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Demonoid Down For a Week, Serving Malware Laden Ads
hypnosec tipped us to reports that Demonoid is still down after a suffering a massive DDoS last week, and that the domain is now redirecting to a malware-ridden spam site. Notable for surviving a CRIA mandated shutdown, this may be lights out for the torrent tracker: "To begin, while Demonoid’s admin told us that he would eventually bring the site back online, he clearly has other things on his mind. A really important family event puts a torrent site nowhere near the top of his priorities. ... Demonoid has been experiencing staffing issues this year. As we mentioned in an earlier article, there were rumors that one or maybe more Demonoid staffers had been questioned by authorities about their involvement in the site."
to finally start researching private newsgroup servers.
...and not using some form of AdBlock anyway?
IIRC, demonoid has had several outages throughout the years, some lasting weeks at a time. I would be surprised if this lasted much longer, but I would be far more surprised if this really did spell the end of demonoid all together.
fuck all you pirate assholes anyway. I hope you get a virus that blows up your hard drive, you anti-business pricks.
you forgot to add yours sincerely MPIAA :D
http://chimpbox.us
stopping people from getting information about sex and contraception was supposed to solve some problem or other.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
For a decade now, I've been operating on the basis of "Do I need it? If not, do I want it? Can I justify spending money on it? And if not, is there a free-as-in-beer legal alternative available?"
The problem is that most people don't make it to this point. They only see that FREE FREE FREE FREE, and then use their morals against giant companies/for privacy/ anti-government, what-have-you, to justify their decision. A little bit of research will prove that for most things there is a legal, free version available. It might not be 100% what you want, but it'll be close, and it'll be great considering it's free.
DISCLAIMER: I do pirate things (games usually, or music) to TRY THEM. IF I like them, I BUY THEM. This is because there is no such thing as a good demo anymore.
I usually pirate software before I try them. If it's worth it, I will buy it. Same thing with games. Is it worth it to spend 60 for a 8-16 hours game that I will trow away in the garbarge or let it gather dust in my cabinet cause I only played it once ... or is it worth 60$ cause I still play today and the replay value is very strong. With software, is it worth 50$ and more depending on the usage I need from it. lots of software are just overpriced for my needs. That's bad cause I know some software that I would buy the their price is very questionable.
Prove to me..or us here, people of /. that piracy is anti-business. Give me stats, hard numbers to make me shut up. Afaik, piracy helps business in an indirect way like it or not.
obligatory link to The Oatmeal: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/computers
Uhm.... how about charging 50+ USD/hour + miles ?
Perl Programmer for hire
And you post posts that say *zero*. Talk more.
Because when you're working full-time, have been doing so for a decade and are generally pretty successful, it really rankles to have people who you only see at Christmas and who only pick up the phone when they have a PC problem expecting you to jump to their aid in the way that you did when you were a teenager or student with plenty of free time.
i went to download some of his more obscure movies (and they're all pretty obscure) and without demonoid i had to pause for a second and think where will i get them? especially since only a few have been released on DVD. well i still found them but it really remind me what a wonderful culture resource demonoid was. i mean any obscure movie from anywhere in the world was probably on there, likewise for music. although i'm still looking for a copy of communist Polish camp classic Hydrozagadka with english subs. wasn't even on demonoid! at least not with subs..
For me demonoid.me points to localhost so if you're being redirected to a malaware website your system is compromised.
i miss BTJunkie.
BTJunkie had EVERY FUCKING THING!!!112
Dammit.
I have a couple friends who... acquired some of the professional imaging and video software. They used to play with it as a hobby. They then went to school, and are now working-- one designing movies, the other games. They even admit that they probably would never have gotten to where they are without that. The schools that they ended up going to asked them to exhibit some of their work.
good info and something I'll have to check out, but I'd add that at least OpenDNS is practically malware in itself due to their screwing around with dns records to advertise to you. they even break SMTP by returning MX results for *everything*, which point to them.... a user on your network fat fingers an email address and the message ends up with opendns? I don't think so.
the others might be great tho, will try them.
-Lod
...where am I to torrent stuff now? /sadpanda
According to the article in TFA, which has been updated, the ads were put in place deliberately by the site admin to recoup some of his costs. Presumably, he didn't know they were full of malware.
I have developed this method of appearing to be helpful and trying to resolve the thing over the phone but invariably reaching the "I don't know about that" conclusion, and pointing them to a repairshop. After a few such occurrences they stopped bothering me. It also helps that all my relatives live at least 100 miles away and I don't own a car so they don't expect me to travel to fix whatever they broke.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Was wondering what was happening.
This.
My movie/music tastes are pretty strange at times, and I am genuinely trying to buy some obscure movies or albums. Problem is, they can't be found anywhere any more. Some have been released by Iron Curtain state owned companies (communist era stuff from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, URSS), some were released by now-bankrupt companies, etc. Digital copies are the only chance, and now with less and less large torrent sites around, the chances of actually watching that obscure movie or listening to that obscure album are slimmer. That's too bad, because people will be more and more limited to mainstream crap that sucks most of the time.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Let old Hairy show you how to seriously cut the time down on a boot and nuke there friend. First go to WSUS Offline and have it download the patches and/or service packs for whatever version of Windows it is, you can then put 'em on a thumbdrive or DVD and have them ready to go once the OS is installed. Once the patches are all installed just go to Ninite on the now clean machine and check the boxes for any third party software you need, AV, flash, media players, codecs, etc.
