The Scene

[alex28]

The Scene



The Scene is a community of people that are involved with organized underground piracy. It's a sort of web of trust, where copyrighted material is illegaly distributed between private FTP sites.

The people in the scene are organized in Release Groups.

Various members in the groups handle different tasks, suppliers (obtains material), packers (packs the material for release), coders (cracks, tools etc), artwork (for NFOs, intros etc).

Often not even the nicknames of the individual members of the groups are known, which provides an additional layer of privacy, while at the same time lets the group as a whole take credit for their releases.






Release Groups



A number of people working together to obtain and release new games, utilities or patches on to the net. A release is made when a correctly packaged file is uploaded to a private FTP for other release group members to access. Release groups generally follow a set of rules governing the correct etiquette to package releases, failure to do so results in a Nuke. Many groups have specialised in releasing games for a particular console.

Releases that come from an individual not belonging to any group are usually labeled as Independent.





Scene Release



A Scene Release is a pirated piece of software, game, movie, music album etc packaged for distribution on The Scene.


There are some commonalities between all types of scene releases but the requirements varies between different types of media.

Generally each scene release has it's own directory. In the directory, besides the release itself is also an NFO file with details. The actual data is often compressed with rar or zip. Big files like movies or ISOs are split into several files using rar. Sometimes a SFV file is included to verify the checksums of the files.






NFO



NFOs are information files with the file extension .nfo provided with just about every warez or ROM release. An NFO usually contains the official title of the release, the group who released it, the handles of the group members who helped out, and any and all technical info about the release. NFOs also contain ASCII artwork.


NFOrce is a leading site containing NFOs from many scene releases.





Nuke



A nuke is a release in the Scene that for some reason doesn't hold up to the rules set by the scene. Most commonly they are bad dumps, ie the data is corrupt or innacurate somehow. This would be a typical site-wide nuke.

Each separate site in the scene can also have their own specific set of standards for nuking.





SFV




Simple File Verification or SFV files are used by the scene to verify the integrity of files. An SFV file is basically a series of CRC32 checks saved in plain-text format.

After a new release is packed (generally into a series of RAR files) the packer then runs a script and or program to create checksums for each file. The checksums are then all listed in a text file with the extension of .sfv.

Once an end user has finished downloading an ISO they can then run the SFV file through one of many programs specifically designed for the task of verifying checksums. If any file fails the CRC check the user will be notified and need to download that file again. If the CRCs are identical to what is expected, there will be no errors and the files are intact and are exactly the same as they were when first uploaded.





via: PHWiki