THE 2005 BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO GETTING WAREZ ON IRC BY: DIzzIE []opyleft 2005

0. Prelude Well, it’s been three and a half years since the first edition of the guide came out so it’s high time this second edition is put together to keep you abreast of the developments in the so-called IRC scene. If you haven’t read the 2002 guide, fret you not—as this guide will explain everything you need to know to get started with download warez from IRC. On that note, this guide is orientated towards the complete beginner, someone who’s never heard of IRC (). On the other hand, if you have used IRC before, skip through the first few sections, but at least cast a cursory glance on some of the other sections, you just might learn something new ;). Secondly, if any of the links don’t work by the time you get your grubby paws on this guide, you can always type creative search strings like ‘’ into your favourite search engine. And finally, while some basic IRC commands are covered in this guide, this is primarily a guide on downloading warez, not on using IRC…there’s plenty of those guides around. Check out www.irchelp.org for starters, as well as typing /help in your IRC client. And now, on with the show…

I. Downloading & Configuring IRC As the majority of computer users also happen to use Windows this guide will feature examples and screenshots from mIRC, the most popular Windows IRC client. However, as the commands for IRC are, for the most part, universal, you can use the same commands irrespective of the particular client. There are, of course, various IRC clients for other operating systems: such as (www.ircle.com) for Mac, or BitchX (www.bitchx.com) for UNIX .

Now then, step one is to download IRC. Hop on over to the official mIRC homepage (www.mirc.com) and download the latest version (6.16 at the time of this writing).

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Figure 1. The mIRC Homepage. As you can see, you can Download mIRC, read the IRC FAQ, get a basic list of commands, and much more…

Once you have downloaded the install file (which should be just a wee bit over one megabyte), go ahead and install it. There’s no dire need to change any install settings, so go with the defaults if you’re unsure about anything during the install process.

After mIRC is installed, go ahead and start the program up. Each time you start the unregistered shareware version you’ll be presented with an annoying nag screen asking you to, well, register. You can either cough up $20 at http://www.mirc.com/register.html, or hop onto your favourite crack site—check out http://astalavista.box.sk—and download a key generator or serial. See my guide on finding serial numbers if you need more help in that area: http://www.dizzy.ws/serials.htm.

Following the registration, go ahead and restart mIRC. You will now see Options menu pop-up:

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Figure 2. The basic mIRC Options menu.

1. Enter a fake name or a brief piece of witty social commentary here. 2. Same as #1 3. Enter your handle or nickname, what others will see you as on IRC. Something akin to ‘1337h4x0r’ will get you all of the respect you deserve. 4. A backup nickname in case someone already has the one you specified in step 3. 5. Check the Invisible mode box. This adds a very light layer of anonymity, for instance if someone wanted to see a list of users in a channel without joining the channel, and you didn’t have invisible mode set, on some servers one could type /who #channelname and get a list of users, whom one could then spam…

After you have setup the main Connect menu, click on the Servers subcategory under Connect in the Category area on the left:

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Figure 3. The mIRC Servers menu.

1. An IRC network is a collection of servers which in turn have a collection of channels (the equivalent of chatrooms). You can view all of the channels on a network by connecting to any server belonging to the network, but you cannot view the channels located on other networks if you are connected to a different network. For example, two of the most popular networks are and EFnet. If you connect to an Undernet server, you can view and join all of the channels on the Undernet network, but you cannot view any channels on the EFnet network from an Undernet server. You can specify the network in the top drop-down panel. 2. This will in turn limit the list of servers in the second drop-down panel to those belonging to the network you specified in #1. You can let #1 be ‘All’ to see servers for all networks. 3. As you will later find your favourite warez networks, you will want to add them to the main server/network list by using these buttons. 4. If you’ve already connected to one server, and want to connect to another server/network you don’t have to open a new mIRC window but can just check the New server window box. 5. Finally, press Connect To Server to, well, connect to the server :-P. 6. Clicking on this little sun button will merely take you back to the Connect menu shown in Figure 2 (or to the servers menu if you click it from the menu in Figure 2).

The first time you connect to a server, you’ll get an annoying ‘favorites’ pop-up box:

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Figure 4. mIRC Favorites box.

Uncheck the ‘Pop up favorites on connect’ box for now. Once you have been to various servers, you may want to input your own favorite channels in case you forget their names, but for now the box is merely an annoyance that you’ll want to get rid of.

Now that you’ve connected to a server, you can go ahead and disconnect either by typing /disconnect or by clicking on the connect/disconnect yellow lightening icon in the top left-hand corner of mIRC: .

A quick note on mIRC commands: they are all preceded by a forward-slash (though you can change the command prefix by going to OptionsÆOther, if you so desire), and can be typed in any mIRC window, whether it be the chat window, the channel, a private message, or the main Status window. I’ll be typing commands and shortcut key combinations in bold, with variable fields that you can change in italics.

