Torrents from a known trusted source (i.e. a tracker with a fairly locked down clientele and savvy admins) are plentiful still. You won't find them unless you gather the troops and launch an all out sortie, but they are out there. There are quite a few I use on a regular basis and never have an issue (I do scan everything as well. CYA and all that) . Trackers running in the public domain anymore are hit and miss. You can DL from these as well but you must be pretty well familiar with a methodology of determining software integrity. If not, I would stay away from those altogether. One thing I don't abide is these SFS sites that charge fee's in order to DL scene stuffz. In essence they are profiting from the scene. Profiting from the scene is supposed to be a breach of the first rule of the scene. Second rule of the scene is you never talk about the first rule.

 

I am unfamiliar with the acronym SFS sites. Do you mean FFS? as in, Free File Sharing ? The kinds where technically, you can download things for free; but they deliberately make the wait times, transfer speeds, files per hour/day, pop-up ads, forcefeed executables, and other aspects the only option to pay some monthly charge?

You can pay for some premium service from them if you don't want to deal with their "free" service; so why do you say they are selling files? There is an apparently pretty big company in South America someone here showed previously; and it was a website very similar to Plugin Alliance website or even Amazon. The main difference being they are selling individual products completely illegally.

If the FFS sites are the same as that, why do so many websites use them?

 

R2R has been around a long time and are extremely reputable and trustworthy. Just get your downloads from a reliable well known site.

 

I wonder whether R2R spend any time tracking down rogue uploads that carry their name but are infected. I don't know how feasible it is to do this and if they do then how do they get the message out so people can avoid these downloads? Also, what is the actual scale of the problem?

 

Any file from an unknown or untrustworthy source can be tampered with. You would hope, most people would know the fault would reside with the uploader, and not the group or Team. If the files are properly archived, they cannot be "infected on accident" the way a virus/malware can automatically infect other file types. That is often referred to as Propagation; it's how a virus may scan the hard disks for a certain file extension and then infect them all; or how a worm finds open network shares, as examples. It's hard to imagine that anyone would spend any significant amount of time tracking down possible fake or infected shared files. Big software companies do not even do that; or that would be going on left and right. You would hear about it.