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.
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.
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.
Demonoid had a treasure trove of rare files you could not find on other public OR private trackers let alone on USENET. So no, Demonoid was like no other file sharing site on the web. And the community is what made Demonoid great. Who care about the latest LOST or Intelligence tv episode ? But then you were looking for some rare comic or ebook the D was the place to go. I still have a lot of torrent files from Demonoid. Could never bring myself to delete them hopeing for a day when the tracker would come back online again. It seems that day has come. Long live the D and its superb community.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Demonoid had a treasure trove of rare files you could not find on other public OR private trackers let alone on USENET. So no, Demonoid was like no other file sharing site on the web. And the community is what made Demonoid great. Who care about the latest LOST or Intelligence tv episode ? But then you were looking for some rare comic or ebook the D was the place to go. I still have a lot of torrent files from Demonoid. Could never bring myself to delete them hopeing for a day when the tracker would come back online again. It seems that day has come. Long live the D and its superb community.
Exactly this. Demonoid was like a torrent Library of Alexandria, and the whole human race was made poorer when it went down. It'll still be a long while before I'll trust the new one though.
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.
Yes, I think that's the problem. No matter where you view the movie the script and story are still crap.
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 ----
Buddy, if it's not worth watching for free, it sure as hell isn't worth paying for.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
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.
No, because they dont want to admit that they are offloading the cost of distribution to the customers who are paying for it.
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