Nuke Dictionary

If you’re a hardcore scener, you can probably leave this page right now, there’s no use in reading following paragraphs for you. However, there are also many people who are not so familiar with a scene slang and that’s why we decided to collect a list of most common nuke reasons and explain them for you. This way, you will always know what to expect from a release which is nuked.
These nukes are based on TDX 2005.
stolen.from.p2p – lately a very popular and common nuke reason. This basically means that the scene group which pred the release stole it from another source – specifically a peer to peer network (p2p) in this case. In most cases, this means a private BitTorrent tracker, which obtained and released the copy of a movie faster than any other scene source. This nuke reason will not affect your viewer’s experience and many sceners consider it useless as we basically steal the movies anyway.
stolen.src – stolen source. Similar or same as the above nuke reason. Scene groups can steal the video or audio also from each other, apart from stealing from peer to peer networks.
bad.res – bad image resolution. The scene rules define allowed image resolutions and their aspect ratios. If a movie doesn’t fit in these rules, it means the image will be probably malformed in a certain way. Many advanced video players allow to change the image resolution, so this can be sometimes fixed at your computer.
bad.ar – bad aspect ratio. A similar reason to the above one. Each video was originally filmed and released in a specific aspect ratio (horizontal vs. vertical side). The most common AR is 2.35:1 which is for example a resolution of 640×272 pixels. Bad aspect ratio leads to inproportional image, where characters appear to be either too wide or, more often, too tall. This can be also fixed with some media players.
dupe – dupe means simply a dupe. The nuked release was already released by another group earlier, so the nuked one is basically useless, doubled. This doesn’t really matter if you don’t care about the strict scene rules.
undersized – a release is nuked for being undersized when it doesn’t fully use the capacity of one or two CDs. This means that the final rip is for example 680 MB, while it could be 700 MB and offer a better quality of image and audio. Once again, this is not a serious deal unless it’s undersized by hundreds of megabytes.
oversized – guess what.
bad.crop, overcropped – movies on DVD contain black parts of the image above and below the actual video. In order to decrease the final size and offer the best possible quality, these black parts must be removed before encoding and releasing in xvid. Sometimes, scene groups don’t properly remove / crop these parts and it means that the image misses top or bottom part, therefore you don’t see the whole scene. Cropping is often used also for removing watermarks or hardcoded subtitles, but it still means a serious loss of the image. The other, not so common extreme, is when a group forgets to remove these black boxes.
bad.ivtc, no.ivtc – quite a common nuke reason which affects mostly lower-quality releases. IVTC means “inverse telecine” and it’s basically a process of converting a movie (usually PAL) with high FPS (30 frames per second) to lower FPS (for example 24) in order to save space and offer better image quality. This conversion often goes wrong (bad.ivtc) or completely lacks (no.ivtc, lazy sceners)). As a result, the image appears to be jerky and the final release uses too much space for no reason.
interlaced – the image contains visible black lines, which often cause the video to be completely unwatchable. These black lines are visible mostly during movement on the image and are caused by incorrect field order. I won’t go into details explaining the reasons for this – it’s caused by different way of displaying frames and fields (half-frames) in the video, more details are available for example here. It’s highly recommended to not download any interlaced release.
cbr.audio – audio can be either CBR (constant bit rate), or VBR (variable bit rate). According to the scene rules, all releases should contain VBR audio, so any release with CBR is instantly nuked. Variable bit rate allows better quality, according to the current sound, while constant one sets the same quality for the whole movie, including the quiet parts. However, releases with AC3 audio almost always use CBR. It’s often hard to distinguish the difference between CBR and VBR for an untrained ear, so this nuke reason isn’t too serious if you don’t care about the rules.
bad.fps – bad frame rate. The frame rate should be close to the original framerate. Not a very common nuke reason, but it’s better to beware any release with this nuke.
mislabeled – a release trying to look like a better quality rip. A good example would be an R5 rip from Russian video source released as dvdrip – the difference isn’t that big in this case and scene groups always get more props for releasing dvdrips. The another case can be a typo or wrong year in the release name.
grp.req – a nuke requested by the release group. Happens when a scene group releases something and realize it’s completely wrong, not working or simply bad, so they request a nuke.
oos, out.of.sync – out of sync, audio isn’t synced with video. Extremely annoying mistake which makes most of such release completely unwatchable. This happens very often with cams, telesyncs and telecines, which require a synchronization of audio and video from different source. Some releases are completely out of sync, while others have this problem only for a few seconds or minutes.
bad.pack – bad packing. The group didn’t pack their release properly, according to scene rules. This means they either forgot to pack it into 15/20/50 MB RARs or it’s completely impossible to unpack it.
invalid.proper – proper is a release fixing other, previously nuked release. When a certain group releases proper and the first release is actually fine, the new one becomes nuked for invalid proper.
qpel.not.allowed – qpel or quarter pixel is a feature of modern encoding codecs such as H.264 which allows better and more efficient compression. Videos encoded with quarter-pixel precision motion vectors require up to twice as much processing power to encode, and 30-60% more processing power to decode. Thus, such releases often cause software problems or are completely unplayable at certain DVD players.
ghosting – annoying feature of a release, which result into ghost effect during every movement in the movie. It’s caused by inproper encoding and can’t be easily fixed.
field.shifted, dupe.frames, blended.frames, custom.quant.matrix – other mostly serious faults affecting the image, caused during encoding the final video.
divx.not.allowed, no.audio, missing.audio, get.rerip, get.proper – no need to explain these I guess…


