Comment by deepakhj

We had weekly scene reports that ranked the FTP sites and groups. It also covered the drama, politics, group mergers or closures, and personal stories (under anonymity though). You got ranked by your performance on the sites that counted towards points. In order to upload files to a top 5 site, you would have to get into release groups and get the "pre", in other words, you get first dibs at uploading the files. Europe had the fastest internet connections especially Swedish and Finnish universities. Top 5 EU FTP sites were the most important. Followed by the top 5 US which were primarily hosted at Internet2 universities such as CMU, Georgia Tech, MIT, and Virginia Tech. These FTP sites were the first place any cracked release would be uploaded to. Almost like the root DNS servers for internet.