new mac tracker

re vortex:
http://torrentfreak.com/controversy-as-rookie-admin-aspires-to-bittorrent-domination-080730/

Apps is the one thing I would really love to have access to a private tracker for. As you describe the risk that someone has tampered with a release and injected malware is much smaller there.
Sadly, all of us who don’t have access to such trackers have to take our chances. I still hope this problem will be solved by a database secure hashes of some sort. I wrote about that in an earlier comment: http://filesharefreak.com/2008/02/01/advanced-searching-for-copyrighted-content-part-iii-nfo-websites/#comment-439
But now I’m thinking that the private bittorrent trackers are really the people that could create such a database. Their uploaders have all the content. And when creating the torrents they already calculate a form of secure hash. I don’t know the details but I think it is SHA1 for blocks of data rather than individual files. Maybe the bittorrent software could also be changed so that it automatically adds secure hashes for each separate file? Anyway, the private sites would only need to also calculate separate hashes for all the releases and post them at some place like nforce.nl . If a few major private trackers banded together they could easily pull this off.
I guess the problem is that they don’t have any incentives to do so. But I hope they will do it as a favor to the rest of the file sharing community. Most of them probably started out on public trackers like the rest of us. And lets face it: malware like trojans doesn’t only hurt those who are first infected. Because often infected computers become zombies that infect others or are used in attacks. And the damage caused by malware costs society in general a lot of money so its in everyones interest to stop it.