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Warez FaQs

First: Never respond to a "Warez FTP site" or "Warez Sign-up List" message.
Most are trolls (come-ons) designed to entice you to respond with a "me too" and expose yourself to the warez-world as a total newbie. At best you'll begin receiving commercial e-mail (junk mail or spam) and at worst you may be subjected to harassment, mail bombing, viruses, Trojans, or worse. You should never post your personal e-mail address on UseNet anyway. Now you may be wondering, "But can ALL of these people replying be wrong?" Unfortunately the answer is YES!
Check out this net-abuse/troll-FAQ at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq/troll-faq/ by Gandalf.
The answers to the questions in this FAQ come from the experience of people who have had some years of success in ABWI and in other binary groups, and present the methods and tools they have found to work best — in the majority of instances and over the long haul. In many cases there are also advanced techniques and less well-known tools to do the same things, but since this FAQ is intended to help you use the group effectively in as short a time as possible, those have either been skipped-over, or are linked-to with links which you will find throughout this FAQ and the tutorials. Note that many very experienced people use only the techniques and tools explained here. It is absolutely possible to get the most out of the binary groups without any "marginal" tools, or obscure techniques.
The tutorial sections are intended to get you up-and-running as quickly and painlessly as possible. If you find any answer or section obscure or hard to understand, or if you have any question not answered here, please post your comments/questions either on UseNet in alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc.d where they will be addressed, or via the "Comments" page, or by email to warezfaq@warezfaq.com, so the FAQ can be updated to fix that lack.
If this is your first exposure to the world of UseNet and Warez, and if you're entirely new to all this, don't feel alone, we were all "newbies" at one time or another. But before you jump over to the detailed Q&A or to the tutorials and dig into the meat of things, we suggest that you take a few minutes to continue reading these hints as assembled from the experiences of some folks who have been here for quite a while. It only takes a few moments and provides a quick overview of what goes on and what you might expect to see. Because this sort of group is bit more complicated than most other UseNet newsgroups, there are a few things you should be made aware of up front. Consider this portion as your basic guide the Warez groups, and any UseNet binary group in general.
Lurk: Watch in the background for a while, getting an overview of the lay of the land and a feeling for the general climate, and for who is who.
Learn - Browse through this FAQ to pick up the pointers you'll need to get the most out of things. Success in the binary newsgroups takes a certain amount of persistence and patience on your part. as Warez are NOT available on demand like some sort of Internet jukebox. Sometimes it's just a matter of timing or "catch as catch can".
Suggestion: Get a well-connected news server. This will benefit you because you'll be able to get many more complete postings. Take a moment and ask yourself how good your present news server is: If after downloading the message headers you're missing 10% or more of the parts of the multi-part messages, that's not good. Local ISPs have notoriously poor news servers, as it's not their main business. If things look kind of choppy, then you have two upgrade paths: (1) Get a new ISP with a well-connected news server (and don't be afraid to ask who provides their news service.) (2) Get an additional stand-alone subscription to a premium news server (where news is their main business) as a primary server, or as an adjunct to your present news server. Either changing your ISP, or spending a little extra to ensure article completion and retention (how long those articles stay on a server before disappearing,) will be well worth it in the long run.

