In September, Demonoid was forced to go offline due to some hardware problems. It later turned out that the hardware issues had resulted in severe data loss.

Some user data and torrent files are unfortunately gone for good and the site’s code has been permanently damaged. This resulted in the extended downtime that persists through today.

Since Demonoid’s owners are not very talkative it didn’t take long before imposters created their own news about the site, causing wild rumors to spread among Demonoid’s fans. Some reported that the site would return under a new name and others claimed that the authorities had permanently shut it down.

In a rare update, Demonoid staff have informed their users that none of this is true. Demonoid will return and things will return to normal as soon as possible.

“There are some rumors about the site shutting down for good and we [sic] starting a new tracker next year. The rumors are of course, lies. There are no plans of shutting down or creating another site,” Demonoid staff write.

Aside from refuting those rumors, the staff update brings more good news. A full comeback of the Demonoid site is looming. Parts of the code had to be rewritten in order to get the site back up and this process is almost finished.

“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,” the Demonoid team adds.

As reported earlier, the tracker is already back up and running smoothly, and considering the latest update from Demonoid staff, it shouldn’t take long before the site itself is also recovered.

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

Popularity: 1% [?]

Since Demonoid went down in September there has been a lot of speculation about what had caused it, and how long it would take for the site to recover.

As always, Demonoid staff kept quiet about the site’s future and all its users could do is wait for a sign of life, which quietly arrived earlier today.

A few hours ago Demonoid’s tracker started to respond again. It appears that it’s still hosted in the Ukraine, and although the frontend of the site hasn’t updated yet, this comeback might indicate that the site is preparing for a full return.

The current situation stirs memories of Demonoid’s downtime back in 2007. At the time the tracker also returned before the site itself became accessible again, which took two more months. Many Demonoid members are undoubtedly hoping that this chain of events will complete more quickly this time around.

When the site returns, it’s likely that members that joined the site more recently will have to sign up again, while others may have to resubmit their torrents. “A loss of some months worth of activity including registered users and torrent submissions is to be expected,” Demonoid staff warned earlier.

The tracker’s return in itself is already being welcomed by the thousands of users whose torrent clients are not supporting trackerless torrents. Many of them might have been staring at several unfinished downloads for weeks, and now they are finally able to complete their downloads.

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

Popularity: 1% [?]

DHT has been included with many clients since it first debuted in the summer of 2005. however, over the 4 years of life, many myths and misunderstandings have been spread around. These can put people off using it and can give these users difficulties when a tracker goes down. Currently the Pirate Bay is popping on and offline, and Demonoid has been down for a week or two.

The main problem is that most people just don’t understand what DHT is, what it does, and how it works. Not really a surprise since the documentation and even the Wikipedia page are filled with technical jargon, and no simple explanation.  Without that basic understanding confusion is inevitable. We did explain DHT in our jargon piece back in 2006 but after 3 years, we decide to cover it again.

The easiest way to think about DHT is to imagine it as a form of ’super tracker’, in some ways a lot like WinMX and Kazaa of old. A large ad-hoc network of peers pass on information requests about torrents without a central server, meaning no control or single point of failure. No information about the contents or even the names of torrents are passed around, making this legal and hard to shut down.

Myth: You must turn off DHT when you use private trackers.

Wrong — There is an element to a torrent that is called the ‘private flag’. It’s a small flag that marks to a client that the torrent is ‘private’ and disables any method of sharing peers (including DHT), except via the tracker. This flag also changes the hash, so peers on a non-flagged torrent could not connect to a flagged torrent in any case. Most private torrent sites check for the flag, and add it if missing when the torrent is initially uploaded to their site.

Myth: Certain clients leak DHT data and should be avoided.

Wrong (with one exception) — There are always going to be people that want control. When it comes to torrent sites (especially the private ones) they like to express their control through lists of clients you can and can’t use (a form of DRM) and sometimes give reasons to support this. An example would be this statement from a staff member at a private tracker:

Not all torrent clients respect the private flag. But if you are using a client like Vuze, uTorrent or similar if the private flag is on (set by the tracker) the DHT, peer exchange settings etc are ignored. However, if you are using something like BitComet, BitLord or their ilk they ignore the private flag so if you have DHT etc enabled it is going to be enabled no matter what.

