Workaround for Ratio Problems
Ratio/seeding problems anyone?
Apart from the usual standard suggestions on private tracker sites, here is a tip for getting up and running on trackers where seeding is difficult. The dance around the golden calf of ratio leads to an excessive over-supply of seeding capacity on many private trackers, so for those who live in countries/areas with an inferior infrastructure and low bandwidth, the following might be worth trying out.
If you cannot get or afford a seedbox because you live in a third world country or in the province, outbacks or the like, use the tracker as an announcement board rather than sucking it dry from the very beginning. In other words, look which software, music, games and movies are being published (preferably not compressed, i.e. the .iso instead of multi-part .rar/.zip archives) and then search for them on public trackers or file sharing hosts. After having seeded them back there -- which is far easier and quicker -- to a ratio of 100% (1.00), cut them off from public trackers, because many private trackers cannot distinguish between uploads to them and to other trackers; if you upload to them and the public at the same time, they often interpret that as 'ratio cheating', although the ideal and idea of 'sharing' is being upheld.
Now download the torrent file from the private tracker, but do not start it yet. Copy the previously downloaded files into the temporary download directory and force a re-check on them. Your BitTorrent client will realize that you already have most of the content, except for the nonsense text files à la «this was downloaded from NitwitTor.duh». Subsequently, start the torrent to get those few missing .nfo files from the private tracker, which will then start seeding. This way, your ratio will be positive even if you can only upload/seed a few MegaBytes before the guys with the big seedbox guns dish out the warez with shovels.
It is somewhat ironic that the concept of ratio is nowadays hindering instead of fostering the free interchange of information on private trackers, but until administrators finally wake up and come to the obvious conclusion that upload capacity is not a bottleneck any longer, seeding/ratio problems will continue to make up 80% of all cries for help in the respective user fora -- which of course is a nice argument for administrators to 'encourage' members to pay, pardon, 'donate' to the site.
People in places with a good IT infrastructure will probably not need to go through this kind of hoops, and people who live in countries where software piracy is watched with a vulture's eye by the authorities might want to steer clear of public trackers, but for others, this can be a life saver until you built up a buffer that allows you to download from the private tracker directly.
Good luck in your new community and take care.
Authorities watching private Tracker Sites
That would depend ...
... on where you as the user are located, where the tracker infrastructure is located and where the owners/administrators are located. For instance, in the US, where the MPAA, RIA, SPA and other industry lobbying associations practice 'political contributions to society' in the form of campaign financing (people only call corruption corruption when it happens in the third world), it is obviously risky to host a tracker on American servers if you are an American citizen living in the US and having your e-mail account with an American provider. The same goes for most countries in the EU who suck up to the US or accept and obey any bullshit as soon as it is made a law, Germany for example. When it comes to autorities observing BitTorrent trackers, a case in point is Great Britain, where the IPTorrents domain (IPT) was blocked by the authorities and inaccessible until the IPT stuff offered an alternative domain. Make no mistake, though, technically it is no problem to find out everything about any country's citizens already, just remember that Echelon and other US spying endeavours survey every e-mail, every phone call, every public space and every Internet activity around the world. It is not even a problem of size, as the 17 mio. Frenchmen they kept an eye on demonstrates (25% of the French population) nor level (they wiretapped the German chancellor's phones, too). Currently, the data is usually not filtered for anti-software-distribution purposes, but that may only be a question of time, depending on whom the industry lobbies get elected into office and how much propaganda they are willing to make. In the good old days, when journalists had to fear for their lives when publishing critical views, depending on courageous and valiant editors and publishers who printed what they printed because it was the right thing to do, media houses were on the side of those who fought for truth and liberty. Today they are large, multi-national enterprises that influence and manipulate the public opinion in order to bolster their bottom line. Let's not forget about the easiest approach: police offers signing up at the site as members should not be too difficult and if they are smart and get in a certain amount of agents, they could cause quite a mess simply by erratic behaviour, uploading fake torrents, donation chargebacks, etc., even without any razzia or modifications of the law.
In Switzerland on the other hand, instead of blindly following the industry's idiotic claims that every copy pirated is a sale lost, the government ran studies on the actual effect of software sharing, investigating whether there was really a significant impact on sales. The result was negative, i.e. no, people do not buy less stuff just because they pirate something, they only buy different things. When it came to music, they would often download the easy to obtain top of the charts and then buy the discs of lesser known artists they would never have known if it wasn't for free 'testing', or to support the fledgling artists they liked. Similar observations, albeit to a lesser degree, where made for movies, etc.: despite being able to download it, many fans still preferred to watch the awakening of the force in cinemas, having Lucas' latest epic breaking all sales records despite digital availability. In other areas, people pay less for streaming media services but more for higher Internet bandwidth, buy fewer DVDs but more hard disks to save downloaded content, and so on. Overall, neutral studies have shown repeatedly that there is no real negative impact on the economy caused by software sharing. There is, however, a clearly visible positive impact on the breadth and width of the variety of cultural content: artists do no longer have to pass through the bottleneck of corporate approval, the international nature of the Internet leads to content becoming available in countries/regions where the industry does not offer it, people getting access to software in other languages and packages as what the suits & ties decided is best for customers, music and films in other languages and from other cultures finding an audience they were not marketed for, workaround for astronomous shipping fees to and non-reliable payment systems in underdeveloped countries (thereby narrowing the informative/cultural/technical gap), and so on.
