Very interesting Wired interview with David Thomas here

This is an incredibly detailed expose about the 'dark side'. When I was younger and stupider I drifted towards the dark side, almost exclusively dealing with pirating games. But the modus operandi is almost identical; the handles (nom de plume), the elite websites, the gatekeepers, etc. And it was a very fast paced and heady world; sites would go up and down in a matter of days, and it was common to use hacked sites for storing games/applications for high-speed downloading. I relate to Thomas who mentions that he would sit in the bathtub for hours to 'wash away' all the cyber-chatter; doing it for 12 hours a day 7 days a week would pretty much drive anyone insane, as it almost did me. Anyway, those days are behind, and you wise up about the monsters lurking in the dark.