This statement is completely false. All torrent clients that support DHT respect the flag. The flag is set by the torrent file, not the tracker (although the tracker can add the flag to the file, it’s still set by the torrent), and BitComet does NOT ignore the flag. The one exception is a single build of BitComet (0.60) that was available for 2 weeks at the end of 2005, and even then, was a fallback only if the tracker was unable to be contacted for a 30minute period. Bitlord is unable to leak to DHT, as it doesn’t use DHT at all.

If you see staff making claims like this, it’s a good indication that the staff is clueless, which might be an idea to leave that tracker. If they can’t get the basics right who knows when else is wrong. Of course, we ask those claiming other clients leak to let us know so we can test it.

Myth: You can be tracked by DHT / AntiP2P groups use DHT to find you

Unlikely — It’s much easier and simpler to use the tracker. Blocklists, used on your client and on the trackers, are generally ineffective and easily circumvented through the use of residential connections. Last year’s University of Washington study showed that they will send letters just based on tracker info.

Myth: DHT slows your system down

Generally not true — It can slow down your connection depending mainly on network hardware. The actual data used in running DHT is low, generally less than 1kilobyte a second. Some routers and modems, however, can have problems with DHT causing lockups and restarts if they run out of ram. This mostly happens with lower spec ‘home’ equipment (such as older Belkins, Netgears and D-links), or telco-provided hardware.

Myth: You need to connect to a tracker, before you can use DHT

Wrong — When DHT is enabled (certainly in uTorrent) it connects to a bootstrap node (such as router.utorrent.com or router.bittorrent.com for mainline, or dht.aelitis.com for Vuze) and uses that to enter the DHT ’swarm’. It’s handed a set of DHT nodes and uses that to build up a small group of connected nodes. Those nodes are then used to get peers. No tracker is required at any time.

Myth: When enabled, it sends usage data back to [insert company]

Wrong — This is another case of people not knowing what they’re talking about. Generally they’re misinterpreting the bootstrap node connection for their client.

When the demonoid tracker was finally resurrected last year, many of it’s torrents were still active thanks mainly to DHT. DHT with Peer Exchange (PEX) is a very powerful addition to the torrenting world, and allows torrents to stay active, irrespective of the trackers stability or even existence. Also, Azureus/Vuze users, despite having their own DHT system, can join in using a mainline DHT plugin.

Should you use DHT? Not if you only use private trackers, but if you use public ones and your network hardware can cope, then yes. It can help reduce tracker load. If you have a question about DHT not answered here, then again, let us know.

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

Popularity: 3% [?]

While the admins of some of the larger public torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt are happy to give interviews, many others demonstrate a certain phobia of the media.

One major site that has showed an acute aversion to saying just about anything to outsiders is Demonoid. This semi-private site has nevertheless made the news dozens of times, most recently due to its recent downtime, as reported here on TorrentFreak.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” said Demonoid in a statement six weeks ago, warning that downtime could run to “…days maybe, until we can change the power circuit.”

However, TorrentFreak has received possibly conflicting information from Demonoid’s host, Colocall in Ukraine, who said in a statement: “There were no problems with power supply at the location where Demonoid servers are hosted.”

While information about Demonoid is always scarce, information coming out of Colocall is a rarity too, since the company has previously refused to speak with journalists about their most infamous customer. That’s why it was of great interest when Ukrainian blogger Pavel Golubovskiy contacted TorrentFreak to say he had netted an interview with Colocall. Here is a translation of the questions related to Demonoid;

Why did you choose to host Demonoid?

The customer came to us and ordered a particular service. For us it wasn’t a political decision, Demonoid is an ordinary client for us.

What exactly do you host, the inferno.demonoid.com tracker?

They brought their servers, which are now located in our data center. We don’t know what information is stored there – we do not have access to this information. These servers are supported remotely by Demonoid technical staff.

