Very nice you remember the old scene from 1999-2004? or earlier? wow. VLAD? NUKE? Vibrant Pixel days. :p
To be honest most of us left scene after Gigs high profile "radio show" incident.
At that age must of been hellishly scary being dragged out and all tech confiscated and interrogate by new CC division.. I'm thankful got off BS charges. Were connect/chat logs kept, ftp, irc? Not FUN :|
29a crew effectively retiring was also big downer and left huge scene hole.
A few tried take over the mantle likes of SPTH, but they were years away from having enough knowledge to be on that ASM level. lol.
Indeed cyber crime laws in most western and european countries really changed for the worst around 2000-2002.
We can blame vicodinES/david for that one. Source of chaos forever. :p
Those possession "burden of proof/conspiracy" law changes really shook up those crazy tripping SPTH german guys.
You're right, there was mixture of attitudes about source code and binary sharing responsibly in the scene.
From I don't give fuck T2000 (RIP), mandragore to more mature approach like benny, bumblebee.
Though vast majority coderz were non malicious and doing vx study as an intellectual hobby.
Believe it or not, totally true that binaries were't just given out to anyone.
If person indicated they were looking to do damage, they'd be KB'd and shunned by the community quickly.
If you couldn't compile the code and understand how to fix the really basic deliberately placed errors, no working bin for you.
Even among traders, a unique bin was like rare gold, only select upper echelon got hold of those. First needed to prove your worth.
More responsible mature and skilled coderz occasionally even sent there code and early ezine preview access to trusted AV'ers.
Rod Fewster was friend to many in the scene, including evil (still jailed?) and raid.
Very disappointing certain AV'ers choose to become so hostile towards the vx scene and employed private detectives when vxers visited there conferences or spoke to press to give differing viewpoints.
There was so much more we could have learned from each other and not just through ibm sarah gordan yearly papers..
Oh well, guess sarah was right, VXers "Age" out and risk/reward becames to high even for intellectual study purposes.
Atleast Vec and zombie got jobs working for NSA or Russian mafia. ;)
Btw UN #vir still had X, CYoda nowhere to be seen. Couple years back.