Demonoid Tracker Is Back Online

Crymson4 writes "We discussed the shutdown of the Demonoid torrent tracker last fall. For those who don't already know, Demonoid is back up. Looks like they found a new host for the Web site and the tracker is functioning properly as well. For those with old accounts, all the old data has been saved. It's almost as if they never left."

Wha?

Okay, seriously, what's the point of invite-only registration? I see right now, it says you have to be an invite, but it also says (on the "got an invite?" page) that they open registration to the public once a month. If they're trying to keep the MAFIAA out via invite-only reg, then why the hell would it ever be open to the public at all?

Re:Wha?

Its a pure traffic problem, once a month the delete all the idle accounts and let new people join, the invite systems means its fairly easier for you to get in if you want anyway.

though off the top of my head i can also see how a 'closed' system could be a legal defence, your not distributing to the public everyone is a member of your 'private' club.

Re:Wha?

Thanks! My email is: [e-mail].

I cannot wait to start torrenting those warez. I'm going to collect hundreds of MP3s! Information wants to be freeeeee!

Re:Wha?

Demonoid has always been a public tracker, but other features of the site require an account (including uploading). You don't need to be a member to use it, just a member to access other stuff.

Re:Wha?

It's private to stop Joe-hit-and-run from just leeching without sharing, people have to share to a ratio on Demonoid (usually 1:1).

Re:All file shareres are leechers

I don't understand this hatred of 'leeching' amongst file sharers. You know that you are ALL leeching right? You are leeching off the honest people who actually BUY the music, BUY the movies and BUY the software.

... and who then post the music, the movies, the shows and the software freely on torrents.

No longer quite so honest in your book, huh?

Anyway, ethics is relative and subject to change, and so are business models.
As far as I'm concerned, it is better to let everyone adapt to new conditions in the world than to try to reverse them.
Besides, it has been proved that torrents don't hurt music sales in the least; quite the contrary, in fact. Software companies have also profited from the increased mindshare (private users may pirate the software, but when they use it for business, they buy the software they are familiar with instead of something else).

Aside from all that, the ratio requirement is there so that information would continue to flow — it only happens when everyone gives at least as much as they get. And that's why it is called sharing.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

I don't understand this hatred of 'leeching' amongst file sharers. You know that you are ALL leeching right? You are leeching off the honest people who actually BUY the music, BUY the movies and BUY the software.

Quite a lot of the content here is likely to originate from people who bought the whatever and uploaded it. Another major source is where the content was broadcast to a significent chunk of the planet.

without them, the stuff would not get made,

This is the "every pirated copy is a lost sale" theory. Which has been completly debunked. Quite simply the vast majority of the people involved are not "potential customers" in the first place.It's also very possible that the "pirate" version, which tends to be "Available worldwide and DRM free", will be the only version available to people. Possibly for months/years even forever.

Re:All file shareres are leechers

[In reply to: "without people buying stuff, it would not get made"] This is the "every pirated copy is a lost sale" theory.

No, it's not. Ever heard of TV shows getting cancelled because of bad ratings, movie sequels being made because the original sold well, artists being dumped by a label when their latest album bombs, et cetera? It's not hard to see that the creation of media is influenced by people going out and paying for it. That also means that people going out and buying stuff contribute significantly to the diversity of media available for downloading. If you only download and never buy, you are profiting from the availability of materials that is paid for by paying customers.

That has nothing to do with "every pirated copy is a lost sale" (or "without IP no art would be produced"). It's just pointing out that when person A buys albums and person B downloads them, A contributes more to the production of future albums than B. How you can miss the point so completely and still be modded "4: insightful" is beyond me.

Re:canada back online

I am sure glad to be able to resume leaching from Canada. They blocked the country due to legal threats quite a while ago, and now seem to have forgotten to do so again.

Traceroute shows they're not in Canada anymore. The web server is in the Ukraine, the domain registration is in Brazil. So I'd guess that those legal threats are no longer a problem.

Re:canada back online

I'm aware that it's a popular myth that hosting your site in some other country will exempt you from the laws of the country in which you live.