Is there a way to contact the Demonoid admins?

They will not answer you. Many people want to contact them – journalists, fans, police, local authorities from different countries. But the Demonoid admins have a very selective approach to e-mail correspondence. When the police wanted to contact them, I specifically warned the admins that they had to respond to this request.

So the police already inquired about Demonoid?

Well, our local authorities are interested in Demonoid all the time. Rightholders associations are constantly trying to put pressure on us, including pressure with the help of Ukrainian authorities. We redirect them to the admins, but do not interfere or try to negotiate.

Are they putting any serious pressure on you?

It sounds strange, but Ukraine is still a jural state. Therefore IFPI’s personal opinion is just that, their personal opinion, despite the fact that the budgets of the IFPI participants are comparable to the budget of the Ukraine.

Aren’t you afraid that there can be a similar situation with Demonoid’s servers as there was with Infostore.org site? [famous Ukrainian file-sharing site, its servers were confiscated by police about a year ago]

As a hosting-provider we take such risks into account. This can happen not only with Demonoid, but with any client. We do not control what information is stored on servers, anybody can buy our hosting service.

Anti-pirates and the media-lobby are now trying to shift all the responsibility for file-sharing onto Internet providers, so that providers will have to monitor user activities. Will this affect hosting providers too?

We have such laws in draft in our parliament periodically. But the Ukrainian law “On communication” is clear about this: providers are not responsible for what their customers do. And the fact that rights holders want to change that is their personal opinion, they are not legislative bodies. Let them buy a parliament member and lobby for such law, then we will observe this law. But until then they are nobody to us, and we are nobody for them too.

About a month ago Demonoid reported technical problems. Due to those problems all data for the last several months has vanished. In an attempt to recover from these problems the site went offline. Do you know what happened?

Some time ago several of their hard-drives crashed. But that was several months ago and we don’t know what was the reason of recent problems.

According to their admins, the man who can restore the tracker is not available. Are they speaking about some Colocall programmer?

No, all the technical support of servers is performed remotely. They aren’t speaking about one of our specialists.

Torrentfreak wrote about the president of Lithuanian antipirates, who demanded the closure of access to Demonoid. He said that it is very hard to even make contact with you. Have you spoken with him?

Yes, someone called us. We just could not speak with him: from the start of the conversation he immediately began to threaten us, he was absolutely non-constructive. We sent him to the court and have said that if he brings the court’s decision, we will be happy to execute it, because we observe all Ukrainian laws. Until then we are not going to speak with him.

Access to Demonoid is blocked for several countries including Ukraine. Is this your initiative or the tracker’s decision?

It is the tracker’s policy, not our initiative. I think this is due to DDoS-attacks.

Are there any DDoS-attacks aiming at Demonoid?

Yes, there are many large and serious DDoS-attacks. But they are always the problem of every hosting provider. We have learned how to neutralize them, so such attacks have almost no effect on Demonoid’s operations. And, incidentally, Demonoid isn’t the only site to be attacked: during the last election we hosted the server of the central election commission committee, it was constantly under DDoS-attacks.

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

Popularity: 1% [?]

BitSnoop was launched just a few days ago and the site currently indexes 1,480,666 torrents worth an impressive 1184.4 terabytes of data. In terms of functionality the site is not hugely different from other torrent indexers. Users can search for torrents, and the search results are presented in a clean fashion, sortable by seeders, leechers, health and size.

However, BitSnoop has one big advantage compared to other torrent search engines with a feature called TrackerMatch. Before a torrent appears on BitSnoop they make sure that the torrents include as many reliable backup trackers as possible. Duplicate and fake trackers on the other hand are carefully removed.

“Each tracker we scrape gets rigorously analyzed and filtered to exclude typos, errors and just junk in tracker URLs. We know about backup tracker hosts, redirects, DNS aliases, tracker clusters etc. — and we know how to deal with them so you don’t have to,” the BitSnoop team explains.

