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Demonoid Torrent Tracker Shut Down by CRIA
An anonymous reader writes "As of Tuesday, 25th September 2007, Demonoid is currently down, with no prior warnings from any moderators of the site. Both the main torrent page and the forum (fora) are no longer accessible. It is still possible to ping and trace the IP address of the site and it locates itself as in Canada. As of 6:45pm EST on 9-25-07, SSH and SMTP services are no longer active.
Torrentfreak.com has since reported this is due to legal actions from the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) who ordered Demonoid's ISP to shut down the site."
last night techwag was reporting the same thing based off the torrent freak article, but a commenter pointed to a discussion out on http://www.thecircuitbox.com/demonoid/ which is basically an IRC chat that refutes the CRIA end of the story. The techwag article is here http://techwag.com/index.php/2007/09/25/bad-day-for-bittorrent-demonoid-shut-down/ Yesterday was basically a bad day for Bittorrent, ISOHunt shut down trackers to american users, and demonoid out of service, for what ever reason, either because they were taken down by the ISP or they are having one of their outages that happens randomly, but every time they go down people think they got shut down because they were shut down almost a year ago by BRIEN. There really is no way to tell the truth in the story without getting someone from demonoid to talk about it, and so far, people from demonoid have been very hard to reach. Makes for an interesting story overall though.
TorrentFreak has speculated that they may have been shut down by the CRIA. At present there is absolutely no proof, aside from one article on a dutch blog (which is TF's one and only source).
http://www.thecircuitbox.com/demonoid/
For tl;dr types: Torrentfreak made it up, the box is down for unknown reasons. Nobody knows yet. Sorry.
The latest speculation I heard on Torrentfreak 5 hours ago was that Demoniod was down due to a hardware failure and not a MAFIAA Hit squad. I haven't seen any statements from CRIA crowing about their victory which you would expect if they were really responsible.
Actually the blog has done CNN's trick (or is it Fox's trick?) in that they assert a fact that they cannot prove, and so had a question mark at the end. They haven't said the CRIA is responsible, they've ASKED if the CRIA is responsible.
At this point the only thing we know is that demonoid was hosted in Canada, is currently down and the admins of the website haven't made any official comment.
It simply makes no sense that CRIA would be responsible for this. The Canadian MPAA would make more sense as I believe they haven't blundered into the situation the Canadian professional music industry has.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Moderators: PLEASE check the stories BEFORE you allow them to post. According to the folks on demonoid IRC, they were NOT shut down by the CRIA.
Geez slashdot is turning into DIGG where every moron can post "the truth"
As far as I know there is not any strong evidence that CRIA has done anything yet. The server is down, true, but I heard it's just a hard drive failure. Some demonoid people were complaining about the bad journalism reporting that the CRIA shut down demonoid, without anybody from demonoid saying this. Who is the source on this? Some nu.nl article? How do they know anything? Here is an IRC log where demonoid staff give the torrentfreak admin a hard time for reprinting the nu.nl story about the CRIA without having confirmed it in any way. To be fair, at this point in time, the torrentfreak article uses the word "allegedly." maybe they changed it.
Don't jump the gun, I've talked to #demonoid ops and they say nothing has been confirmed. Goto:
irc://irc.p2p-network.net/demonoid
#demonoid
Demonoid shit:
.. Query with (ernesto)/(~info@P2PNET-41E95253.groni1.gr.home.nl) opened on (Tuesday, September 25th 2007, 18:00:54). .. Total queries: (40)/(~0.7 per day) .. Queries today: (1) .. Common channels: (+#demonoid)
Ok folks, here it is. Demonoid is down. It has been for around 1 day 2 hours. The reason is down is unkown. It hasnt been RAIDed, shutdown, terminated, deleted, burned, mamed, or thrown under a bridge. There have been speculation as demonoid.com whereabouts. Well the rurmors are false. A no name site in Netherlands has a blog about Demonoid.com being down. As I don't speak douche, I can not translate. However TorrentFreak Decided upon there own free will to further spread this and rumors. Torrent freak has known to be a sleazy site they post false rumors and hope they turn out true. They do this in order for money and popularity. Quite sad isn't it. To prove this is quite easy:
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:00.54] ((
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:00.54]
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:00.54]
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:00.54]
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:00.54]
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:00.54] ((
[05:26] *seanap*
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:00.54] (ernesto) hi
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:01.01] (ernesto) it's ernesto from TF
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:01.05] (seanap) hello
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:01.27] (ernesto) brb 1 min
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:01.28] (seanap) are you part of the staff there?
