The ARES/eMule/eDonkey Horror Thread

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I'm always amused whenever I see these brought up in any sort of positive light because I have always considered all early P2P (Peer-To-Peer) services to have been little more than humanity's second-largest bit of collective trolling (printers, in case you were wondering, were the first).

Maybe it has gotten better since, but my chief memory associated with these is how it was SO EASY to get Punk'd while downloading anything from those because files were often disguised in both name and extension as something else.

Wanted to get the latest song by Avril Lavigne or NSYNC? We were just gonna ignore the fact that it was a .exe file. What about that hot, new movie everyone was talking about? Well... It was a video file we got, let's put it that way.

And, yeah, it was all entirely preventable by just paying attention and being a little more tech savvy, but we just didn't know better back then.

I remember downloading some sort of Arabic countdown virus once when looking to replace my scratched copy of FIFA 98: Road To The World Cup and someone else got downright nuked while trying to get some episodes of a forgotten cartoon.

I swear, the whole thing was like taking a pogo stick to a minefield... And we didn't care!

Still... When they weren't trying to downright kill you for laughs, those could be pretty useful.

What about you? Do you have any fun horror stories to share... Or just memories in general? Tell us!

 

[Felipe]

The only emule horror story i got was when i downloaded the movie "Land of the Dead" 2005 only to find it was a transvestite porn movie....

Aside that i got good stuff from it.

 

[otogirisou]

i didn't even know emule until recently when i read a comment that said you can get rare mangas there but i don't know how to use it

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Ares worked good for me.

 

[Clippy]

I think everyone back in the day had a mishap or two when downloading shady files. It's how we indirectly learned how to keep our machines safe.

I have a horror story of a different kind. Back in the early 2000s when broadband was a brand new thing it was prohibitively expensive. My friend's dad had an idea though - he would ask around our block of flats if anyone wanted to share an internet connection. Basically, he would sign the contract with the ISP and everything would be in his name. There would be Ethernet cables going from his apartment to everyone else and every month everyone would cover their share of the bill.

It was all above board and everything, the ISP even took care of all the logistics of the endeavor. Ultimately, 12 families ended up sharing a single, slow by today's standards, connection. That actually wasn't all that bad. What was expensive as hell for 1 family became much more affordable when shared and most people in the deal weren't tech-savvy enough or into piracy to clog the connection.

'Most' is the key word here. My friend had an older brother. Said brother had everything on his PC desk: The router, switches, cables, everything. And he was very much into piracy. All your emules, kazaas, limewires and torrenting were his bread and butter. You know what he used to do when he found something he wanted to download? He would unplug everyone else to make sure his downloads go at max speed. And this wasn't a once-a-month kind of thing. It was CONSTANT. So much so that some months the Internet would be down more often than it was available.

There was nothing we could really do since getting our own connection was still way too expensive and this thing was still a hell of a lot better than going back to dial-up. We lived like that for three years. THREE YEARS. That's how long it took for broadband prices to drop to an affordable level. But when they finally did, boy oh boy. The month we got our own broadband the neighbor who orchestrated the entire thing called a meeting to tell us that he signed a new contract for some ultra-fast (for the time) data plan and that it meant an increase in price. He showed us the contract and everything so it's not like he was trying to take advantage of us I think.

It felt like the right time to tell him that we were actually in the process of setting up our own connection and we'd be out of the deal. And just like that, the dam broke. It turned out that everyone had had enough of the shenanigans and either already had a connection of their own and was waiting for the right time to spring it on the guy or was considering getting one. The man's face when he realized that he was going to be on the hook for that uber premium data plan all on his own was priceless. And this time there was nothing HE could do since it wasn't like anyone else had signed anything.

The ending of this story was almost worth the three years of suffering. Almost. Man, I'm so glad those days are long behind me.

 

[secreto7]

I think everyone back in the day had a mishap or two when downloading shady files. It's how we indirectly learned how to keep our machines safe.

I have a horror story of a different kind. Back in the early 2000s when broadband was a brand new thing it was prohibitively expensive. My friend's dad had an idea though - he would ask around our block of flats if anyone wanted to share an internet connection. Basically, he would sign the contract with the ISP and everything would be in his name. There would be Ethernet cables going from his apartment to everyone else and every month everyone would cover their share of the bill.

It was all above board and everything, the ISP even took care of all the logistics of the endeavor. Ultimately, 12 families ended up sharing a single, slow by today's standards, connection. That actually wasn't all that bad. What was expensive as hell for 1 family became much more affordable when shared and most people in the deal weren't tech-savvy enough or into piracy to clog the connection.

'Most' is the key word here. My friend had an older brother. Said brother had everything on his PC desk: The router, switches, cables, everything. And he was very much into piracy. All your emules, kazaas, limewires and torrenting were his bread and butter. You know what he used to do when he found something he wanted to download? He would unplug everyone else to make sure his downloads go at max speed. And this wasn't a once-a-month kind of thing. It was CONSTANT. So much so that some months the Internet would be down more often than it was available.

There was nothing we could really do since getting our own connection was still way too expensive and this thing was still a hell of a lot better than going back to dial-up. We lived like that for three years. THREE YEARS. That's how long it took for broadband prices to drop to an affordable level. But when they finally did, boy oh boy. The month we got our own broadband the neighbor who orchestrated the entire thing called a meeting to tell us that he signed a new contract for some ultra-fast (for the time) data plan and that it meant an increase in price. He showed us the contract and everything so it's not like he was trying to take advantage of us I think.

It felt like the right time to tell him that we were actually in the process of setting up our own connection and we'd be out of the deal. And just like that, the dam broke. It turned out that everyone had had enough of the shenanigans and either already had a connection of their own and was waiting for the right time to spring it on the guy or was considering getting one. The man's face when he realized that he was going to be on the hook for that uber premium data plan all on his own was priceless. And this time there was nothing HE could do since it wasn't like anyone else had signed anything.

The ending of this story was almost worth the three years of suffering. Almost. Man, I'm so glad those days are long behind me.

Clippy for Writer's Guild

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

@Clippy (I'm not quoting all of that): sometimes I regret posting threads in here, but that one reply was incredibly worth starting this one. That was an AMAZING story and I loved the ending.

Do you know if the guy ended up axing that massive expense later? I remember my grandpa putting an end to our online shenanigans around the same time once the bills started growing in size.

 

[Clippy]

Do you know if the guy ended up axing that massive expense later?

No idea. It wasn't my problem and teenage me was far more interested in celebrating finally getting a stable connection. Funnily enough, it also became the time my own PC would finally be connected to the Internet and I would no longer have to beg my dad to use his PC to go online. This came with its own issues as it turned out that the walls in our old Soviet block of flats we live in are made of thick reinforced concrete that blocks just about any Wi-Fi signal so in order for me to have stable Internet access we had to buy a 15m long Ethernet cable to connect my PC to the router in the living room.

I don't know what exactly they put in these walls but whatever it is it's holding up. All those years later and my PC still has to be directly connected to the router despite all the progress that Wi-Fi has made.