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0-Day
"0-day" is a term used in the Warez-scene to describe the releases by all the cracking/warez/release groups on that particular day. These releases are moved around the world to 0-day dump-sites (FTPs) by "couriers" for the various groups. Some dump-sites also connect to other dump-sites via FXP, using server to server transfer, and keep each-other "synched") so that these dump-sites can have as nearly complete a feed of the day's releases as possible.

0-day warez are posted exactly as released by the release groups. The zips are not altered in any way, except that some posters/sites remove extraneous "nfo" files that are put into the zips by some sites or couriers. This can help to hide the path the files took to the dump-sites which are supplying the warez that is being posted.

One of the beauties of 0-day warez being posted (and archived) in this fashion is that it is possible to get a fill at some distant time in the future from a 'careful archivist'. (See "Saving and preserving posts" for how to do this. Ed.) For example: If you have the March 15th 2003 Paradox release of 'such-and-such' archived to CD, and your hard disk crashes, so that you lost the installed app- then you went to CD and found that one of the zips had "gone-bad", you could be screwed-- except that since you had the original archives and know their specifics, you can go and ask on Usenet or IRC for the specific zip by name from that particular release. Someone will likely have it, and you can restore your system. If you pull the RARs and delete the zips you have almost certainly lost your chance to restore, and will have to search-out the entire application again.

Some dump-sites are better served by couriers than others, but these are also more exposed and vulnerable to be taken down by "anti-evaluation forces" who don't want people to fully test the software, usually because it doesn't really work. (Once you break the shrink-wrap it's yours-- they have your money and there's not a thing you can do about it if the software doesn't perform as advertised. And that is exactly the way the software dragons and their "bought-and-paid-for" legislators mean to keep it!)

A 0-day site is organized by date. Everything the courier has that was released on April 15th, for example, s/he will deposit in a directory on the dump-site named 0415 (mmdd)- creating a sub-directory for it with the name and version # and release group name, such as:

Wise.for.Windows.Installer.Professional.v4.02-PARADOX

This is to make it simple for the site-operator and other couriers to see what has been delivered. Very often a particular release will be brought to a site by different couriers on different days, so 0414 and 0415 might both contain the same release. No biggie.

People with 0-day "access" are allowed onto these 0-day dump-sites to both upload and download warez. This warez very quickly finds it way to places other than the regular dump-sites: Web pages, private FTPs, IRC, etc. One of the places it ends-up is Usenet. People with 0-day access (very often group couriers themselves) will post some of the material to Usenet. This is new material that no one has had an opportunity to test yet, least of all the poster who probably only just looked on the dump-site, saw an "interesting-looking" application name, grabbed it and posted it, with few or no checks at all.

Prolific posters who do this on a regular basis may grab dozens of applications to post daily. They have no time to check them, except perhaps to virus scan them. Many times they are taken and posted based solely on the application's name. Typically the poster hasn't got a clue as to the workings of the application, the crack, or anything else about the application.

Such posters are acting as couriers, moving the material from the dump-sites to Usenet- they have no chance to do anything with it. The 0-day material stays on the dump-site for a limited time (depending on the storage and daily volume of the site) - and on the poster's drives for a limited time. They post most or all of what they get, when they get it. After it's posted it's either deleted or burned to CD or DVD, or whatever other long-term storage the poster may have.

Asking such posters for specific applications is highly unlikely to produce a positive result. Generally speaking, if they get it, they post it when they get it. So asking for something in a 0-day group, or of a 0-day poster, is usually a waste of time. But go ahead and ask if you think, or know, that an application was recently released. Many posters have taken more than they have uploaded to Usenet (bandwidth there being a major consideration- and time to prepare and post) and may have what you're looking for on their hard drive.

Asking a "0-day" poster for an application you know was released 6 weeks ago or more, for example, is most likely a waste of time. Chances are very slim that he/she even remembers it, much less still has it. But you never know, and someone else might see the request and fill it for you. But such requests are best