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:02.01] (ernesto) I'm the staff
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:02.03] (ernesto) hehe
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:02.32] (seanap) that article is completely false.
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:02.39] (ernesto) well, I based my story on a respectable source
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:02.47] (ernesto) but I doubted it
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:02.55] (ernesto) so what's going on then?
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:03.05] (seanap) there hasn't been word yet
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:03.44] (seanap) the 2 IRC ops that are usually in contact with Deimos haven't been around
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:03.45] (ernesto) last time demonoid staff said it were hw problems you relocated to CAN
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:04.11] (ernesto) they said my story was false then too
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:04.20] (ernesto) but it turned out not to be
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:04.46] (seanap) well i'm saying we as site and IRC staff haven't heard anything.. and we'd be the first people to hear
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:05.18] (ernesto) perhaps Deimos doesn't know it?
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:05.21] (ernesto) yet
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:05.28] (seanap) so i don't think you should be reporting unconfirmed things, the IRC is going insane.. almost double the amount of users in a day
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:05.32] (ernesto) that was exactly how it happened last time
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:06.04] (ernesto) nu.nl is the biggest news source in NL
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:06.12] (ernesto) they might have inside info
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:06.21] (seanap) form who?! we are the inside
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:06.22] (ernesto) from the isp or the CRIA
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:06.41] (ernesto) the ISP probably firewalled the servers
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:06.52] (ernesto) after some seriuos legal threats
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:07.04] (ernesto) it's not unlikely
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:07.16] (seanap) no its not, but it's not.. confirmed
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:07.31] (ernesto) as long as you can't explain what's happening this is all I have
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:07.16] (seanap) no its not, but it's not.. confirmed
[05:27] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:07.31] (ernesto) as long as you can't explain what's happening this i
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
actually that is not true, look it up in a dictionary and you'll see that dike and dyke are synonims.
and from another
-- the cake is a lie
"That's neither here nor there as its legal to download and upload music thanks to the CD tax."
Misinformation like this is contributing to the problem.
As you've demonstrated, this doesn't prevent folks from trying to claim that uploading is legal. The most common argument is that since the default operation of P2P software is to automatically redistribute what's downloaded, then if downloading is a legal act, then anything that happens (including the redistribution) as a result of the downloading must, in turn, be legal. However, this would not even pass the laugh test in court.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Not really. Demonoid was a tremendous private tracker. There aren't a whole lot of those (much less ones that are huge and always have fully seeded content) around like Demonoid. Pirate Bay is fine, if you want to have your machine hammered from all the public trackers you'll continue to be listed as a seeder/peer on for weeks after you've stopped seeding/downloading the file. Not to mention, the crap you have to pour through to find something worthwhile.
The funny thing is, I used Demonoid a lot. But I mostly downloaded content that had nothing to do with the MPAA or RIAA. It was a great place to find seeded open source ISOs. It was a great place to download doctor who episodes as they came out in the UK instead of waiting 18 months to watch them in America. It was a great place to get very old BBC Radio content. It was a great place to get original Doctor Who episodes, as far back as the show goes (1961-1963).
From what I've read, the demonoid servers got hosed and the admins have to restore everything from backups. The TorrentFreak article is just baseless speculation at this point and slashdot isn't helping by spreading these rumours.