> There's a reason the takedown of a good private tracker is seen like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again.
The irony of course being that we developed the Internet to prevent Single Points of Failure from destroying our American society, yet we're seeing our culture die over and over again to the crumbling of Single Points of Failure.
Maybe at some point we'll start seeing the point of building failure-resilient networks, but as long as there's money to be made in Facebooks and Netflixes and other walled gardens, we're just going to keep seeing these failures wipe us out.
Sure but what made What.CD the gold standard was the control they had over their community to curate and moderate which doesn't seem to have a distributed solution yet. Public torrent sites & trackers are very distributed and failure resistant but they're a cesspool of low quality content.
This isn't to say that you can't find what you're looking for but most of the quality stuff is usually repackaged from other higher quality sites/sources that are single points of failure for their niche of content.
I can't see the problem with having a select group of people maintaining the repository (i.e WCD users) and also distributing the content of the repository on the Internet for all.
As another commenter mentioned, GNU/Linux package management and in fact most free software projects are managed this way.
The only downside would be that maybe some of the information would be infringing copyright, even if it's just the database rather than the music itself.
>maybe some of the (torrent database) information would be infringing copyright.
This isn't likely unless they're hosting the cover images instead of distributing them with the torrents. iirc, wcd used a separate domain to host cover images to be viewed when browsing the site.
I would think that signing is a good method to curate and moderate a distributed solution. Looking at debian repositories, they are both trusted, distributed and failure resistant.
People still need a platform to build the community, but that could be built in a separated system from the distribution.
> I would think that signing is a good method to curate and moderate a distributed solution. Looking at debian repositories, they are both trusted, distributed and failure resistant.
BitTorrent uses cryptography to ensure file integrity. DCPP does too. Even FXP did (although only CRC32 this was reasonable back then).
Debian repositories don't compare to the illegal distribution of quality audio (and video) because Debian repositories are legal to host/spread. Because of this reason they're widely available and therefore the supply meets the demand. Unlike with illegal distribution of quality audio (and video).
The comparison with Library of Alexandria goes moot. During the burning of the Library of Alexandria many works got lost forever. Thanks to the invention of printing in the 15th century this is already more unlikely to happen. Nevermind storage on computers which has seen tremendous progress. One also needs to keep in mind that all the copies people had from the content on What.CD still exists. So it is more akin to a Library of Alexandria being burned down while all the copies are still spread (multiple times!) among large groups of individuals around the globe. I don't think many people on Earth would be able to figure out where those copies are, except maybe the NSA or GCHQ. But it'd cost them a lot of effort which isn't worth the hassle, besides being outside their scope of interest.
This is not to say we're there yet, just that its less dramatic than it seems. The burning of the Library (What.CD) is substantial because it was a meeting place for those interested in the data, akin to the shutting down of Silk Road or Timothy Leary getting busted. However one lost battle doesn't mean the war is lost.
Its still important to improve distribution of data, allow anonymity on the Internet, or the combination of both.
2 thoughts there: Convenience trumps pretty much all other rationals in the decision making once a price point is reached. And we are still being feed ADSL instead of SDSL. Meaning that while your ISP and mine are maximizing the bandwidth they can sell, we are just seen as consummers. There might be a shifting point in the future for the consumer to be seen as a potential distributed hosting node. But this will leave the question of who is really owning the connection and therefore who is responsible in front of the law? The current context of internet data flow is very much a grey area.
The irony of course being that we developed the Internet to prevent Single Points of Failure from destroying our American society, yet we're seeing our culture die over and over again to the crumbling of Single Points of Failure.
Maybe at some point we'll start seeing the point of building failure-resilient networks, but as long as there's money to be made in Facebooks and Netflixes and other walled gardens, we're just going to keep seeing these failures wipe us out.