I was just reading through the interview process for RED, and they specifically forbid the use of VPN during the interview. I don’t understand this requirement, and it seems like it would just leak your IP address to the IRC host, which could potentially be used against you in a honeypot scenario. Once they have your IP, they could link that with the credentials used with the tracker while you are torrenting, regardless of if you used VPN while torrenting.
Most people using these sites prefer the lossless codec flac anyway, which can be transcoded to anything.
MP3 320kbps and MP3 V0 is transparent to most (all?) people, so there’s not much of a reason to go with a newer codec, except for space savings.
There’s not even much of a reason to go with 320kbps, as V0 achieves the same quality with smaller files. That’s why almost nobody actually downloads MP3 320.
I personally think MP3 is there for historical reasons, as I don’t see a reason for using lossy codecs for archiving purposes. Just download flac and transcode it once or on demand on a media server for streaming.
I exclusively grab FLAC. Never 24 bit. I downloaded a few to test and couldn’t hear a difference. There are plenty of people who care about mp3 though.