websites in web CRACKS.AM contains some ads of sponsors, especially dialers - which is the only critics one can find when browsing through the comments of visitors. Isn't it possible to come along without them?
Blackzer0: Oh, that is a real pain for us as well as for our visitors :(. Yes we do have dialer and 1-2 popups, but unlike others, we try to keep our site as clean as possible. Despite that, our visitors strongly criticize us because dialers and similar programs often annoy people much. However, we are in the situation where we simply have no choice. We pay for server, traffic (imagine how much bandwidth 270K visitors consume?!), admining, programming, and a ton of other things. If we remove the ads now, the next month CRACKS.AM will go down immediately. I personally have absolutely no profit from CRACKS.AM, because almost all the revenue the ads generate goes to pay expenses. If one month we make more money than we spend, we just store that money to use in emergency cases, such as for example hosting change or buying new servers.
I do hope our visitors will understand why we continue to keep hosting the dialers and other ads, don't get angry and continue visiting us. I don't like the idea of opening a crack paysite and charge people for access. And I am open to any suggestion how to finance the site without all this crap!
ImportantPeople.net: What are the future plans for CRACKS.AM? Will there be any changes?
Blackzer0: Firstly, our visitors demand a forum where they will have possibility to talk and share cracks and why not, learn cracking. This is gonna be a forum both for crack users and crackers. I do hope we will have the forum up this year, besides, there are some other plans that we have, but I prefer to keep them secret for now! :) I can tell only that it is going to be a big surprise :)
ImportantPeople.net: Many websites in web, a famous example is ShareReactor.com, have been closed during the last months, more and more users downloading warez get problems with the industry and are sued. Has CRACKS.AM also experienced problems like these and - if yes - is it possible that CRACKS.AM will go offline, too, anytime in future?
Blackzer0: As I already stated, we are located in a country that has no working analogue of US DMCA, so I wonder how one is gonna sue me. We do hope that Europe will never ever accept a law like that. Besides, we have really strong will to stay up, and we will do everything to not get our site closed. We do not work for money, so we are not going to close our site if it does not generate income; we just need our site to make enough money to support itself. And remember, we are up for almost 5 years, despite numerous attempts to close our site.
ImportantPeople.net: Behind the webmaster of CRACKS.AM, there's also a "human being" in real life. Would you like to tell us anything about the "real" blackzer0? and what he is doing in his real life?
Blackzer0: I am 28 years old, I live in Yerevan, Armenia. Funny thing is that I have medical education, but I have cancelled my medical career because it is very hard to make a living being a doctor here. I run a small local business that makes me enough money to not turn CRACKS.AM into a popup farm ;) I am married and I have two children: a boy and a girl.
ImportantPeople.net: How many admins or team-members are needed – besides you - as the webmaster himself – to keep CRACKS.AM online? Is this a one-man-work mainly or are there other supporters of this site?
Blackzer0: The only permanent team-member is me :) The others work by part-time contract: admin, programmer and crack processor. All of them are professionals of highest level, hard-workers and very good persons; they all worked for free when we had no money to pay them back. Let me also tell you that all my team members fully share my opinion on cracks and cracking ;)
ImportantPeople.net: The last question is the question I ask all of my interview-partners finally: blackzer0, how do you think will the internet look like in the future, perhaps in 4-5 years?Blackzer0: I do hope that next several years will finally bring the real FREEDOM to the Net, a freedom that it deserves. I hope that big corporations will have less influence and simple users will have more power to decide what to read, write, and download. I think that laws like DMCA will only slow down but not stop technical and social progress.
The best thing will be if the technical progress in the next 3-4 years will allow increasing the computers and Internet speed many times, which will possibly allow to strongly encrypt all the data of any volume, including emails, downloaded files etc. That will be really great for our freedom and very bad for people who want to control us!
ImportantPeople.net:
Thank you for the interview!
Blackzer0: Thank you very much, and my best wishes to ImportantPeople.Net!