Of course not. But it makes it a lot harder to pursue. Dealing with your own government is numbingly frustrating as it is. Now consider having to deal with governments that are not your own, and that may not have the same priorities. So, let's see. You need to jump through the hoops of Brazil's government to compel a "privacy guard" type registrar to give the name of the domain holder. That turns out to be a mail drop in Vanuatu. Call around and try to find someone who speaks Bislama, because while you're pretty sure that whoever answers the government phone in Vanuatu understands English, they're being pricks about it. Give up on that approach, which is just as well because even if you had found someone who spoke Bislama and filed the necessary paperwork in that language with the Vanuatu Justice Ministry, it would have turned out that the mailing address is vacant lot in Amsterdam, and the email address is a free account in South Africa.

So, go after the server in the Ukraine (even though you're pretty sure the operator is backing everything up by FTP to somewhere else, and can start up at a new location on 24 hours notice). Call around to find someone who speaks Ukranian, and someone else who has a petty cash fund big enough to pay the bribe that's going to be required. On second thought, say "what the hell" and give up, you joined the force to catch bank robbers, not to play bureaucratic games in languages you don't understand, for the benefit of some company that isn't even in your country.

Besides, what makes you think the site operator is Canadian?

Re:Wha?

The point is the avoid leeches, not to avoid legal shitbags.

Re:Wha?

I'm not sure about Demonoid, but my preferred tracker is also invite-only for a good reason: ratios. The tracker stays fast because people are forced to give back. The thing works on a credit system - downloading costs credits, uploading gains credits. To avoid people signing up over and over for free credits, EVERY single account that is opened needs to have credits donated from an existing member, such that credits never magically materialize out of nowhere. It's a good system - and the only tracker I've ever been on where I can always max out my pipe at all times.

Re:Wha?

Elitist? Demonoid is one of the most community-friendly trackers there is. Invites are plentiful and anyone can upload. The information there _is_ free. As a side note, the tracker has been up for months now, but the website was down.

Re:Wha?

Spoken like someone who doesn't have an account.

Want an invite? :)

Re:Wha?

Information wants to be free.

...says the person posting as an Anonymous Coward.

Re:Wha?

Quick thoughts: by allowing anonymous posting, you make people post something they wouldn't have posted if they couldn't be anonymous, thus making information more free. Also, isn't the public opinion on /. that you should exercise all your rights and powers even though you don't strictly need to?

Re:

Sure, but in a sense it's like saying: "Information wants to be free, except information about me".

Re:Wha?

"Information wants to be free, except information about me".

This is not at all hypocritical. In fact, it's probably the most insightful and practical way to operate in this Age.

Re:Wha?

Information wants to be free.

...says the person posting as an Anonymous Coward.

I was talking about other people's information, not mine. Obviously.

Private tracker.

One of the things that made/makes Demonoid so great is that the unwashed masses aren't permitted to ransack and abuse the system in the same way that they are at TPB.

You need invite only registration if you really want to be able to enforce ratios. Otherwise people just create disposable accounts, leech to the cap and never seed.

On Demonoid, people seed or their ratio goes to shit and they can't DL.

Anyway, I'm glad it's back. TPB is great, but it doesn't always cover all the bases for me.

no catch?

After all the fuss & muss (with no court-based legal rulings) how are they back up?

They did not goto court (the innocent admins would have shouted it from the roof-tops), they must have had an out-of-court settlement. Considering all the old account are still available, this stinks of a setup.

I am from Canada, and as we are aware there are several laws that 'allow' me to d'load. There is even one that I can think of that allows me to upload. BUT that said, I will not log back into demonoid, I will not create a new account.

I will continue to use the private trackers that I am currently on, and most importantly continue to use Piratebay to search.

Re:no catch?

The new server is located in Ukraine, so unless there's a very elaborate international conspiracy here, I doubt it's a setup. The original admin isn't from Canada or the USA (or Europe for that matter). The original servers were located in Amsterdam, then they moved to Canada before being shut down, and now they've moved again. Not at all unusual for torrent sites, even huge ones like The Pirate Bay.

Re:

Don't confuse my tone of pessimism, I _hope_ they are back.

Just wary, and paranoid.

hehe paranoid of demoniod.

Oblig. Ackbar quote

It's a trap!

  ~ Admiral Ackbar.

Re:

A "subtle" difference is also that demonoid never was taken down because of the pressure on the admin (as I've understood it) but because the host didn't want demonoid on their servers anymore. Since then deimos have said that it probably would come back a