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 As of 6:45pm EST on 9-25-07, SSH and SMTP services are no longer active.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."

Re:Legal?

[Hemogoblin]

Coincidentally, the CRIA is now opposing the private copying levy. [michaelgeist.ca]

The Canadian Recording Industry Association this week quietly filed documents in the Federal Court of Appeal that will likely shock many in the industry. CRIA, which spent more than 15 years lobbying for the creation of the private copying levy, is now fighting to eliminate the application of the levy on the Apple iPod since it believes that the Copyright Board of Canada's recent decision to allow a proposed tariff on iPods to proceed "broadens the scope of the private copying exception to avoid making illegal file sharers liable for infringement."- Michael Geist

there is some debate here on the demonoid shutdown

[bubblah]

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/ [thecircuitbox.com] 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/ [techwag.com] 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.

Just to clarify

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

IRC log of convo with seanap of Demonoid.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.thecircuitbox.com/demonoid/ [thecircuitbox.com]

For tl;dr types: Torrentfreak made it up, the box is down for unknown reasons. Nobody knows yet. Sorry.

Speculation

[Ilex]

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.

Re:Legal?

[speaker of the truth]

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.

Re:CRIA Sut Down by Pirates

[radiojock]

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"

Re:IRC log of convo with seanap of Demonoid.

[morgan_greywolf]

Nobody knows yet because Deimos hasn't said anything. But from what I see in an nmap scan:

Starting Nmap 4.20 ( http://insecure.org/ [insecure.org] ) at 2007-09-26 09:54 Eastern Daylight Time
Initiating Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 09:54
Completed Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 09:54, 0.00s elapsed
Initiating System CNAME DNS resolution of 1 host. at 09:54
Completed System CNAME DNS resolution of 1 host. at 09:54, 0.00s elapsed
Initiating SYN Stealth Scan at 09:54
Scanning demonoid.com (209.44.123.21) [1697 ports]
SYN Stealth Scan Timing: About 6.25% done; ETC: 10:03 (0:07:43 remaining)
Completed SYN Stealth Scan at 10:01, 401.57s elapsed (1697 total ports)
Warning: OS detection for 209.44.123.21 will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP port
Initiating OS detection (try #1) against demonoid.com (209.44.123.21)
Host demonoid.com (209.44.123.21) appears to be up ... good.
Interesting ports on demonoid.com (209.44.123.21):
Not shown: 1690 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
21/tcp closed ftp
22/tcp closed ssh
80/tcp closed http
123/tcp closed ntp
443/tcp closed https
8000/tcp closed http-alt
8080/tcp closed http-proxy
Device type: general purpose
Running: Linux 2.6.X, OpenBSD 4.X, Sun Solaris 10|8|9
OS details: Linux 2.6.17.13 (Slackware 11.0, x86), OpenBSD 4.0 (CURRENT) macppc, OpenBSD 4.0 (sparc64), Sun Solaris 10 (SPARC), Sun Solaris 8 (SPARC), Sun Solaris 9 (SPARC), Sun Solaris 9 (x86), Sun Solaris 9 or 10

OS detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at http://insecure.org/nmap/submit/ [insecure.org] .
Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 405.503 seconds
                              Raw packets sent: 5164 (229.400KB) | Rcvd: 76 (3496B)


It looks like all the ports are firewalled off by the ISP. So while it's not confirmed, it's pretty obvious to anyone knowledgeable in network admin that the ISP firewalled off all the ports at someone's behest. Perhaps the CRIA, perhaps even Deimos himself.

Are You Sure?

[fringd]

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 [thecircuitbox.com] 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 [torrentfreak.com] uses the word "allegedly." maybe they changed it.

What's really going on...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Legal?

[This_Is_My_Happening]

Didn't we just decide that stea^W copyright infringement was legal in Canada...

Downloading is legal in Canada. Uploading is still a grey area.

what a joke

[HipPriest93]

"Without torrent is there a need for high speed?"

Are you dumb? P2P services like Soulseek and E-Mule are showing no signs of being even remotely effected by all this bullshit, and as long as P2P exists and the popularity of video hosting sites like YouTube and Google Video remains unchallenged, there will be a need for high speed.

This whole article is poorly researched in any case:
http://www.thecircuitbox.com/demonoid/ [thecircuitbox.com]

Re:Ratio problem?

[tlhIngan]

So what do you do when you are on the tail end of a torrent's popularity, you leave your client running for a week, and you still can't get up to 100% because there aren't enough other people who want to download the work? There might be a dozen seeders and 0 downloaders.

