Slashdot Mirror
Demonoid BitTorrent Tracker Apparently Back Online
Freshly Exhumed writes "TorrentFreak has broken the news that after more than a year of downtime the Demonoid tracker is back online. The tracker is linked to nearly 400,000 torrent files and more than a million peers, which makes it one of the largest working BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. There is no word yet on when the site will make a full comeback, but the people behind it say they are working to revive one of the most famous file-sharing communities. As the single largest semi-private BitTorrent tracker that ever existed, Demonoid used to offer a home to millions of file-sharers. Note that this is apparently the original Demonoid and not the d2 site that claims to be using the Demonoid database."
I'll get right to downloading and shop on Silk Road while I wait.
There are legitimate uses for torrents, but demonoid wasn't about distributing Linux iso's or other open source projects. It was about pirating movies and music.
You can't stop the signal
Yo-ho, Yo-ho, a pirate's life for me!
I remember a disk copier for the Commodore 64 that used to display a flaming golden skull while playing pirate themed music. I didn't own a computer at the time, and my buddy had, of course, pirated the pirate software. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Technical Details
www.demonoid.com uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is not trusted because it is self-signed.
The certificate is only valid for americanstoner.net
(Error code: sec_error_untrusted_issuer)
American Stoner? I guess it'll be a real buzz-kill if the copyright cops get them for possession with intent to distribute.
Are you NSA?
GP is a karma whore, not (necessarily) NSA. Very easy to identify as they post "the slashdot line" without saying anything substantial.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
*whi-TISH!*
Is it? Both Demonoid and The Pirate Bay have received direct blessing from music artists and film-makers and featured their work as promos on their front pages. The question is: Why on Earth are you trying to speak for everybody else? You clearly don't hold the only correct opinion.
It had all the problems of being a 'public' site. Shit seed ratios and all that low speed public leechers stuff. Crap descriptions. The same useless crud uploaded 50 times when a current active good version existed. No comments on the QUALITY of the files. Just completely useless "thanks for uploading" repeated for pages.
Along with all the drawbacks of being a 'private' site. Requires logins. Don't say anything to anyone important or you might find your account banned. Don't mouth off. Don't express unpleasant opinions on anything anywhere or you're gone. Offend the wrong person and you're gone.
Plus they had the habit of drawing unwanted attention to themselves as some sort of 'industry spokesman'. And nobody elected them to a damm thing.
I was glad to see it go. It was a kiddy site one tiny step up from the old malware ad infested 'warez' sites. It has been replaced and surpassed by far better sites now. And even the totally public pirate bay beats the crap out of them now.
copyright that isn't in the names of the actual human creators is null & void.
This is great news because for the last few years the media has done their best to demonize torrents and related activity as nothing more than a pirates' leisure time activity
Lets be real here. If I were to look up usage of torrents by volume and by category (legal video, legal software, illegal video, illegal software), what do you suppose the spread would be? Would you be willing to wager that legal activity was even more than 10%? Because I wouldnt.
I'm a musician, and make part of my income from my music. All of my music is CC licensed, and some people still buy it. It's certainly not offensive to me that these kinds of site operate with impunity.
Not a sentence!
The question is: what can we do to permanently remove illegal filesharing from the web? It's offensive to everyone who creates digital media for a living that these kinds of sites operate with impunity.
First of all, if you are someone who creates digital content and is starting out, this is an amazing boon since it can get your work out to potentially a large audience without any middlemen.
If you are one of those big corporate digital media creators, then create alternatives where buying digital content is preferable to getting them from filesharing networks!
Movies and music downloaded from "official" sources have lower quality than from filesharing. Software, ebooks and other DRM riddled stuff are less restrictive and easy to use downloaded from filesharing.
Last of all, as a lawmaker, don't make copyright essentially last forever. After time, creations become culture and let people share old stuff. Demonoid was great because it had a large repository of stuff that was mostly of historical, nostalgic or cultural interest. Yes, there is still a few drops of blood to be squeezed from old stuff but let it go free so it adds immensely to cultural wealth.