The advantage of TrackerMatch is two-fold. Firstly, it makes sure that users will be able to connect to as much peers as possible by including all trackers that are found for the same download. On the other hand it will save tracker owners resources because there are no unnecessary announces due to a torrent containing duplicate trackers.

Don’t expect too much in the way of speed increases though – in most cases it will be hardly noticeable. However, having multiple backup trackers will come in handy when a torrent’s main tracker goes down. With the recent troubles over at The Pirate Bay and Demonoid, this is no longer a hypothetical situation.

BitSnoop is definitely worth a bookmark. Even if you’re not planning to use it on a daily basis it will surely come in handy when you come across a torrent with a dead tracker on your preferred torrent search engine.

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

Popularity: 1% [?]

At the end of August, Stockholm’s district court ordered Black Internet, the bandwidth supplier to The Pirate Bay, to disconnect the site from the Internet, pending the outcome of a civil action taken by several Hollywood entertainment companies.

The ISP had little choice but to comply or face large fines, but TPB was quick to react and quickly partnered with a new host.

That short honeymoon was quickly over.

“It took just 20 minutes before the Hollywood companies telephoned the new host who took over operation of The Pirate Bay,” commented Patrik from the ISP which had been indirectly supplying bandwidth to TPB.

Despite initially putting on a brave face and standing strong, Patrik’s company continued to feel the heat. It is not a large outfit and doesn’t have the resources to fight the entertainment industry and its threats.

Last night, Patrik could hold off no longer after receiving mounting threats from the entertainment industries, which culminated in threats of a court summons. Having come this far, there is little doubt that IFPI and the MPAA would litigate if necessary.

“I was threatened by the movie and music companies,” Patrik said today. He had no choice but to stop servicing TPB. His company cut off the site’s bandwidth last night but The Pirate Bay is fully operational, so they must’ve found another host. It’s likely that they already had one prepared.

With Sweden seemingly out of bounds, the site needed to move overseas. The Netherlands is not really an option anymore and the same goes for most of Western Europe – the solution lies in the east.

On the heels of several rumors today, Patrik said he could confirm news of the move, saying that he believes The Pirate Bay is now hosted in Ukraine.

There have been signs that this Eastern European nation is becoming an attractive location for torrent site hosting, with several large sites and services showing interest.

However, as illustrated by the on-going problems at Demonoid, TorrentFreak is told that the reliability can leave a lot to be desired, with sites having to take measures to ensure that when their Ukrainian hosting becomes unavailable, backup resources kick in.

The standard of Pirate Bay’s new home (if it is indeed in Ukraine) isn’t likely to reflect the comparative luxury of Sweden, but that door seems to be all but closed now. Whether the site stays in Ukraine is another question, but that aside, a simple one remains;

Would you host The Pirate Bay in Sweden? The answer will likely match the response to “Do you like lawsuits?”

Maybe the Swedish government’s nightmare is finally over.

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

Popularity: 14% [?]

There are many popular BitTorrent sites on the Internet that are sorely missed when they go offline, but of course, the larger the site, the larger the disappointment.

One major site having serious technical issues at the moment is Demonoid. At the beginning of September, TorrrentFreak reported that the Ukranian-based site would go down for possibly-extended downtime due to some hardware problems.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues,” site staff sad in a statement. “We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” they added, while warning that the site could disappear for days while the site’s power circuit received maintenance.

Since we receive questions daily from worried users on the situation at Demonoid, an update seems in order. Unfortunately, at this stage it doesn’t seem like good news.

Although staff at the site say they hope Demonoid will return as soon as possible, they have confirmed that the hardware issues have caused severe data loss. This problem is compounded by the fact that the person who can get the data back is unavailable to assist at the moment.

“A loss of a some months worth of activity including registered users and torrent submissions is to be expected because the backup we are hoping to get back is not up to date, so please be prepared for it,” Demonoid staff said in a statement.

When ‘the backup guy’ has worked his magic the site will return. In the meantime, anyone getting public BitTorrent site withdrawal symptoms can check out our alternatives list.

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

Popularity: 2% [?]