And then finally once you have it just the way you like it slap in Comodo Time Machine and have it set to make a snapshot on boot. personally depending on how stupid the user is I have CTM take up 10%-20% of the drive, this way next time they do something stupid you can walk them through restoring the system in about 15 minutes. Nice thing is even if they hose the machine so badly it won't boot you can tell them to just hit the Home key on boot and run Time Machine from there. With these little tricks you are talking maybe an hour and a half, maybe six clicks all told, and once set up it'll be damned hard for them to pwn it again. Personally if it were me I'd use Comodo Internet Security for the AV as its not only free it plays nice with time machine, although I've also used Avast and its played nice too.
As for TFA its not like there aren't a bazillion and one warez sites out there, i'm sure if Demonoid goes tits up another will take its place by the end of the week. You'd think they'd learn its like whack a mole with those things but if the *.A.As want to pay some Media Pretender to play whack a site? their money to blow I guess.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
this is just retarded. They said they incurred a bandwidth cost from the ddos and turned on advertising to deal with it. I imagine the bandwidth cost before and after the DDOS were probably substantially different. I don't know if they were aware of the bad ads regardless.
In my personal experience pirate sites are relatively safe even when browsing them from Windows, I've never had any problems with sites like solarmovie.eu, demonoid.ph/demonoid.me or thepiratebay.org. Actually, I've personally had less problems so far with pirated content than with dysfunctional DRM schemes. Perhaps your relatives are a bit too careless or need better anti-virus software? (Porn sites, on the other hand, are full of malware.)
But anyway there is an easy remedy: Install GNU/Linux for them and tell them to use GNU/Linux for downloading all the great pirated content out there. Afterwards they can check their downloads with a nice anti-virus software before using them in any way Windows. Works like a charm, keeps your system 100% malware free.
Oh man...this is techie porn, right here. Time machine+win updates+one click installs=awesome.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
How's about using NNTP just for distributing the .torrent only :-)
I did a quick search... amazingly I haven't seen anyone doing this?
A blog I run for the wealth
Hairyfeet,
I've been reading your banter for years, and while I generally perceive that you're trying to be helpful, this is the first time that you've helped me.
Thank you for re-introducing me to WSUS Offline (the last time I saw that concept was many years ago and somewhat broken and/or German), and Comodo Time Machine (which I'd not yet found).
These things will make my life, and the lives of my customers, immeasurably easier.
Best regards,
adolf
Kid-proof tablet..
Glad to help, just a little shop owner in BF nowhere that tries to make things easier, both for the common folk and the fellow fixit guys. WSUS was a little buggy the first year or so but now they have it down to a science, just pick whatever updates you want and let it package them however you'd like. I have mine set to once a month download all the updates from XP to Win 7 X64 and that way i can have all the updates and service packs on a single shared drive which cuts out a HELL of a lot of work.
Now with Time machine there is ONE little catch, but I usually don't mention it because its such a rare condition most don't run into it. if you try to install TM into a system that has both WinXP and Win 7 in a dual boot? it won't work. don't screw anything up, just won't work. That is because Win 7 changes the drive letter so no matter where you install it it looks like C: to the OS and with 2 C: drives TM doesn't know how to handle it. It hasn't be updated in awhile but it works great on XP- Win 7 and while I haven't personally tried it i'm told Win 8 works great as well, and the nicest thing is your grandma can run this. Just tell her to click the home key at boot or pick the clock from Windows, pick how far back she wants to go, and that's it. You can even run it and system restore if you'd like, but TM runs so much better frankly it makes SR pointless. also unlike SR I've found malware don't know how to infect TM so its an easy way to get rid of nasties if they refuse to listen and click on the "free porn/iPad/movies' and get a bug.
Finally be sure to give Ninite a spin, I've been using them for a couple of years now and they really take the work out of a clean install. Browsers, codecs, media players, flash, Libre office, you can pick as many as you like and with one button it all installs unattended with NO toolbars or other crap. Another nice feature most don't know about is you can use Ninte to update any software that is already on the system, simply check the boxes and ninite will skip anything that is already current.
So glad you enjoyed Adolf, with WSUS and Time Machine frankly it takes no time to set a system up and more importantly with TM its a hell of a lot harder for them to break it and ruin all the work you've done. Just be sure to tell it to lock the clean install, where you have everything set up just right, and no matter how many years pass you can send it right back to your own version of "factory fresh" with a single click.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Glad you enjoyed it, with those little tricks you can take the hassle out of an install and more importantly make it a HELL of a lot harder for them to break it. Another nice trick with Time machine is you can "lock" a snapshot, so once you get the PC exactly how you like it, with all the programs you or the customer wants, you can then lock it and no matter how much time passes you'll have your own 'factory fresh" option just a single click away.
Heck I walked a former customer over the phone in another state on how to restore the system using the Time Machine I had installed, took her less than 15 minutes to go from a machine her niece had hosed so bad she couldn't even get a desktop to a perfectly running system, you just can't beat that kind of ease of use friend.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
there is no such thing as a good demo anymore.
Ugh, I know right? I miss the good old days when a demo was a 30-day trial, with every feature intact.
Right when dual core processors came out I built a PC with the most expensive processor I could find. Most games would not even recognize the second processor and have tremendous difficulty running. After the FIRST time that happened, I switched to downloading the game first, just to see if it could even operate on my machine. It probably saved me from buying hundreds upon hundreds of dollars of incompatible games.
Baahaha! Good advice for getting rid of pesky family members posted by something that looks like a spam-bot. Nice.
Don't be silly.
Businesses don't hate piracy because it makes them lose money
They hate it because it threatens their monopoly control of the market.