Server Migration

For the first time in 6 years we have decided to change web hosting providers. This is the first stage in a long process of giving Defacto2 a much needed internal update whereby we will eventually simplify and unify the data within the website. One of the big changes with the move has the switching of server platforms. Previously we used Microsoft Windows 2003 Server operating a commercial application server by Adobe. But the website you see before you is now running on an open source platform.

Obviously as with any large platform change such as this there are bound to be some hiccups. While we have extensively troubleshoot the website there are bound to be glitches we have missed, so please get in contact with us if you encounter any bugs, missing files or broken URLs.

The only obvious downside to this migration so far has been a random, yet noticeable write performance lag to our database. We are well aware of the issue and will look at resolving this in the future.

On a more positive parting note we have reintroduced missing magazines that were accidently deleted from the database mid-last year. This means all the issues of The Game Scene Chart are back on-line.

Enjoy.

Jason Scott Of textfiles.com Needs Our Help

Jason Scott, the man behind such legendary projects such as textfiles.com and the BBS Documentary is currently engaged in a Kickstarter fund raiser. Recently he was made unemployed and so he is looking for pledges to reach a goal of $25,000, within a month. Using this money to live off he plans to spend the next number of months working full time on his various computer history projects.

If his past projects are anything to go by then this in itself is worthy of a significant donation. Without Jason’s and his supporters’ work over the past decade hundreds of thousands of historic, computer files and computer related documents would have most certainly been lost to the black hole that is data rot.

Kickstarter, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/textfiles/the-jason-scott-sabbatical

What is happening to Defacto2?

I am in the very slow process of updating the whole backend of the Defacto2 website. This has meant rewriting the site’s database from scratch. Before then transferring all the data from an old, poorly designed MySQL catalogue, which itself was once migrated from an earlier Windows 2000 Access database. So because of this I have avoided adding new files to the site and this is why the it seems a little quiet.

I will continue to add certain, popular files such as The Scene Charts issues, but lesser known, obscure files will only be added to the new database, which obviously will not show up on the current site at www.defacto2.net.

Please DO continue to submit your old, scene related files though as all the submissions are collected, catalogued and stored. They will be placed online when the new site is ready for public consumption.

Defacto2 Twitter

For those of you who use Twitter I thought I would remind the readers that Defacto2 tweaks. Not only are the latest updates from the site published to the Twitter account. We also tweet when files previews and progress updates on the website revision, news that you will not find on the website itself. You can find our Twitter page at Defacto2 Twitter.

No replies to Contact Us messages

In the past month if you have sent us a message using the Defacto2 contacts forms and have not received a reply, then I must apologise. Unfortunately it seems that the e-mail address those messages were forwarded to expired; so all the messages submitted in the past month has been lost. While the issue has now been fix there is not much I can do to recover the lost messages. So if it was important I would ask that you please resend.

Random Visitor Statistics for Defacto2

Today I thought I would do something different and list some of the more interesting statistics for defacto2.net in the past month. To give some idea of the type of users who visit this site and where you go. For web browsing, 62% of you use Firefox, 20% use Internet Explorer, 9% use Opera, 4% use Chrome and 2% use Safari.

91% use Windows, 5% use Linux, 3.5% run Macintosh machines.

22.7% use a screen resolution of 1280×1024, 19% use 1024×768, 15% are at 1680×1050 and 13% are at 1280×800.

A massive 81% of you have Adobe Flash 10 installed, the remainder have Flash 9 installed, while only 3.5% of you have no Flash plug-in at all.

84.46% have some form of Java support, with 15.5% having no support.

Speed wise, 34% of you are on DSL, 24% are on cable, 5% use a T1 line and fortunately only 3.7% still use dial-up, I feel for you guys.

22% of you come from the United States, 12% from Germany, 7% from Russia, 6% from Sweden.

The Japanese spend the most time on the site with an average visit of nearly 6 minutes, while the Indonesians spend the least with an average visit of only 27 seconds. The median visit is 2 minutes and 15 seconds.

Only 19% of traffic was direct, 40% of you were referred from other websites and another 41% were referred from search engine results.

The top five referring sites for past month were Wikipedia, the Russian site Softboard.ru, a blogspot.com item on our recent scene artpack, stumbleupon.com and aboutthescene.com.

Top search engines are Google with 96% of the referrals, Yahoo with 1.6%, Search with 0.8% and Microsoft Live with only 0.35%!

The most popular pages on the site were the front page with 21% of the total views. 2nd was the Defacto2 – NFO Utilities; 3rd the Razor 1911 group page at 3.1%; 4th the Scene Documents, text and NFO files page at 3% and 5th was the Reloaded group page at 2%.

New Art Pack

Today we have released a new file pack, the Group Logos Pack. This is a collection of over 1,560 scene group logos and art pieces that were once collected by Climbatiz. Climbatiz once ran a web site at http://crackart.95mb.com/ which housed all these pieces but it has long since been abandoned. So the collection has been donated to us for hosting.

The pack is released under a Creative Commons (cc) Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike licence. The artworks within are still copyrighted by their respective artists.

You can download the pack here.

Defacto2 YouTube Video and Site Updates

I thought I would let you know of a few updates that we have recently introduced to Defacto2. Firstly you might have noticed the site’s

is slightly longer. We have added an extra 200 pixels to every page on the site to increase legibility. Also in the process is an upgrade to our YouTube account. Hopefully soon, where possible we will have every DOS crack and intro hosted as a ‘high quality’ on YouTube video. We are planning to also update the older low quality videos that were put on the channel a couple of years ago into high quality video.

Once this project is eventually complete the videos captures we have created will then be released as a crack-intro video pack. You will be able to download the pack from Defacto2 and play the videos using your favourite media player. This pack will also be included in an updated release of the Defacto2 ISO DVD image.

Finally we have added a new category to our webpage portal, ‘Legal Scene Torrents‘. Currently we have 5 entries but we hope this will be expanded at a later date.

Download Our Files With Care

Virus/Trojan warning! UPDATE: Some people have reported that the Trojan reports are false positives due to the way certain crack-tros are packed using combined compression and encryption. This is the same way these Trojans are often packaged. But still our advise on running them in an isolated environment stands.

The Maktone Cracktros and Installer pack contains a number of installers and cracktros originally designed for Windows 98. It has come to our attention that 5 files within this pack are infected with Adware Trojans.

• class-gameboy-installer.zip – Trojan Vundo
• class-peanuts.zip – Backdoor.Bifrose
• cls-1999_04_03.zip – Trojan Vundo
• cls-1999_02_15.zip – Trojan Vundo
• class-bubbles.zip – Trojan Horse

Unfortunately this means these files have to be removed from the pack as they cannot be disinfected.

Also 21 cracktros and installers have been infected. These infected files can also be found in the Defacto2 ISO Collection 2007 and the The Scene Archive Cracktros Pack. A full list of the infected files can be found in this text document.

As always common sense dictates that you always run an up to date scan over any execute/program files contained in a download. Especially from a historical scene site such as ours where at the time of upload, the infection might not have been detected by the scanners of the era. While we do scan every file we put online, we do not often run periodic update scans on the files already on the server.

So we as always recommend that with any file you download from Defacto2. If it contains an execute or program file you should run with caution. We always suggest an isolated virtual environment such as Virtual PC, DOSBox, VirtualBox or VMware.

Defacto2 Sitetro 2008

You can download it here. Credits goto to the guys at electric druggies and s!p. Feel free to vote for our sitetro.
Defacto2, http://www.defacto2.net/cracktros.cfm?id=869