PC gamers who pre-ordered Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood in advance of tomorrow’s release in the United States are getting some extra goodies with the so-called ‘digital deluxe’ version of the game.

In addition to two new single player maps, two extra multiplayer characters and a new skin for the Ezio character, it’s also packaged with a map of Rome, behind-the-scenes video and the game’s soundtrack. But there’s a more interesting extra too. Reddit user ‘plginger‘ already downloaded the soundtrack and immediately noticed something unusual, as illustrated by the screenshot below.

In the comment column it clearly reads “Encoded by arsa13″ – and arsa13 is a member of the semi-private BitTorrent tracker, Demonoid, who uploaded the Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood soundtrack to the site more than 4 months ago.

But maybe ‘plginger’ is messing around, and retagged the files he downloaded from Demonoid for the lulz? While it’s possible, it seems unlikely. When arsa13 created his original torrent somehow a track was left out. The missing track is called Apple Chamber and, perhaps not coincidentally, the same track in the first screenshot above is the only one not tagged ‘arsa13′, suggesting it came from a separate source.

While arsa13 uploaded FLAC files which were ripped from AC3 files included on a console bonus DVD, it appears that Ubisoft have not only used these torrented tracks as a source, but reduced their quality down to MP3.

This latest event seems to be deja-vu all over again for Ubisoft following its 2008 usage of a so-called ‘No-CD’ crack from warez scene group RELOADED to fix its game Rainbox 6: Vegas 2. The publisher is yet to offer an explanation.

Can there be any better endorsement of BitTorrent, that people find it easier to access their own content through a torrent site than via their own internal methods?

TorrentFreak

Popularity: 1% [?]

The new TV-season started last week with the debut of several new series, including the animated sitcom Bob’s Burgers on Fox. As with all TV-shows, the first episode of Bob’s Burgers also ended up on BitTorrent, where one downloader stands out above the rest.

In a torrent discussion at Demonoid.me, the largest semi private BitTorrent community, a commenter with the nickname XIIIth claims to have a special relationship with the show. Unlike the regular downloaders, he is actually involved in the production of Bob’s Burgers, or so he claims.

“Nice to hear that people liked the show, I’m an animator on it so it’s nice to hear something positive from all the negative I’ve been hearing about! I’m going to keep seeding to support my show,” XIIIth wrote a few hours after the torrent was published on Demonoid.

Of course, anyone can claim to be an animator of the show, but as we will point out later in this article this one turns out to be legit. This is where it gets interesting.

Other commenters on Demonoid seem to be genuinely surprised and honored that one of the animators approves of their actions, since makers of such big productions are generally negative towards ‘unauthorized’ downloads. In a follow up comment XIIIth adds some more insider insights to the ‘sharing’ crowd.

“There are 13 eps for the show coming out, they’ve been well received by the everyone at the studio so far so we’re hoping everything will turn out and it’ll gain more of an audience as it goes,” he says.

“If you go to 21:24 I’m one of the animators listed,” he adds. “I’m not going to say which just cause I want to keep my interbutts anonymity. But yeah, enjoy guys, this show was hell to put together considering the deadlines we had to work with. Hell I’m still working on it right now!”

With that last comment XIIIth did give away more than he might have wanted to do. It is of course great that someone from the production team of a popular show approves of torrenting, and we welcome such an open stance. But, at the same time we got very curious about the identity of the torrenting animator, if only to verify the legitimacy of his claims.

Since it’s hard to hide something on the internet nowadays, it only took a few Google searches to find out that the nickname and the birthday of the commenter are linked to an animator featured first in the credits above. So, the story seems to check out and we applaud XIIIth for making Bob’s Burgers available – in more ways than one.

Article from: TorrentFreak, Covering Torrent Sites and News since 2005.

Popularity: unranked [?]

The U.S. Senate’s Judicial Committee unanimously passed the controversial ‘Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act’ today, a bill that could be used to crack down on many BitTorrent sites and other file-sharing platforms. The bill would give the Department of Justice the unprecedented power to take over domain names of websites that are deemed to facilitate copyright infringement.

As was demonstrated earlier this year, taking the domains of suspected sites has proven to be a highly effective tool to shut down sites that are considered illegal. In September, a group of U.S. senators proposed legislation to make this a standard procedure, and today the Senate’s Judicial Committee unanimously supported the bill.

Before it becomes law the bill will have to be approved by the Senate and Congress, which has to happen quickly because a new Congress will be seated in January.

If signed into law, the ‘Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act’ (COICA) would allow the Department of Justice to file a civil lawsuit against the domain owners. If the courts then decide that a site is indeed promoting copyright infringement, the DOJ can order the domain registrar to take the domain offline. The bill is not limited to domestics offenders, but also allows the DOJ to target foreign domain owners.

The targets of the bill could possibly include many BitTorrent sites. Last week both the MPAA and RIAA submitted their wishlists of “rogue websites” that should be taken care of, and these included The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Demonoid and other popular torrent sites.

