Oink's Pink Palace is long gone, but these trackers are still out there--unfortunately, the only thing more of a faux pas in the private tracker community than ripping your music at 128kbps is actually mentioning a working private tracker.
5. Google After foiling a decade of increasingly exotic file-sharing methods--of torrenting and program-downloading and private meeting--the RIAA has finally found itself unable to stop the biggest piracy enabler of them all: Google's suggestion box. Type in any album name and you're liable to get something that at least purports to be a ZIP file of same. What's weird is how eager the suggestion box is to do it--it would love to autocomplete "rihanna single mp3 download illegal" for you.
It's almost too easy--piracy is supposed to look like 19-year-old hackers and pop-up ads advertising horny-mom webcams and home-brewed programs that crash all the time, not like the most widely trafficked website there is. It's a little like an otherwise-reputable pharmacist who hears you mention Vicodin and says, before you can get your prescription out of your coat pocket, "Oh--well, you're going to have to meet me out in the parking lot, okay? And this might be meth, actually, but it says Vicodin, are you a cop, nah, it doesn't matter, give me like ten minutes, okay?"
Megaupload's shutdown leaves a gap in those sketchy search results, but I'm sure a million other sleazy shell companies incorporated in the Principality of Sealand will be happy to oblige Google's laziest music consumers over the next few days. Just wait 30 seconds to download. 29 28 27 26