There are now a few options you’ll need to further setup to optimize your warez downloading experience. Hit Alt+O to open the mIRC options menu again, and click on DCC.

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Figure 5. The main DCC options menu.

Check the ‘Auto-get file’ and the ‘Auto-accept’ radio buttons in the On Send request and the On Chat request areas, respectively. Click OK when the Auto-warning window pops up. The reason for clicking auto-get file is so if you have a file in a server’s queue, and you are not at your computer when the file begins transferring, mIRC will display an approval dialogue box, and thus your transfer won’t begin. That is, unless you have auto- get selected. Of course, this also means someone can send you malicious files, which is why you should always virus scan your Downloads folder and never run any files you don’t remember requesting. Also, be sure to select ‘Resume’ in the ‘If file exits’ drop- down box.

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Figure 6. The Folders Configuration menu.

If you want to change the default folder for storing your downloaded files, click on the Folders subcategory under DCC, and change the folders to your desired location. The default folder for music files is the install path, followed by \sounds (ie. C:\Program Files\mIRC\sounds), while the default folder for all other files is \download. What’s nice about IRC is that you can set it to place all files with certain extensions into separate folders, so for instance you can set the options to download all movie files (with extensions .avi, .mpg, and so forth…) into \downloads\movies, for better organization. Be sure to click OK after you’re done, or your changes won’t be saved.

Next, go down to the Ignore subcategory, and be sure to disable ignoring by changing the Method to ‘Disabled’, versus the default ‘allow only.’ Also, be sure to uncheck the ‘turn ignore back on in’ option.

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Figure 7. The DCC Ignore menu.

Congratulations, you should now have all the minimal options selected that will allow you to download warez with ease. You should, of course, feel free to browse through the various other options available and tweak them to your liking (you may especially want to disable all Sounds, as that shit gets annoying pretty fucking fast).

Now it’s time to take IRC for a test run!

II. IRC Search Engines: An Excursus into Packetnews.com When the first edition of this guide was being written, XDCC bots (we’ll get to those in a little bit) were just beginning to get popular, and there was no organized search engine for searching for warez on IRC (though there were some places that allowed you to search for mere channels, as opposed to files). Soon afterwards however, various IRC search engines sprouted up which allow you to search for warez on IRC. The biggest of these search engines is www.packetnews.com.

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Figure 8. The packetews homepage.

For now, go ahead and type in the name of that popular film/album/game/software that you’ve been dying to download into the search box and hit Search. As you can see, Packetnews is now chock-full of banners (as opposed to only a single banner when it first started), thus you’ll want to have a pop-up blocker installed to minimize the spam.

Figure 9. A packetnews search result page.

9 One thing to note at this point is that the search engine doesn’t handle apostrophes well at all, thus when searching for a title with an apostrophe in it (for instance, the film Devil’s Rejects), you’ll either want to search for ‘devil rejects’, thus cutting off the ‘s’ entirely, and getting more results, or search for ‘devils rejects’, ignoring the apostrophe, but getting less results or hits.

The fields in the packetnews search result table are fairly self-explanatory, but nonetheless: Network is the name of the IRC network the file is on, while Channel is the specific channel the file is on. Likewise, bot is the name of the bot in the channel that has the file, and pack is the location of the file within the bot. Active is the amount of time the bot has been online since the packetnews crawler last indexed it. Slots designates the amount of open download slots on the bot, while Que is the number of files already in line for downloading from other users. Kps is the speed at which the total transfers on the bots are going, in kilobytes per second. Naturally, you will first want to choose the bot with the fastest Kps and the shortest Que. Gets is the amount of times that particular file has already been downloaded, Size is the size of the file, and Description is generally the filename. For a detailed description of what some of the more cryptic abbreviations such as ‘svcd’ or ‘cam’ mean, check out http://www.vcdquality.com/index.php?page=faq.

Now then, once you select a search result to download, simply click on the pack number, and your IRC window should automatically pop-up with the following dialogue box:

Figure 10. mIRC Link Request menu.

If you are currently not connected to any server, keep the default option selected, ‘Change servers and join the channel,’ and hit OK. If you are requesting a ‘pack’ or file from a channel that’s on the server you’re already connected to, you’ll want to select the second radio button: ‘Join the channel on the current server.’ Finally, if you’re already on a different server and do not wish to be disconnected from it, select the third option, ‘Open a new connection’, and a new server window will appear.

Once you hit OK, IRC should automatically connect to the server and join the channel where the bot is located. If you are using Internet Explorer as your web browser, packetnews should’ve copied the command to request the file to your clipboard, so all

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