Although none of the operators of these sites will be happy with the new legislation, Demonoid has been opposing COICA in public, asking its members to take action.

“If passed, this law will allow the government, under the command of the media companies, to censor the internet as they see fit, like China and Iran do, with the difference that the sites they decide to censor will be completely removed from the internet and not just in the US,” a message on the Demonoid homepage reads.

Aside from classic ‘pirate’ websites, the bill also conveniently provides an effective backdoor to take the whistleblower site Wikileaks offline, or its domain at least. After all, Wikileaks has posted thousands of files that are owned by the United States.

If the bill is accepted it will change the Internet and how domain names are controlled for good. Thus far, no central government has the power to take over domains. This power belongs exclusively to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Over the last weeks, several digital rights groups including the EFF have voiced their concerns over the new legislation, calling it an “unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech and a threat to innovation” and claiming it “would break the Internet.”

The protests and opposition are expected to continue during the next weeks, but meanwhile the RIAA and MPAA are applauding the Government’s actions.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Demonoid Opens Registration Slyck Its size may not be identical to The Pirate Bay, but its reputation for providing the latest and greatest in torrents makes up for any population … and more »

Popularity: 2% [?]

The Winnipeg-based law firm Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP has put in offers to acquire several of the largest BitTorrent sites behalf of an unnamed client, TorrentFreak has learned. Although the true source behind the offers has not been officially confirmed, all leads point to a familiar name.

With millions of visitors day, the leading BitTorrent sites are valuable properties. Although none of the big sites have been sold publicly, most of them are easily worth a million dollars.

In recent history quite a few medium-sized torrent sites have changed owners, but these were all deals done within the torrent community, none were conducted in the open.

The first time that an outsider went public with plans to buy a torrent site was last year when Global Gaming Factory (GGF) made a $7.8 million offer for The Pirate Bay, and a $25 million offer to buy Mininova. GGF planned to legalize the sites and turn them into media portals where movies and music would be sold with approval from copyright holders.

Most readers probably recall that the deals with the two largest torrent sites at the time didn’t go through due to funding issues. However, last month GGF CEO Hans Pandeya popped up again, this time with an offer for the largest semi-private BitTorrent community Demonoid. Apparently, he had not yet abandoned his plans.

Demonoid’s owner told TorrentFreak that he was not interested in anything GGF had to offer, so Pandeya had to target other sites to carry out his plans. Interestingly enough, a few days after Demonoid rejected Pandeya’s offer, the Canadian law firm Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP contacted several other larger torrent sites with similar offers.

In their correspondence the solicitors claim to be working for a U.S. based corporation that is interested in acquiring the assets of the sites in question. The identity of the potential buyer is not disclosed, but considering the timing it wouldn’t be strange if it turned out to be GGF CEO Hans Pandeya.

Torrent sites don’t often get offers from external parties, except the ones from GGF we discussed above. If Pandeya is indeed behind the offer, it would make sense for him to make his approach using the cover of a law firm due to the bad reputation he has built up among torrent site owners.

The torrent sites that have been approached prefer not to be named, but they are among the most visited on the Internet, which is in line with Pandeya’s plans. The only thing that’s different this time is the money being offered. Unlike the millions of dollars that were thrown around previously, the current offers are at the lower end of the scale.

None of the torrent sites that were contacted are interested in selling, so it is likely that we might never know the truth about the mysterious buyer or if he has connections to GGF.

Hans Pandeya was contacted for a comment, but didn’t want to respond on the record.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Demonoid is without doubt one of the best known BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. Unfortunately, this Internet fame makes the tracker a target for numerous DoS attacks. Following one of the latest attacks Demonoid has decided to block many Taiwanese and Chinese IP-ranges.

Demonoid is one of the biggest torrent sites around. Hosted to the west of Russia in Ukraine, the site has settled outside the reach of the various anti-piracy outfits that previously tried to shutter the tracker.

Threats from the movie and music industry aside, Demonoid has also been the target for dozens of large and small DoS attacks. Usually these attacks only slow the site down a bit, and in the worst case they result in several hours of downtime before Demonoid staff takes care of the problem.

During mid-June reports started to come in to TorrentFreak from Chinese and Taiwanese Demonoid users who complained that the site was inaccessible to them. Both the site and tracker were no longer functioning. Browsers reported a “server not found” error and torrents with a Demonoid tracker returned a “error: hostname not found” message.

For the affected users this could mean only two things. Since Demonoid was working fine in other countries, either Chinese and Taiwanese ISPs has started to block Demonoid’s website and tracker, or the people running Demonoid had decided to block IP-ranges from these countries.

To find out more about the origin of the connection issues, a TorrentFreak reader based in Taiwan decided to contact his Internet provider, who dismissed the first option after some investigating.

“We cannot access Demonoid.com either,” he was informed by his ISP. “We attempted to access the site via the other ISPs in Taiwan but all these attempts failed. We determined that there is no connection problem. The Demonoid server is rejecting all requests from Taiwanese IP-addresses.”

