Man Up Your Electronic Thievery

The terabyte of porn

My college friend has a roommate who pirated a terabyte of porn. A fucking terabyte.  For those of you who get laid quasi-regularly, a terabyte is one trillion bytes, or a thousand gigs. A gig squared. A million megabytes.

In other words, my friend's roommate is a fucking hero. A fucking hero whose mouse you would never want to touch, granted, but a hero nonetheless. This is the high watermark all electronic pirates should aspire to: once you've got a trillion bytes of men and women having sex with one another in various positions and scenarios, then you're well on your way to become a legitimate, worthwhile thief. Nothing's easier or more fun to steal than porn, so have at it -- just make sure to pace yourself or you'll die of fluid loss after a week.

We won't detail the various methods of stealing porn, but if you're halfway intelligent and/or occasionally visit the /gif/ forums at 4chan.org, you'll find what you're looking for soon enough. Just be prepared to pay ten bucks or whatever for an unlimited short-term Rapidshare account.

Look beyond the PC

Electronic thievery is not limited to just pirating programs or files for personal computers; there are literally dozens of intensely useful, even more intensely illegal things the experienced pirate can download for a PSP, an iPhone, or a Nintendo DS.

An R4 card will render your already-bought DS cartridges obsolete; a PSP hack will turn your otherwise useless handheld device into a ubiquitous media player; you'll look even more tech-savvy and elitist by the time you've upgraded your iPhone with a few unlicensed apps. One might argue that using homebrew applications is immoral simply because the device's original creators didn't approve of it, but why let corporations define the usefulness of the crap they sell you? Without homebrew, we wouldn't have all the awesome stuff Johnny Lee created using a Wiimote.

There are always those people who would say that using an R4 to emulate DS games without a cartridge is completely different from using a Wiimote as a cheap whiteboard, but...well, those people are right, but it's not like that's gonna stop anybody from pirating stuff.

Be a discerning pirate

Just because you have the ability to torrent and steal everything in sight doesn't mean you should. A decent pirate will torrent a few gigs of random screeners (a pirate term for when a dude sits in a darkened movie theatre and films the screen) without thinking twice about the quality of the actual film, where a good pirate will download DVD rips of those same films, where a great pirate will keep gigs of truly great films and TV shows on his hard drive, before eventually buying them all on DVD so he can watch them on an HDTV (that, or he'll hook his computer up to his TV and cut out the legal and moral middle man).

Shitty pirates keep the entire first season of Two and a Half Men on their hard drive for no legitimate reason. Discerning pirates have all seasons of The Wire, Futurama, and The Sopranos simply so they can send single episodes to their friends and get them hooked. This in turn makes more people buy the season DVDs, which gets the producers more money than if the shows had never been pirated at all. While we'll fully admit the immorality of some degrees of electronic thievery, statistics show that piracy helps good cinema and television. As much as big corporations might like to believe otherwise, people do like giving money to artists who know what the hell they're doing.

Taking this seemingly-evil-but-actually-moral stance to your pirating will turn you into a cyberspace Robin Hood, or an Internet Han Solo. Just way, way less attractive.

Leave as much as you take

If you happen to be stealing content from a site or person you hate, don't hesitate to leave a little somethin' somethin' for every file you copy to your own hard drive. Never underestimate the effect of a well-placed horse porn file innocently masquerading as a readme document, or a cute little registry-changing virus in exchange for a few music files. If you really, really dislike the bastard you're stealing form, why not bump yourself up from "pirate" to "hacker"? 

There's a bigger prison sentence involved for hackers, of course, which is what makes them so much cooler. Anonymous is made up of hackers. Anonymous hates Scientology. You hate Scientology too, don't you? 

Go big or go home

Though we previously mentioned the terabyte of porn, do not for a second assume that you should simply stop there. If you get caught by the FBI, you don't wanna go to the clink simply for having a burned Call of Duty 4 ISO on your desktop. That's kid stuff.

If the feds ever come for you, the list of stuff you've stolen better be so long that your local newscaster has to pause for breath midway through listing it all off. You'd better have every decent TV show ever made, every comic Alan Moore has ever written which he no longer receives residuals on, at least seven Phil Collins albums (just to confuse people), and the entire library of the original NES. If anything's worth doing, it's worth doing with excess; if you go down for electronic thievery, you better go down hard. Don't half-ass, even if it causes your own destruction.