Trump/maga is pro-big government, regardless of what they pretend they are, and more importantly they're pro-making my friends dead. When the topic is sensitive communications that could lead to such a scenario, that association is very hard to ignore.
CoyoteFacts
joined 6 months ago
Yep, I forgot it's not a company. The point stands though; someone has to pay for the servers and administration, and if they run out of money or the foundation falls apart, then the problem happens in the same way. I don't know much about Wikipedia's structure, but I would guess it's a similar situation in terms of needing money to stay running and also being able to be salvaged by the community if it does go down.
Weirdly, Chris does have a GitHub repo for it, which would be way more secure for serving downloads, but it's not mentioned on the download page. We're also assuming that Chris is trustworthy and has not included a malicious payload into this file, in which case it wouldn't matter if the file is correct - it would still be malicious.
My advice is don't run things you don't understand or that people you trust have not vouched for. If you use Linux, you inherently trust your repository maintainers to not serve you malicious code and to audit the packages they are maintaining, so you can be delivered safe software from secure repositories without needing to understand every line of code. This isn't 100% bulletproof, as we saw with the XZ Utils backdoor, but it's a hell of a lot safer than piping things raw.
Worth noting that when What died, ~4 new sites popped up immediately and invited all the old members, and everyone raced to re-upload everything from What onto them, which was actually pretty effective. At this point, RED and OPS have greatly surpassed What in many ways, aside from some releases that never made it back (you can actually find out which releases used to exist because What's database was made available after its death). Users and staff are a lot more prepared if it happens again, e.g. keeping track of all metadata via "gazelle-origin".
If by "in" you mean how to get into them, generally you're supposed to have a friend invite you. If you don't have anyone you know on private trackers, you've gotta get in from scratch. Luckily, RED and OPS both do interviews to test your knowledge on the technicals of music formats, though I've heard RED's interview queues are long and OPS's interviews are often just not happening: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html https://interview.orpheus.network/
Alternatively, you can interview for MAM, which is IMO the best ebook/audiobook tracker. They're super chill and have a very simple interview e.g. "what is a tracker": https://www.myanonamouse.net/inviteapp.php. After that, you can just hang around there for a while until you can get into their recruitment forums to get invites to other entry-level trackers, and then on those entry-level trackers you can get recruited into slightly higher-level trackers, and so on, and eventually RED/OPS should be recruiting from somewhere.
This can feel a little silly and convoluted, but I guess I'd just appreciate that these sites put the effort into conducting interviews for new people at all, since the alternative is that you will just never get into anything without a friend. Reddit's /r/trackers wiki is unfortunately one of the better places for information about private trackers if you want to do further reading.
As an aside, please don't pipe arbitrary code from the internet directly into execution. Download the file and read it first. Someone could easily pwn that site and host malware at that URL, for example.
If you have any drive to get back into it, TMK the interview for RED is roughly the same as the interview for WCD, and although OPS isn't interviewing right now it's fairly easy to get to power user on RED and get an invite to OPS that way. I think RED is a little bit more hard-ratio than WCD was because RED doesn't do freeleech staff picks or site-wides, but they do give out handfuls of freeleech tokens from time to time, so even if you can't keep up with ratio requirements you can still nab free stuff with those just by having an account. As before, having an OPS account will help tremendously for keeping up with RED ratio, and eventually it'll become a non-issue.
Yes, it's allowed and encouraged between RED<->OPS. There are a few tools on the RED and OPS forums to automate most of the process (e.g. Transplant, REDCurry, Takeout, Orpheus-Populator, etc.). Cross-posting torrents on many sites is allowed and fine, you just have to be aware of the rules of the source site, e.g. some places don't want their internals to be shared, or some have a literal timer countdown before cross-posting is allowed. On the other hand, most sites are not going to enforce other sites' exclusivity demands (PTP explicitly has a note about this). If an exclusive file is cross-posted onto PTP, PTP isn't going to take it down on anyone's behalf.
I'll note that private tracker culture has warmed up quite a bit in the past decade and a half that I've been on them. Trackers (and their users) don't usually see other trackers as rivals/competitors anymore, release groups are respectful of each other, there are a ton of tutorials and help forums around to help low-skill members learn how to do the advanced stuff, and so on. There are recognizable usernames everywhere, and the general vibe is to cross-upload as much as possible and help build everyone's trackers together. Cross-seed (the program) has helped a lot with this, and seedbases have become very strong even on smaller trackers as a result.
Mainly, HDDs are bigger and FLAC is future-proof for future audio formats, as well I think the death of What.CD has really impressed upon the next generation that preservation is of utmost importance. A lot of albums were fully lost during the transition to RED/OPS, and a good chunk of albums that used to have a lossless copy now only have lossy versions from those who kept MP3 libraries. IMO, piracy is ownership, and owning the master lossless copy so you can generate any other formats is that concept taken to its logical conclusion.
Seconding the notion to get into OPS somehow if at all possible. RED's economy is one of the few economies that is actually non-trivial, whereas OPS's economy is totally trivial. A large amount of RED stuff is automatically mirrored to OPS, so you can just grab it at OPS and cross-seed back to RED (there are a few tools to do this automatically, e.g. nemorosa). RED is still definitely the more active and qualitative place to be, but cross-seeding shenanigans with OPS will keep RED's economy in-check.
A lot of people just rip Qobuz, Deezer, and Tidal FLAC for free using shared keys that you can find on the megathread ("Knowledge & Tokens"). Autosnatchers will give you at least one snatch per upload. No one is actually buying most of that WEB FLAC. There also might be a big batch of freeleech tokens during December for kickstarting a library. Also, I'd recommend just going full FLAC from the start; MP3 is easier/smaller to snatch, but it's 2025 and no one wants MP3, so long-term you'll get the best results by perma-seeding a large FLAC library.
I don't think it will be a big deal to transcode MP3 to Opus as long as you're okay with for-sure having theoretically-scuffed-up audio files. Every time an encoder has a go at the files (especially different encoders) they'll leave little artifacting marks all over the waveforms, typically seen as little "blocks". Are they audible? Doubtful. If you want to keep a neat and high-quality library I'd recommend collecting FLAC next time around.
Also, this won't work on Win11, and I don't think you can make it transcode MP3, but if anyone happens to have slightly different requirements I'll plug https://gitlab.com/beep_street/mkopuslibrary, which I use to keep my FLAC library in sync with a parallel Opus library for mobile use.
I definitely agree that secure communication is not political, but my concern is more about that person's ability to break the security or implement backdoors. I'm okay with simplex as a concept (warts and all), but I'd need a different client or at least someone else packaging the software so that they can check the commits before building. For most other people's beliefs I'm not overly concerned with the maintainers trying to maliciously impose them, but people in the maga crowd have completely lost touch with reality, and giving someone like that the sole power to make a git commit and push a client update that can get people killed makes me too nervous long-term. We've seen them literally kill each other for not being hateful enough, and this is a problem that's only getting worse.