Simple. You just have to understand that what you're trying to restrict is the duplication of numbers; that numbers can be duplicated perfectly and trivially by computers; that many people want to duplicate those numbers; that many people are sharing those numbers all the time; that it takes time and effort to identify where the numbers are being shared from; that each time you remove a site which faciliates the location of that number, or a list of people who are sharing the numbers, it'll get replaced immediately; that the numbers are much easier to obtain via downloading than via traditional methods; that we're in a recession and buying/renting these numbers is a lower priority than buying food/fuel/paying rent; that there's no technical way of preventing the copying or transmission of these numbers.
Also, many people who create `digital media` (I guess you mean `numbers`) do not find it in the least offensive.
There are legitimate uses for torrents, but demonoid ... was about pirating movies and music.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Demonoid had a large collection of abandoned works - music, tv shows, movies, magazines, books, etc that were simply not commercially available. Some were orphaned works where the copyright owner was unknown and so could never be legally distributed again, some where works where the copyright owner just didn't think it was worth it to distribute and some were works that were too risky to distribute commercially - like fan edits of movies and other works that the owner could not afford to go to court to prove their right of fair use. Piracy of those sorts of works serves a legitimate public interest.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Until someone gets the bright idea to store X.509 certificate fingerprints in Namecoin. Instead of paying a commercial CA for a TLS certificate, a .bit site owner would do something analogous to what's done with DNSSEC: self-sign a certificate and store its fingerprint in the domain name registry.
The "parent" you are responding to talks about "illegal" file sharing - that is, file sharing of content where the copyright does not allow it. Since you licence your files under CC, most are probably not "illegally" shared. But not every artist uses CC.
Just as developers that use GPL code and folks that use CC licensed material must adhere to the copyright conditions associated with GPL and CC, so must they adhere to the copyright conditions that are associated with other types of copyrights.
You can't have it both ways: "you must follow my copyright rules but I don't have to follow yours".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
copyright that isn't in the names of the actual human creators is null & void.
This is not currently the law in Slashdot's home country; I'm assuming it's a proposed reform of copyright. In such a system, who is the author of a work whose creation involves thousands of people, such as a feature film or a AAA video game? And what happens to the copyright should this author die a day after the work is published?
As a musician, what steps have you taken to make sure that you have not unwittingly incorporated substantial portions of non-CC music into your CC music? George Harrison got in trouble for this (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music).
demonoid.com [...] happens to be hosted on [a] server [that] doesn't seem to support SNI.
At least on the client side, every major desktop web browser supports SNI except for Internet Explorer on Windows XP. With security updates for Windows XP ending in three months anyway, why aren't more web server administrators installing SNI to use valuable IPv4 addresses more efficiently? (Disclosure: I moved my web site from another shared host to WebFaction about a year ago primarily to get SNI.)
How deep does the rabbit hole of government hijacking go? The government could be running a man-in-the-middle attack on all five of your senses to keep you in a honeypot that is the only existence you've known since birth. How can anyone be sure that this isn't the case?
Do you think that's air you're breathing now?
Demonoid also had (legally or not) a great deal of otherwise inaccessible material. Books and music that were out of print and/or out of copyright. TV shows that were never going to get a DVD release even in this day and age. Obscure movies and serials, many of them from the early 20th.
The tracker is the least important part of demonoid. The interesting bit was their website that had such a great catalog of stuff AND such a great system for search it.
SUB CATEGORIES! Oh man. There were so many sub categories. Which meant if you wanted something you could search just that sub category. Honestly, Amazon.com often has an inferior search system to what old Demoniod had.
If the resurrected the site but kept the tracker offline it would be nearly as good as the old days... assuming anyone ever used the new demoniod again.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"There are legitimate uses for torrents, but demonoid wasn't about distributing Linux iso's or other open source projects. It was about pirating movies and music."
