Terminal Case

I was going to continue OnionRings' series on Linux configuration, but I don't have access to a clean Ubuntu install at the moment (or any other kind, actually), so I'll leave that topic for now. Instead, I'll rant a little about the future of the MAFIAA, and the RIAA in particular.

The popular opinion among pirates is that downloading music hurts no one. I've heard a variety of justifications for this, but the most popular opinion is that the free publicity (which presumably leads to album sales) counteracts lost sales. I'm no expert, but you're sure as fucking hell less of an expert than I am. What I will say is that, if this is true, it's true only for small bands and independent labels. The big boys can afford to buy as much publicity as they want. So they're right, it is hurting their sales. It's not hurting their sales by the number of copies downloaded times the full sticker price of the album, but it's hurting them nonetheless.

Don't mistake this for a bad thing. The big labels would have you believe that without them, there would be no music. Listen, bud. There was music before you came along, and there will be music long after you are laid to rest. What we will see the death of is McMusicians, singers and bands that everyone has heard of and that the most gullible of us consider to be the epitome of good music. You know who I'm talking about.

What will be left without the big labels? Musicians that aren't in the business of making millions of dollars. Record labels that are employed by the musicians, not the other way around. A world where the music industry is easier to break into because people are more open-minded about music they haven't heard on the radio at least 15 times. A world without the fat, corrupt husk that pretends to serve the needs of musicians and music-lovers alike.

The best bit of all: you can live in that world today. Listen to internet radio and find new bands. Go anywhere with live music, be it a concert, bar, club, coffee shop, or street corner. Buy independent records from independent record stores. Learn to play an instrument yourself! The labels aren't afraid of downloaders. They're afraid we'll realize that we don't need them. Downloading music won't hurt them as much as the realization that you never need to buy anything from them, ever again.

Naturally, all of the sentiments above can be directly applied to the film industry as well. Notice how movies are all shit these days? Try independent cinema. Trust me, there are still movies being made that don't suck.

Okay, that's all for now. I'll see you on Monday, or better yet, OnionRings will. I'll see if I can make him do an article next time.

A brief update: apologies to anyone that was expecting this to be a pun and for me to cover command-line stuff. I think OnionRings is indeed planning to get his series going again for Monday, and I'll try to get a little further ahead on my posting as well.

Retrospective 1: Conception

Since starting TorrentFries, I've had a number of people ask me how to start a successful tracker. The first question I ask is always "What sort of material do you want on the site?" Only one person gave me a response other than "everything". Incidentally, I'm now involved in some small way in the development of that other person's tracker. The two aren't directly related (I'm not a sword for hire), but they're not entirely unrelated either.

Listen, I'll let you in on a secret. There are tons of "everything" trackers out there. Come up with something unique to pull people in.

Personally, I believe in unconventional activism. In this case, deep-fried goods are too expensive, so I thought a BitTorrent tracker might get people talking about the problem. Since nobody else had one going, I set out to create one of my own.

The first step in the process was to find a host and a tracker. In this situation, personal connections are nice. I was lucky enough to know a guy that ran a shared web host, so I was able to get things running for $5/month, plus the cost of registering a domain name ($12/year). However, any shared host worth their salt should figure out that someone is running a tracker pretty quickly, so don't count on slipping that under the radar. Instead, you might consider a VPS, which allows you to rent part of a server, rather than having to pay for the whole thing. You should have plenty of control over your server, and get more leeway in terms of traffic. A basic VPS will cost you around $40/month.

However, be aware that there's no way you can buy security for any price you can afford at this point. The best you can hope for is a web host that will look the other way until they hear from a copyright holder. Most dedicated and VPS hosts I've encountered will do this; in fact, some hosts have told me this directly. What you can do is maintain daily off-site backups and have a backup host lined up in advance in case of the worst. We'll talk about contingency planning a bit later on.

Choosing the software involves a fair bit of research. I was pretty lazy on that point, and have been paying for it ever since. The only two trackers I checked out were TBdev and TorrentTrader Classic. TBdev is used by a lot of big-name private trackers such as Torrent-Damage, TorrentLeech, the late OiNK, LearnBits, BitMe, BlackCats, BrokenStones and so forth. However, the administration functions are almost non-existent, and the amount of customization available in TorrentTrader appealed to me. I didn't want to spend much time digging around in the code to get everything to work properly.

I've got a fair bit of experience with graphic and web design, so I took it as given that I'd build a new theme from the ground up. The product was in retrospect not that impressive, but it was certainly usable and unquestionably better than what I'd started with.

Finally, before going live, I asked a friend to take a look at the site. I expected him to spend perhaps 5 minutes and respond with a "looks good", but he ended up giving me a two-page essay including everything down to copy-editing in the FAQ. It was great help, and I was able to refine a lot of features that way.

Tomorrow: details on how to pull members in.