After a bit over a days downtime due to maintenance, the ZeroSec Forums are now back online. Unfortunately this was a necessary downtime and not one we could have avoided. It’s good to be back!

Note: As Untamed mentioned in the comments, the DNS may not have propagated for everyone yet. The forums should be available globally within a few hours. We appreciate your patience.

//ZeroSec Forum Crew

The majority of you will still be lagging behind in 2009, but here in Australia we’ve finally reached 2010! Here’s the ZeroSec staff wishing you a happy new release filled year!

Cheers,
ZeroSec Crew

As you may have noticed, we suffered from some hours of downtime today. Regrettably this is due to continued issues with hosting and it seems bad fortune on this end has no mercy, even during Christmas. My sincere apologies for the downtime.

We said this in the last downtime post in August of this year, but it looks like we’ll definitely be moving hosts in the coming couple of weeks. Hopefully this will abolish these rare yet disruptive down times.

I hope you’ve all had a great holiday and are looking forward to the New Year celebrations!

Regards,
ReeGed

No matter what kind of attitude towards filesharing and piracy you currently hold, most of us started out either because it was fun and (or) because of the simple fact that watching films, listening to music and playing games could suddenly be free of charge. Without speaking on behalf of the rest of the ZeroSec crew, I’ve personally come to think of filesharing as the only way to force a change in the norm which the movie studios and record industry has created for us. Napster utterly changed the way the mainstream consumed music and paved the way for services such as iTunes and more recently Spotify (in European countries). But when it comes to movies and television we are still more or less expected to consume as we’ve done for decades. VODO is a project that will help change this, which is why we’ve chosen to fully support them.

To fully understand what VODO is about, please read the description below, but in a nutshell VODO uses the power of p2p distribution to give independent film directors an opportunity at exposure. Once every month a new film will be released and spread by the VODO distribution group, of which ZeroSec is now a part:

WHAT IS VODO?

‘VODO could be a valuable tool for indie filmmakers who recognize that obscurity is a much bigger threat to their efforts than piracy.‘ – Mike Masnick, Techdirt.

Founded by Jamie King, one of the figures behind the well-known filesharing documentary STEAL THIS FILM (www.stealthisfilm.com), VODO brings filmmakers together with the distribution power of the filesharing community. It aims to offer fresh, quality films on a free-to-share basis, promoted and distributed through a ‘coalition’ of filesharing partners that includes big names like The Pirate Bay, Mininova, Miro, TorrentFreak, ZeroSec, VeeHD, Isohunt, Plube, OneDDL, Vuze and Frostwire, amongst many others.

Read More

Following on from the recently added FAQs and a few email requests, I’ve written some info summarising the most common ways people download releases. There’s a lot of discussion, and differing opinions out there when it comes to the best way of downloading releases. Many people have their own preferences, but lots of people don’t fully understand all the available options – with these posts I hope to change all that.

I will try and be unbiased as possible, and just give my honest opinion along with useful info for each of the main ways you can download a release posted here at ZeroSec.

Main Download Options:

• File hosts
• FTP
• Torrents
• Usenet

You can access this FAQ and all the others from the Extras menu, but I wanted to make a main site post for this one so we can hear your opinions, tips and experiences in the comments. As always if you see any problems, or think I’ve missed something drop an email to pandaking[AT]zerosec.ws, or just leave a comment in this post.

There’s still a few more on the way, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to post a few FAQs that I’ve written up recently. Some of you might already have read a couple of them but you can now find a whole load of FAQs in the Extras section.

We now have a FAQ for most the questions we see people coming in and asking on our IRC channel or in the comments: from how to use the RSS feeds, to what a nuke means.

If you can think of any more FAQs you would like to see then either email me on pandaking[AT]zerosec.ws or leave a comment here in this post and I’ll try to check back and reply to you.

I should also point out that a few of these are works in progress, and I don’t claim to be the greatest knowledge on most of these subjects so again if you think we should add/change/reword anything just let us know.

Can I also use this opportunity to thank all of those who’ve been beta testing for us, and while we’re all pretty busy with real life work at the moment (Pah, we hate having to work! ) we will be rolling the features out soon.

I and the ZeroSec team hope that these are of use, enjoy!

Well it’s the 1st of December and time to pop open the first little door on your advent calendar as Christmas is just around the corner! Rather than being a boring old Scrooge, this year we’ve decided to deck the halls and spread a little cheer with a new theme.

Many thanks to LASER for putting in most the legwork on this, and we hope it puts a smile on your faces.

Merry Xmas,
From all of the staff at ZeroSec…

It was a few days ago now when I promised that some exciting new features would be coming. It’s taken longer than planned and we’ve done a lot more than we were originally going to, but I think you’ll be pleased with the results.

So, what have we got in store for you?

Because all these new features are custom made we don’t really want to put anything live on the mainsite without some testing first. This is where beta.zerosec.ws comes in.

We just need you to go there and have a play around, try out the new features and let us know if you find any bugs. We are expecting bugs to be found, and if/when you do find them we ask that you either post them in the comments to this post, or email them to untamed&zerosec.ws (&=@).

Once we feel it’s all running like clockwork we’ll be adding the features to the main site, so if you like the features listed below get beta testing!

I know what you’re asking now: “What’s been changed on the beta site?”