Actually, no. If you wanted hit movies or music, Demonoid was among the last places you would look. It might have what you were looking for, but probably not.
Demonoid's forte was along the line of more obscure works, like hard-to-find books and such.
"Would you be willing to wager that legal activity was even more than 10%? Because I wouldnt."
In the U.S., it doesn't matter. IANAL, but legally speaking, the amount of illegal vs legal activity is irrelevant. It only has to have genuine legitimate uses to remain legal. Anything else would constitute punishing law-abiders for the actions of others.
See the Betamax decision.
Well, it knew my old login and password. So at least part of the database was there.
Still, no way to know any of these things are not an *AA honeypot now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The question is: what can we do to permanently remove illegal file sharing from the web?
Tho you are a troll, ill answer you question anyway: Revamp copyright laws so its NOT illegal for non-profit sharing to occur.
Now back to troll, i do hope you are one of the 'victims' and everything you do is shared 'with impunity'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They also pay to come to your shows. ( assuming you play live )
And as you say, some of us out here do support our 'artists', at least the ones that don't try to screw us.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Vigilantism works so well in general that I'm glad to see you applying it to copyright law.
Nobody is claiming that piracy is about punishment.
It isn't even close to vigilantism.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You can't have it both ways: "you must follow my copyright rules but I don't have to follow yours".
Of course you can. You are confusing the form of a thing with intent of a thing.
Stuff like the GPL and CC is about increasing free access, copyright is about limiting free access. The fact that the principles of copyleft are currently implemented on modern copyright law does not validate modern copyright law, it just means that under the current set of circumstances it was the most practical way to get it done.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I couldn't agree more. Seems like all the advocates of copyright infringement are those who've never created anything worth paying for.
Right. As someone who sells software on the side as a small home business, I can tell folks here that this kind of thing feels quite different when you're the copyright holder. I first found a cracked version of my software on the Internet over ten years ago. It used a fairly simple registration keying system at that time, and probably wasn't too hard to crack. But when I developed that system, it never occurred to me that anybody cared enough about my small-volume software to even try to crack it.
Who know what the motives of the crackers were? Maybe they just enjoyed the challenge of cracking. (Get a puzzle book.) Or maybe they were having a little juvenile fun damaging someone else's property. (Get a spray can and find an abandoned building.) Or maybe they had a High Moral Purpose of freeing the proprietary software from the evil use of copyright. (Donate to the FSF.) Or, maybe they just wanted to keep my kids from going to college. (Sorry, but I can't think of any alternate way to do that.) But if they had enough skills and time to do cracking, why don't they use those talents to *create* something of their own? Isn't that the best way to make the world A Better Place?
At one time, cracks for the software were listed in Google rankings above my own site. That's really discouraging. Fortunately, cracks for the software now have moved down in the search results, though they're still there.
A wise friend of mine who also sells software on the side said that there isn't really any point in fighting crackers because you don't lose much (or any) revenue from it anyway. So, I came to think of my registration keying system as a way of keeping honest people honest, not of defeating those who really want to steal my software. But it still feels like being raped.
The first crack soon disappeared (the cracker had posted it on his employer's site for some silly reason), but a different crack appeared a few years later, this time from sort of cracking group. They also published a key generator. Raped again, only worse. So, I created a much stronger registration keying system, and made every anti-cracking change I could think of to the software design. That took me about six weeks altogether. It truly is a Rube Goldberg machine. It's so complicated, I barely understand it myself. Under my friend's theory, it was wasted effort: six weeks I should have spent improving the product. But if it took me six weeks to create it, I wonder how long it would take someone to duplicate the new keying system via reverse-engineering? Hopefully, it's beyond the average cracker's attention span for small-volume software. Anyway, I think it's working.
