Razor 1911 diss Isonews

There are many things the scene is about. For most it is simply the benefit of free cracked software to use as you see fit. For others, it is the thrill of winning on a cracked release against your competition. Still others simply enjoy racing the files between sites. Wherever you fit in, or if you fit into the scene at all in the eyes of members of the other classifications, the scene is something at least slightly different for all of us. Even with all of this differentiation there is still one ideal that has held true for we'd like to think at least 99% of sceners over all the years since this software piracy stuff got started. The scene does not exist for monetary profit. Meaning that you don't make money off of the backs of anybody else. There have always been people who have bucked this simple ideal. People who feel they have a right to ask for money for leech accounts, or to sell copies of games on the streets to others, but for the most part those people are shunned by the rest of the scene, and usually can't even admit their indiscretions to their own group members. While we despise this kind of person as the lowest scum in the scene, on the other hand we feel sort of sorry for them since clearly they're so pathetic in real life that they have to make an income from someone else's labor. Please note that the fact that we don't make any money here in Razor 1911 does not justify stealing from software companies. Which of course is essentially what we're doing by cracking and releasing games. We know it is theft and we're not going to attempt to fool ourselves or anybody else by claiming we're some kind of robin hood "steal from the rich give to the poor" organization. The truth is that most people who work in entertainment software development are woefully underpaid and underappreciated. The only reason we release the games is because of the competition, it is actually a very highly refined art attempting to beat other groups to the punch when a new title comes out. We tell you this only so that you can better appreciate what's coming next.

So, who makes money from the scene? Well, we believe there are other groups who profit from their cracks. However we're not here to point fingers at those guys. They have to live with their actions, and if they feel any kind of guilt about what they're doing then perhaps they need to re-evaluate the behaviors thad led them to that point. We definately are here to lambast someone, though. That someone happens to be the chief source of "scene news" for the average end user - a site called Isonews, which most if not all of the readers of this nfo file are familiar with. Why are we taking this opportunity to rail against Isonews when we could have really tried to stick it to them so many times in the past? Well, its kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back. Isonews has long claimed it is not a for-profit site - which is a blatant lie. Ads on Isonews can run over $1000 a month - and there's more than one puny ad on that site. Isonews generates a massive amount of traffic for potential advertisers. It does so by directly taking the information from the cracking groups in the scene and posting it where every Tom Dick and Harry can see it. Razor 1911 and other groups have requested repeatedly in the past that Isonews should please omit any of our "content" from the site. Isonews has flatly refused and even gone so far to call US the lamers who are ruining the scene. The truth is that Isonews has brought a massive amount of undesirable attention to our scene, and if that wasn't enough they don't even give a rats ass about showing the groups who make their existence possible a little bit of respect. This is something we find troubling .. but there's more. It is a pretty well understood rule that if you are going to go so low as to slap a group's nfo on your site, at the very least you should leave the content in an unaltered state. This is something that Isonews has failed to do on more than one occasion in the past, and is now doing again. Several months ago we complained (along with FairLight) about some nfo files that had been edited to include advertisements for Isonews (which we can assure you NO respectable scene group would ever do - for us Isonews is a plague and a joke, something to be both hated and giggled about as an incredibly poor effort at becoming a real contributor to the elite scene) - at that time Isonews had the sense to correct the foolish additions they made. Perhaps we should have stayed after it more but they seemed to leave our nfo files alone for awhile, other than posting them which as we mentioned above isn't something we particularly enjoy either.

-=-

I had no idea the scene had these feelings towards IsoNews. I found pureiso.com to be a good resource aswell and I think I'm gonna use that site from now on..