Obviously, the topic is more complex than what can be reproduced within the narrow scope of a forum post (a very good article in the German computer magazine c't is several pages long, and so is a nice essay from a French artist who himself downloads, too), but you get the picture. To be fair, there are regions like South America were not just individuals download what they can't afford to buy, but even businesses and companies run on stolen software. This has to do with the mentality in those countries, where everyone cheats and steals from everyone and arguments are either decided by bribes or violence, as Latin America's overwhelming corruption and crime are not just within the government, but a general characteristic of the mindset and behaviour, or as the saying goes, «the government is not corrupt because of being the government, but because of being Mexican». While in these and middle eastern countries, some effort against software piracy would surely benefit the economy, these are the last places where such measures need to be feared, at least until somebody pays an amount large enough to someone who considers the sum worth a change in the nationalist attitude against anything of foreign origin. At that moment, the scantily disguised 'democratorships' of Latin American governments, corporations and crime cartels, all tightly interwoven by interest and family relations, could be more effective than in north-western countries, because there is no real freedom of expression, democracy, impair judicial system or anything that could protect the population from excessive private or public use of power.
In western nations, for the reasons outlined above, some countries like Liechtenstein, Switzerland and others with a more freedom oriented and independent culture do not pursue and prosecute their citizens as draconically as others. In one of the few member countries of the EU with a backbone, the Netherlands, society regards the privacy rights of citizens as more important than increasing the profits of multi-billion Dollar companies, so that's the safest place to be or have your website hosted if you live in the EU. Nevertheless, the best strategy always consists in having your servers in a country outside the EU and US, in a country where you do not live and that you are not a citizen of, preferably one that doesn't bow to bullying from the entertainment industry's political lackeys. Servers in Russia, VPN from China (and for people in Russia and China the other way round wherever possible), e-mail provider in Africa or South America -- the time and effort it costs to deal in foreign languages with the bureaucracies there, just to obtain some logs and user data, disencourages the state's attourneys somewhat, so they would rather go after somebody living around the corner. It is a little bit like using a firewall, anti-virus and secure passwords: if a group of really good hackers really wants to get you, they probably will, but all the others would rather look for easier targets.
The further the technical advancement in artificial intelligence lowers the prices of filtering big data into concise information, the more likely it will become that some career horny attourney or a politician trying to get media attention as the new hero of law and order will frighten aunt and grandma with stories about the devious dark side of the net. None of us earns the kind of salary necessary to buy all that we have on our hard drives, but if the industry gets politicians and judges (by nature non-technical people, that's why they studied laws or giving speeches in the first place) to believe that's the amount of their losses ... They do not have to sue as all, a few show trials with severe punishments will suffice, because those of us who have a life and are average citizens with social responsibilities and ties have nowhere to escape.
All political systems in modern societies show a severe imbalance between the catering to groups: there is a strong relative overweight in favour of relatively small groups, paid for by the overwhelming large group of the rest of society in form of relatively small amounts --which add up to enormous amounts for the small interest groups. Look at the absurd agricultural policies in the EU, oil prices, wars and so on, or at the length of tax codes: the French one has over 1000 pages, the German one over 1400 pages, the American one 14000 pages. Why? To accommodate all the exceptions, exemptions, special arrangements and permissions that the overwhelming majority of the population does not pay attention to, but that result in enormous profits for the very few who exploit them. Tax codes, building and mining permissions, ecological permits and exceptions -- that's what campaign donations are all about, and given that Obama alone spent 1.8 billion for his reelection campaign, let alone all the money wasted by the Republican candidates, it should become obvious who selects the people who are allowed to become candidates in the first place. Delving into more depth would take us too far from the topic, but readers who are interested in knowing more about how our systems work might want to read up on what is called «New political Economy», «New Economy of Politics» or however they translate it into English -- it is an area of economical science that (instead of making the utopic and abstract implicit premises that characterizes other area of national and macroeconomics) regards political and economical players as self-interested, applying the rules of the market to their politics in order to maximize their respective political and economic profits. Combine this with Rawl's 'Veil of Ignorance' in theory and the empirically observed discontent with the political allocation of resources and you will realize that many things we see in the news every day can be perfectly explained by NPE, although they seem absurdly illogic to common sense. Or as the Romans put it: «Qué bene?» -- look who gains from something and how, and you will understand why things are the way they are.
Résumé: If they really wanted to, governments and law enforcement agencies could find us all just by implementing a few new laws that force ISPs to do some advanced data filtering and cross-referencing. At the moment, they have fatter fish to fry, grabbing power under the pretext of anti-terrorism, the war against the so-called Islamic State and the integration of refugees fleeing from Irak/Syria, the debt crisis in Southern Europe and the US, China's expansion into the South Sea, Putin's power play in the Ukraine, Donald Trump's funny idea of the day, and so on, and so on. Last but not least, there is the old panem et circenses, the distraction of people with sports and show events to keep the masses occupied while the scissors of social divergence open wider and wider. When that changes and calms down (or an easy to point out scapegoat is needed for further distraction from a worsening social imbalance) and self-righteous men of law and order need to profile themselves as hands-on 'doers' (or require some donations for their campaigns), then our days might be counted and our rear ends up for grabs, because the paper that laws are written on doesn't ask for logic or common sense. Human nature will do the rest to finish us off, because people fear what they don't understand and will have no unregulated 'underground', plus there's the envy about us getting something for free while they do not -- the bourgeois philistine does not take kindly to outsiders who gain an advantage by doing something he is too much of a coward for to do the same. Consequently, when the moment comes, there will be nobody rising their hands in our defense, partly due to Schadenfreude (malicious joy over another person's misfortune), partly because there are always more serious violations of human rights somewhere in the world, occupying the few who might care with bigger issues.
