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Comment by blahi | Hacker News Reader

That was a very "upscale" tracker. You couldn't just go in and register. You had to go through a vetting process. They didn't serve a shitloads of ads (or at all, I think). You are not even supposed to know about the site.

How did it get on the authorities' radar?

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What.cd was pretty well known. It had a large userbase and items were leaked on there that made international news. A radiohead song was leaked before it was released, rumored to have been done by the band. COFEE a forensics tool made by Microsoft for law enforcement was leaked. And unpublished stories by JD Salinger that were forbidden to be publicly released until 50 years after his death were also leaked. So the site has definitely gotten a lot of publicity.

hah, I remember the COFEE leak from back in the day. For those who don't know, what.cd requires users to maintain an upload:download ratio to keep using the site. You could contribute a portion of your upload total to a "bounty" on requests for material not currently on the site. Uploader of the content gets the bounty applied to their upload total. The COFEE bounty was over 1TB if I remember right.

>COFEE a forensics tool made by Microsoft for law enforcement was leaked.

Not to be confused with user "coffee". Dude was a legend.

>How did it get on the authorities' radar?

Same way you know about it, I guess. An open secret really isn't a secret.

Yeah, it takes like a week tops to go from knowing nothing about private trackers to knowing what all the majors ones are. What.cd has been extremely well-known for a long time now. The exclusivity was less about actually being hidden and more about avoiding being the low-hanging fruit. What's been known to every government and anti-piracy initiative practically since its inception. It was just a matter of getting around to doing something about it.

There was always a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD), articles in a lot of mainstream newspapers and they never had any ads.

The interview process (to join the site) was out in the open and promoted on other trackers, reddit, twitter. It was never about staying secret, the entry barriers were to educate people about the ripping / encoding / ratio rules not about staying under the radar or elitist.

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