I've tried to download some of the cracks that still appear in order to see what I'm currently up against, but it seems that one now has to give credit card numbers to the crackers first. So, I didn't go any further. But the credit-card thing actually is the best anti-cracking technique of all. If someone wants to give their credit card to crackers, I'm all in favor of it. Even if they get my software for free.
(I'm posting as AC in case anyone here wants to track me down and teach me a lesson. Thanks for listening.)
Exactly. I'd put my stuff out as public domain, but not every country recognizes such declarations. A CC license (attribution only, not nc or sa) achieves much the same thing, and works for people in such countries.
Not a sentence!
I'd rather work within the system to get it changed rather than just violate it because I disagree with it.
Breaking the law because you disagree with it is part of the system. Pot would never have been legalized if it weren't for all those people smoking it in violation of the law. Same thing with anti-miscegenation laws, sodomy laws, removal of the national 55mph speed limit, repeal of prohibition, etc. There are countless examples.
A typical response to that point is to claim that disobedience doesn't count if you don't do it publicly and get arrested. But practically all of the examples I've given were not done publicly - it took wide-scale private law-breaking for people to become comfortable enough with the concepts in order for the handful of court challenges to be successful.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yeah, some artists only put out poor-quality MP3s officially, but you'll see 24-bit FLAC on, say, What.cd.
This idea keeps coming up, but is fundamentally broken, since it is always possible to make profit indirectly by trying to damage your competition. If copyright were revamped as you propose, a larger company that may want to do financial damage to a smaller competitor could resort to distributing that competitor's work entirely on a non-profit basis, relying on their much larger distribution network to effectively circumvent the smaller competitor's revenue stream they might have otherwise wanted to obtain through it. This would effectively mean that only very large conglomerates could effectively have any real control over their copyrights.
We could, if you want... just get rid of the whole concept of copyright entirely, but this carries a baggage of other issues that are also problematic... We are already seeing only glimmers of what would happen as content makers are starting to lose faith in copyright to protect their interests, relying on techniques such as DRM, for example. In utter absence of copyright, such measures are but the tip of a monolithic iceberg that only the very wealthiest people in our society would tend to have the means to actually deal with... and by the time the rest of the public have reasonable access to the same content, it would tend to be the case that it was old enough to no longer be relevant or useful to most.
So... Got any better ideas?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Do you believe that waiting for a traffic light to change when absolutely no one is around is wrong? If so, then go ahead. I know lots of people who do just that at desserted intersections. I've driven through a few towns that have taken that into account and set lights like that to flashing yellow after midnight.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Until police realised that red light cameras make the most money for them in just that situation.
It's widely rumored, and probably true, that many cities actually shortened the yellow phase in order to increase accidential red-light violations. More fines that way.
Does that include the WoW updater? It's a torrent client, but Blizzard doesn't label it as such. Presumably they don't want to be associated with 'shady' technology like torrents.
The scope of that case was greatly lowered by a subsequent one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_Ltd.
I've done that once, on some code that infringes a software patent. Such things don't bother me here in the UK, but I didn't want to attach a license granting rights to what is likely illegal in the US.
It's one of the most popular programs I've written - probably because Microsoft later released a utility of similar purpose under the same name. I'm sure most of the people coming to the website for it are looking for the Microsoft one. It's got more functionality.
There are legitimate uses for torrents, but demonoid wasn't about distributing Linux iso's or other open source projects. It was about pirating movies and music.
Actually... based on WHY people download movies and music, it's about circumventing geodiscrimination and format-monopolies. If I want to see the latest episode of a tv-show for instance, I have no legitimate way of doing so short of travelling to the US and watch it on tv. I could sign up to a streaming service using a fake name and address and use a VPN service to watch it, but that's grey area at best.
Why won't they allow me to buy a downloadable episode? - I want to buy! - I have the money right here! - But no, they won't sell.
Okay then, so I pirate the thing! - You refused my money so now you get nothing!
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
No, because they dont want to admit that they are offloading the cost of distribution to the customers who are paying for it.
