In February 2010, however, an event occurred which rocked the boat. Citing copyright concerns, authorities seized the domain name of Torrents.ru, the country’s biggest tracker with millions of members.

The site continues today under a new domain, Rutracker.org, with its troubles seemingly behind it. The same cannot be said for its sister operation, the adult torrent site Pornolab.net.

Despite being Russia’s 93rd most popular site, Pornolab chose to operate out of a datacenter in Ukraine. The authorities there say it was a huge operation, serving 2 million registered users. With the recent demise of Empornium and PureTNA, this may mean it was the biggest porn tracker in the world. In the last 24 hours, however, all that came to an end.

According to police in the capital, Kiev, yesterday their officers swooped on the site’s datacenter and seized its servers. Unusually for a case of this type, the complaints that led to this action were not related to copyright infringement but to the unlawful distribution of pornography.

The police are citing contraventions of Part 2 of Article 301 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine which covers crimes against children using the Internet – in this case the importation, production, sale and distribution of pornographic material without age restriction.

In addition to attempting to bring the operators of the site to justice, the police say that they will also try to identify Ukrainian users of the site. Due to the nature of BitTorrent – downloaders automatically upload too – they too are being accused of the unlawful distribution of restricted material.

In the past, Article 301 has been used by the government to shut down various publications deemed to be offensive, including literature aimed at the gay community. Punishments can extend from large fines to 5 years in prison.

Ukraine is also home to Demonoid, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent trackers. Unlike Pornolab, Demonoid expressly forbids the tracking of any adult-related content. It also goes one step further, probably to ensure it stays the correct side of the Ukrainian authorities, by banning all local traffic. Pornolab did not and according to estimates, up to 700,000 of its members called Ukraine home.

This is not the first time Ukrainian police have shut down a an adult themed torrent site. In May 2010, xsweet.net.ua was targeted for the same reasons and its 35-year-old operator arrested.

Source: Police Raid Russia’s Largest Porn BitTorrent Site

Threats from the movie and music industry aside, Demonoid has also been the target for dozens of large and small DoS attacks. Usually these attacks only slow the site down a bit, and in the worst case they result in several hours of downtime before Demonoid staff takes care of the problem.

During mid-June reports started to come in to TorrentFreak from Chinese and Taiwanese Demonoid users who complained that the site was inaccessible to them. Both the site and tracker were no longer functioning. Browsers reported a “server not found” error and torrents with a Demonoid tracker returned a “error: hostname not found” message.

For the affected users this could mean only two things. Since Demonoid was working fine in other countries, either Chinese and Taiwanese ISPs has started to block Demonoid’s website and tracker, or the people running Demonoid had decided to block IP-ranges from these countries.

To find out more about the origin of the connection issues, a TorrentFreak reader based in Taiwan decided to contact his Internet provider, who dismissed the first option after some investigating.

“We cannot access Demonoid.com either,” he was informed by his ISP. “We attempted to access the site via the other ISPs in Taiwan but all these attempts failed. We determined that there is no connection problem. The Demonoid server is rejecting all requests from Taiwanese IP-addresses.”

Despite the fact that Demonoid’s owner has never responded to our inquiries in the past, we asked for a comment on the blocking issue and got a swift response. Indeed, as we initially guessed, Demonoid is actively blocking IP-ranges in Taiwan and parts of China because that’s where the DoS attacks come from.

“There is a DoS coming mostly from there,” Demonoid’s admin told TorrentFreak in a brief reply.

We have yet to receive an answer to the question whether the block is temporary or permanent. In the meantime, affected users can bypass the restrictions by using a VPN-service. Both ItsHidden and VPNReactor offer free, but limited accounts.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Yesterday, Demonoid once again disappeared leaving its users behind with lots of questions and in a mild state of panic. As is often the case, Demonoid’s admins have remained silent and rumors of a hostile intervention have quickly grown. Thus far, however, there is no reason to assume that the downtime is caused by ‘legal’ reasons. It has to be assumed that the site is facing hardware or network problems.

On the positive side, we can report that Demonoid’s trackers appear to be working just fine. This is no guarantee that the site itself will make a quick return though. Last September the site vanished into thin air and although the tracker returned early November, it took until Christmas before the site was fully operational again.

Last year’s downtime was not unique either. Since 2007 the site has been offline for more than 13 months in total, due to all kinds of problems including issues with the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA. Hardware issues and trouble finding a reliable hosting outfit were some of the other explanations that were given in the past.

In a rare interview with Demonoid’s current hosting provider a few months ago we found out that DDoS-attacks and legal issues are unlikely to take the site offline, so we can only guess what the real reason for the ccurrent outage is. The wait has started, once again.

Update: Demonoid is responding (very slow) to some people, and the reason for the downtime seems to be a DDoS attack after all.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Despite this extended downtime, the semi-private tracker came in at an impressive 20th place in our list of Top 25 torrent sites of 2009.

With hundreds and thousands of daily visitors and an Alexa rank of 657 last month, it’s undoubtedly a popular site, especially since one needs an invite to gain access.

Well, normally that’s the case. Currently the situation is different.

Whether this is a bug (maybe as a result of the admins having to rewrite some of the site code after the crash) or entirely intentional, we just don’t know, but currently it seems that anyone can browse and download torrents from Demonoid without being a member.

We’re not exactly sure how long this has been the case, but it has been a little while now, perhaps since the site returned after its break.

Demonoid, it seems, has changed from a semi-private to a public tracker.

Enjoy!

Update: A few people have mentioned that it’s been possible to download 3 to 5 torrents a week as a guest in the past. After downloading a dozen today, we’ve still not reached any limit.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

An update on the situation was not good, with the site owners forecasting severe data loss. Some user data and torrent files were predicted to be lost forever and the site’s code had been seriously damaged.

Then, on November 5th, Demonoid’s tracker began to function again, which was followed by another announcement by the site owners. None of the negative rumors and speculation were true – Demonoid would soon return.

“The parts of the site code that got deleted are being rewritten and should be ready soon. We are also working to try and minimize the data loss as much as possible,” they announced.

Since then, nothing much has happened, but a few hours ago Demonoid users discovered they are to get an early Christmas present.

At around 1:30am EST, Demonoid reappeared and started accepting logins from registered users.

“Hello! We are currently testing the newly written code. More downtime is hopefully not necessary, but might be a possibility. Welcome back, we missed you!” the admins said in an announcement.

In respect of the concerns over data loss, it appears that the latest database entries run to Friday September 11th 2009, but of course, Demonoid users are already uploading new torrents, reported to be as many as 150 thus far.

A TorrentFreak reader who as been following the situation since the site’s return told us: “Some users on the IRC channel (which still is active) report not being able to log in. Those that can log in have all noticed that their ratios were pretty much what they remembered them to be before the long downtime. I was able to log in just fine on my first attempt with correct ratio as well.”

As the site deals with various issues, it became a little unstable around 2 to 3 hours after its initial return and then went down again around 4:00am EST.

Although Demonoid’s RSS feeds aren’t functioning, at the time of writing the site appears to be running again, and displaying their famous demon logo all decked out in a santa hat.

Christmas really has come early for Demonoid fans. All that is need now is a gift for everyone in the community – a period of open registrations.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.