Major Updates/Fixes

DONATOR ACCOUNTS
We try not to run too many ads here, as we know they can be a bit intrusive but that means we are often behind on server payments. Every time we’ve come to our readers for help you’ve been amazingly generous, and so we wanted to say thanks to those who’ve been really supporting us over the last year or so.

If you’ve donated in the past and want to get your hands on an account, drop an email to info@zerosec.ws with:

• Your requested username
• Paypal receipt from your donation

We’ll then check it all matches our records and email you back with your login details.

Comment Reporting
Another killer feature, and one which many of you have been asking for of late is a way to report comments which break our rules – such as fake, or virus infected links etc.
Well Untamed our coding God has delivered this wonderful feature, and we can’t wait to get it running live on the main site.
It’s currently set to only allow those with Donator accounts to report bad comments, so we don’t get lots of fake reports coming in. One of the caveats of having a registered account is if you abuse it, we’ll remove it

Captcha v2
Something else we heard a fair amount, was that our current captcha system has a few bugs and caused issues for some of our readers. This has now be completely recoded – every known bug has been squished!

ihateTV v0.2
A lot of you really love our ihateTV feature, and we’ve done some work on it. On the mainsite, it now uses cookies so it should store your last settings.

Something that’s been requested ever since ihateTV came along was an ihateTV RSS feed. Well ihateTV now works for RSS, and used the GET method so its compatible with all common RSS readers. Many thanks to all those who requested (and reminded us on IRC) about this feature!

Read More

Dear beloved ZeroSec readers,
It’s been a little while since we last did one of these and so I’ve decided it’s time for another call-out to you all. Each time we do we get inundated with emails of people who want to help out, and I’m hoping we get the same kind of response this time as we’re once again looking to find some editors to join the team.

We’re looking for people to post in all of the categories, but specifically people to help with the TV lineup, post music and applications. Even if you don’t have the requirements for posting, we have a few new roles which will be needed in the near future so if you think you have something to offer then email in!

The one thing I must stress: we are looking for dedicated members and people who will be able to post regularly. It’s a real kick in the teeth for us when we take the time to set editors up, only for them to not post or disappear.

If you’re interested in joining us, think you can contribute and have what it takes, then please send your answers to the following questions below to: crew@zerosec.ws

1. Do you have access to fast private torrent trackers (if so which?), usenet or FTP sites?
2. How long after a release has pre’d can you get access to it?
3. Do you have a general knowledge of “the warez scene”?
4. Do you have general HTML abilities?
5. Do you write/speak English fluently?
6. Add some interesting information about yourself and state which category you would be interested in covering.

In the very near future, Zerosec is diversifying and bringing you more content than ever before; to achieve this, we need your help. Do you have any interesting anecdotes from years gone by, ideas for an article you’d like to write, or even a film, album or concert review? All you have to do is meet the following criteria, and if it meets all the high, high standards you’ve come to expect from your favourite release site, it’ll get published. Now. Let’s talk requirements:

- Grammar isn’t a problem, but please, no leet or text speech

- Articles in English please, in Word or Open office doc format

- Articles should be anywhere between 600 to 1500 words.

- The deadline for the first batch of article submissions is 29th November

- The email address you send the article from MUST be valid, so if any changes or correspondence is required, we can get hold of you.

Providing you can meet these few criteria, please either click on the image or email zerozinesubmissions@googlemail.com with your contribution, and there’s a good chance you’ll see it featured in the next article. Well. Unless. You know. It’s terribly racist or going to piss off some equal rights lobbyists, in which case it probably won’t get published, as I don’t particularly cherish the thought of having a hit put out on me.

The site went down at approx. 1pm on 3rd August, and we were online again at 2pm on 5th August. The reason we were given from our host is that it was a broken network cable (which obviously takes 48 hours to fix). I’m deeply sorry for the disruption and I can understand that people are frustrated, and so are we. In fact we are so frustrated that we’re going to be moving from our current host to a more stable one within the next week or so. There *shouldn’t* be any downtime when the change-over happens, if there is it will only be 1-2 hours maximum.

On a positive note I have started active development of ZeroSec v4.0, and I’ll be looking to start integrating the new features in approximately 2 weeks, depending on how long it takes me to setup and configure the new server along with my other work load.

Thanks for your understanding,
Untamed

EDIT:
PreDB is now back online

I don’t know about you but I spend a lot of my time searching releases on ZeroSec, and it got me thinking: wouldn’t it be great if you could search ZeroSec from within your browser? Well now you can!

Some browsers already have options to allow you to do this, but I’ve coded a little feature for ZeroSec which means browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer can easily do so too.

To read how to add a ZeroSec.ws and/or Pre.ZeroSec.ws search to your browsers search, click on the appropriate link for a spoonfed guide…

• Google Chrome
• Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Opera
• Safari

We all hope you like, and leave a comment if you get stuck. Keep a look out for more Extras coming soon…

Many of you probably remember the time when I was an editor at another site, some probably remember that ReeGed and me always tried to enhance the end-user experience visitors would get when reading our articles and only a few will remember what then was started on the 29th of June.
I personally think that music is a vital element in the nature of human life and while some wander around aimlessly in the realm of different tunes, others found their safe-spot already in one of the many corners this world has to offer. So, about one year later we try to resurrect our project, the project to report straight from the heart of any festival our reporters are sent to and give you our point of view on the situation. Read More