You rely on the fact that it's a private tracker, and most (>99%) don't expect you to seed 1:1 for every torrent.

Get in on one earlier and seed it 2:1 or more. You don't have to stop at 1:1, you know. I've done torrents where I only seeded 0.5 because, like you said, it was all seeders and no leechers. (Rare for Demonoid due to the sheer number of users. I had year-old+ torrents where I still ended up seeding 2:1). Just remember to make it up. Even as a new user the first GB is often "free". Just if you want to download more than that...

Or, another trick - go the front page and pick a popular torrent you don't care about. Use it to get your ratio above 1:1. Then stop it and delete the file. (Just be mindful about your limit, though - don't go all crazy and download 4GB torrents planning to seed to 2:1!).

Heck, that's why I liked Demonoid - even the lowest popularity torrent still gets a good bunch of leechers for unknown reasons. But if it wasn't overly large (maybe under 100MB), even at 10kB/s, I'd still have 2.5+:1 over the course of a day. All the little ones add up. Last I checked, I had maybe a 100GB differential over the course of 3 years or so (100GB more upload than downloaded).

It's the total of upload:download that matters to most private sites, not whether you downloaded 4GB and only uploaded 10MB on one torrent after a week (as long as your ratio can absorb that 4GB without dipping below 1:1).

Re:IRC log of convo with seanap of Demonoid.

[19thNervousBreakdown]

If you get a "closed" response, that means something is answering for that IP. The ISP is unlikely to do this in the event of a takedown, they'll just cut access. Even if they didn't completely cut access and only disallow inbound, they still would more than likely drop the packet instead of returning ICMP port unreachable responses. SYN scans these days are rarely any more penetrating than a regular TCP connect(). If I had a remote box, I'd do my best to make sure it had some kind of connectivity even in single-user mode.

Demonoid shit:

[Kildjean]

Demonoid shit:

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] .. Query with (ernesto)/(~[e-mail]) opened on (Tuesday, September 25th 2007, 18:00:54).
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:00.54] .. Total queries: (40)/(~0.7 per day)
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:00.54] .. Queries today: (1)
[05:26] *seanap* [09/25/07 - 18:00.54] .. Common channels: (+#demonoid)
[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

Re:Must be a hardware glitch

[Dr Caleb]

For those that don't know your revelation - MAC address are stripped by the first router they encounter. So, if the *iaa got a MAC address, they did so internal to the ISP's infrastructure. Therefore, they were illegally inside the ISP's network as there is no other way to obtain this address.

'Entrapment' is a single edged razor. ;)

Re:Finger in the dike...

[MarcoAtWork]

A dyke is a lesbian. A dike is a dam.

actually that is not true, look it up in a dictionary and you'll see that dike and dyke are synonims.

dyke
          n 1: offensive terms for a lesbian who is noticeably masculine
                    [syn: butch, dike]
          2: a barrier constructed to contain the flow or water or to
                keep out the sea [syn: dam, dike, levee]
          v : enclose with a dike; "dike the land to protect it from
                  water" [syn: dike]

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

and from another

dike
noun {C} ANOTHER SPELLING OF
    dyke

Re:hmm

[shark72]

"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.

• Canadian consumers pay a private copying levy on some recordable media; notably CD-Rs.
• Copying copyrighted music is legal in some circumstances; in particular, single copies, for private use.
• The consensus in legal circules is that downloading is thus allowed under the private copying exception. As Michael Geist (who knows far more about Canadian copyright law than anybody here) puts it, "downloading music in Canada for personal purposes is arguably legal as it is compensated activity covered by the private copying levy." (emphasis mine.) But there is no law that states that downloading is legal. It's yet to be tested in court, and I don't think it ever will be, since the money is in chasing after the distributors, not the people doing the private copying.

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.

Re:Finger in the dyke...

[Seumas]

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).

Re:Legal?

[Emetophobe]

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.

Re:I hate Torrents

[Gadgit]

Typically in a cable modem environment, the upstream ports on a CMTS are bundled together to a single downstream. In this sense, please remember that upstream is what going from the internet to the CMTS, to the cable modem (essentially the download path) and the downstream is your upload going in the opposite direction. In a typical Cisco 7200 CMTS each blade has 5 upstream ports and 1 downstream ports. If I remember correctly, each blade is recommended to serve approximately 1000 modems. Since cable is spaced out over various frequencies on the cable plant, a larger allotment of the frequencies not being used by cable TV are given to the upstream as that is 'typically' what is in higher demand. I know I would be pissed if I was getting 128Kb down and 3Mb up. With newer technologies (ie fiber) this problem should be alleviated.