Demonoid Tracker Back Online, Now Hosted in Malaysia

Site still down, but something seems to be brewing at the once popular BitTorrent tracker site.

It was last November that a Canadian ISP caved to pressure by the Canadian Recording Industry Association(CRIA) and discontinued the rental of servers to the very popular Demonoid BitTorrent tracker site.

A message on the site read:

The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

The move followed a rollercoaster of an affair in which it was first forced to leave the Netherlands for Canada after the anti-piracy outfit BREIN hassled its ISP hosts there as well.

Then last October it subsequently began blocking Canadian visitors after threats from the CRIA. Not satisfied with shortchanging Canadians, it then moved to have the site closed to everyone by of course pressuring Demonoid's ISP to pull the plug, which it did.

Now comes interesting news that the Demonoid tracker is active and that the site is now hosted in Malaysia, both very welcome bits of news to the BitTorrent community.

c:>tracert inferno.demonoid.com

Tracing route to inferno.demonoid.com [124.217.253.30]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 * * * Request timed out.
2 115 ms 12 ms 11 ms 192.168.1.1
3 13 ms 11 ms 21 ms host-181-98-230-24.midco.net [24.230.98.181]
4 73 ms 11 ms 12 ms 24.220.3.49
5 49 ms 53 ms 14 ms 24.220.38.93
6 69 ms 18 ms 15 ms POS3-3.GW2.MSP3.ALTER.NET [157.130.98.77]
7 96 ms 121 ms 15 ms 0.so-0-1-0.CL2.MSP3.ALTER.NET [152.63.66.62]
8 77 ms 116 ms 76 ms 0.so-7-2-0.XT2.LAX9.ALTER.NET [152.63.1.97]
9 76 ms 83 ms 222 ms 0.so-3-0-0.XR2.LAX9.ALTER.NET [152.63.115.165]
10 76 ms 242 ms 211 ms POS7-0.IG2.LAX9.ALTER.NET [152.63.116.85]
11 302 ms 267 ms 253 ms hgc-gw.customer.alter.net [63.65.154.62]
12 381 ms 253 ms 262 ms Se5-0-1.gw02.glsfb.time.net.my [203.121.99.5]
13 259 ms 269 ms 417 ms 211.25.27.38
14 341 ms 255 ms 254 ms 203.121.72.52
15 260 ms 257 ms 263 ms 124.217.253.30

Trace complete.

c:>

The first reports of the tracker's return came a few days ago on February 16th in the SubDemon forums. "It was a joy to me to find an original demonoid torrent ( Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters- the movie ), and appears the tracker is active," writes a user. "What's up?"

But, unfortunately that's where the situation still stands, "What is up?" As usual Deimos, the Demonoid admin, is incommunicado leaving fans of the site to guess for themselves about what it all means. I must say though, the fact that it's now hosted in Malaysia is great news and hints that a site return may be possible.