I thought we were talking about the media demonizing a ostensibly innocent protocol, not where the law stands.
Torrenting has legitimate use, but Demonoid was truly for pirating.
Sarcasm noted... But copyright, reasonably, should be neutral to the size of a company or power of the individual that owns it. In such a case as what I commented on, it would only offer the most protection to those with the resources to do so. At least right now we *do* have plenty of independent content makers who get recognized for their contributions, under that kind of scenario, there would be dramatically fewer.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But it still feels like being raped.
Have you actually been raped? If not, I'm not sure why you presume to know what it feels like, and I'm not at all sure why you'd think it feels like "someone failing to hand me money I believe I've earned". (Engaging a prostitute, taking advantage of their services, then refusing to pay, is the closest sex-related analogy I can come up with. And of course that's not rape, so I'm not sure why you'd expect it to feel the same.)
Or is this one of those things where someone can't persuade people's rational minds with logic, and thus has to resort to hyperbolic rhetoric in hopes of bypassing rationality with an emotional reaction?
Anyway, what it "feels like" is irrelevant. Making laws based on how people feel is just a bad mess all around, and if we're to do that for copyright law, how do we decide whether to go by your feelings that copying == rape, or by someone else's feelings that copyright == rape?
If you actually hope to persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you, you might try arguing that, integrated across society, copyright has more benefit by incentivizing new works than harm by curtailing everyone's natural freedom to copy what they like (y'know, the theory under which modern copyright was originally introduced in 1710). Or something like that. Not complaining that copying makes you feel bad.
(If you're just letting off steam, without trying to persuade anyone, then I guess coming off as an entitled jerk is an acceptable side-effect.)
Do you believe that waiting for a traffic light to change when absolutely no one is around is wrong? If so, then go ahead. I know lots of people who do just that at desserted intersections.
Like what, covered in cherry pie and ice cream?? O.o
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
"Torrenting has legitimate use, but Demonoid was truly for pirating."
Nope. I happen to know that Demonoid carried legal content, because I personally used it for such.
And please get your terminology straight. Copying for personal use is NOT "piracy". Piracy is a legal term, and it involves copyright infringement for profit.
"The scope of that case was greatly lowered by a subsequent one:"
I disagree. That case was about inducement to infringe, not the legality of copying.
Piracy is a colloquial term that is thrown about and as im not in a legal context I dont care terribly whether you term it infringement, theft, or piracy. Fact is that the vast majority of the content on demonoid was there without the approval of its rights holder.
I really dont have stomach for people who try to defend behavior thats about on the same level as shoplifting candy bars by saying "but no look Ubuntu is on demonoid too!"
so uh, get this you get the the light as it changes to red. it stays red for 3-4min. absolutely no one goes through the intersection. your only option is to make a left hand turn (new zealand here, we drive on the left) the oncoming road is oneway. multiple lanes of non existent traffic to your left and right. the windows are down and all you can hear is your engine and the chirping of cicadas https://www.google.co.nz/maps/preview#!q=242+Moorhouse+Ave%2C+Waltham+8011&data=!1m4!1m3!1d1023!2d172.6338703!3d-43.5401286!2m1!1e3!4m15!2m14!1m13!1s0x6d318a113bcffa37%3A0xaf1fe118d9cae3d1!3m8!1m3!1d372!2d172.6335436!3d-43.5403895!3m2!1i1680!2i950!4f35!4m2!3d-43.5401286!4d172.6338703&fid=7 this intersection when traveling north
It isn't rumored. It has been proven many times. Hell, I've seen lights that are unusually quick plenty of times.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
When you use the term "piracy" improperly, you do the copyright trolls' work for them.
"I really dont have stomach for people who try to defend behavior thats about on the same level as shoplifting candy bars by saying "but no look Ubuntu is on demonoid too!""
I'm not trying to "defend" behavior. But on the other hand, I'm not trying to conflate non-criminal behavior with criminal behavior, as you are doing.