Despite the fact that Demonoid’s owner has never responded to our inquiries in the past, we asked for a comment on the blocking issue and got a swift response. Indeed, as we initially guessed, Demonoid is actively blocking IP-ranges in Taiwan and parts of China because that’s where the DoS attacks come from.

“There is a DoS coming mostly from there,” Demonoid’s admin told TorrentFreak in a brief reply.

We have yet to receive an answer to the question whether the block is temporary or permanent. In the meantime, affected users can bypass the restrictions by using a VPN-service. Both ItsHidden and VPNReactor offer free, but limited accounts.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Demonoid is one of the biggest torrent sites around. Now safely hosted to the west of Russia in Ukraine, the site has previously received unwanted attention from several anti-piracy outfits. So, when the site goes offline a lot of people start to think of the worst, especially if there is little or no warning.

Yesterday, Demonoid once again disappeared leaving its users behind with lots of questions and in a mild state of panic. As is often the case, Demonoid’s admins have remained silent and rumors of a hostile intervention have quickly grown. Thus far, however, there is no reason to assume that the downtime is caused by ‘legal’ reasons. It has to be assumed that the site is facing hardware or network problems.

On the positive side, we can report that Demonoid’s trackers appear to be working just fine. This is no guarantee that the site itself will make a quick return though. Last September the site vanished into thin air and although the tracker returned early November, it took until Christmas before the site was fully operational again.

Last year’s downtime was not unique either. Since 2007 the site has been offline for more than 13 months in total, due to all kinds of problems including issues with the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA. Hardware issues and trouble finding a reliable hosting outfit were some of the other explanations that were given in the past.

In a rare interview with Demonoid’s current hosting provider a few months ago we found out that DDoS-attacks and legal issues are unlikely to take the site offline, so we can only guess what the real reason for the ccurrent outage is. The wait has started, once again.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Popularity: 1% [?]

In September Demonoid went down with overwhelming hardware problems but fully returned in the middle of December, much to the relief of its members.

Despite this extended downtime, the semi-private tracker came in at an impressive 20th place in our list of Top 25 torrent sites of 2009.

With hundreds and thousands of daily visitors and an Alexa rank of 657 last month, it’s undoubtedly a popular site, especially since one needs an invite to gain access.

Well, normally that’s the case. Currently the situation is different.

Whether this is a bug (maybe as a result of the admins having to rewrite some of the site code after the crash) or entirely intentional, we just don’t know, but currently it seems that anyone can browse and download torrents from Demonoid without being a member.

We’re not exactly sure how long this has been the case, but it has been a little while now, perhaps since the site returned after its break.

Demonoid, it seems, has changed from a semi-private to a public tracker.

Enjoy!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Popularity: 1% [?]

IT Chuiko (blog)

TorrentFreak's Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2009; Demonoid Returns Lifehacker The results represent several best-known sites (like The Pirate Bay), but also probably a few you're not all that familiar with. Incidentally, number 20 on … Torrent tracker Demonoid has earned againIT Chuiko (blog) all 3 news articles »

Popularity: 3% [?]

In September, Demonoid, one of the world’s most important and well-loved trackers, went down with overwhelming hardware problems.

An update on the situation was not good, with the site owners forecasting severe data loss. Some user data and torrent files were predicted to be lost forever and the site’s code had been seriously damaged.

Then, on November 5th, Demonoid’s tracker began to function again, which was followed by another announcement by the site owners. None of the negative rumors and speculation were true – Demonoid would soon return.

“The parts of the site code that got deleted are being rewritten and should be ready soon. We are also working to try and minimize the data loss as much as possible,” they announced.

Since then, nothing much has happened, but a few hours ago Demonoid users discovered they are to get an early Christmas present.

At around 1:30pm EST, Demonoid reappeared and started accepting logins from registered users.

“Hello! We are currently testing the newly written code. More downtime is hopefully not necessary, but might be a possibility. Welcome back, we missed you!” the admins said in an announcement.

In respect of the concerns over data loss, it appears that the latest database entries run to Friday September 11th 2009, but of course, Demonoid users are already uploading new torrents, reported to be as many as 150 thus far.

A TorrentFreak reader who as been following the situation since the site’s return told us: “Some users on the IRC channel (which still is active) report not being able to log in. Those that can log in have all noticed that their ratios were pretty much what they remembered them to be before the long downtime. I was able to log in just fine on my first attempt with correct ratio as well.”

As the site deals with various issues, it became a little unstable around 2 to 3 hours after its initial return and then went down again around 4:00am EST.

Although Demonoid’s RSS feeds aren’t functioning, at the time of writing the site appears to be running again, and displaying their famous demon logo all decked out in a santa hat.

Christmas really has come early for Demonoid fans. All that is need now is a gift for everyone in the community – a period of open registrations.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Popularity: 1% [?]