Torrent Tracker Demonoid.com Taken Offline
The popular Demonoid.com, a semi-private BitTorrent tracker, has been taken offline. Both the torrent tracker and the site have been unresponsive for over twenty-four hours. Although there has been no official word, or statement from the Demonoid administrators, TorrentFreak claims that the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) is responsible for the downtime, but the CRIA has refused to comment (see update below).
TorrentFreak reports that it contacted some of the Demonoid administrators, but even they are not yet sure what happened to the site.
If it does turn out to be the CRIA, this won’t be the first time Demonoid has suffered major downtime due to pressure from the recording industry. Earlier this year Demonoid moved its servers from The Netherlands to Canada after a Dutch anti-piracy group filed a subpoena demanding the site’s ISP remove Demonoid and cough up the administrator’s identities.
It would seem that Canada is not the safe harbor Demonoid was seeking and we suspect that the site will likely move its servers again.
While The Pirate Bay is still the most popular torrent tracker online, Demonoid is a close second. Much of the site’s popularity stems from the fact that membership is limited and strict ratio tracking means Demonoid is faster than most trackers. Demonoid is also remarkably free of the spam and fake torrents released by groups like the recently exposed MediaDefender.
Although the site requires registration for older torrents, Demonoid recently began offering the newer torrents (within the last two weeks) to the general public.
So far there’s no word on when Demonoid may come back online, but as with the resurrected Suprnova.org, it would seem that you just can’t keep a popular torrent site down for long.
[Update: I contacted a CRIA representative and asked about Demonoid, but he told me that “CRIA is not commenting on that situation right now.” However, I was able to dig up this transcript on CircuitBox, (via the Demonoid Wikipedia page) which purports to be a transcript of a conversation between TorrentFreak and a member of Demonoid’s staff, who pretty adamantly denies that CRIA is involved:
the point i’m trying to make is that Demonoid can’t confirm this info… and that article has 1150+ diggs iirc and it’s abesolutely overwhelming the staff with floods of people thinking the site was taken down, when we’re not sure if it is.. and it puts us as staff in a bad place … and for the record, there is only ONE admin on Demonoid, and that’s Deimos, so until we hear from him, we cannot confirm anything.
So far there has been no word from Deimos, the founder and the head admin of the site. It would seem, at the moment, that no one, including the Demonoid staff, really knows what happened. We’ll be sure to keep you updated as we learn more.]
[Update II: Demonoid appears to be back online. See this post for more details]
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