Popular BitTorrent Tracker Demonoid Killed Off

Yes, it’s true, after many ups and downs, along with a massive DDoS attack last week, Demonoid, the invitation-only bittorrent tracker is down and out, having been busted by local authorities. Demonoid was hosted in Ukraine with a company called ColoCall, the country’s largest datacentre. However, Ukrainian authorities have now forced the site permanently offline, “Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid and sealed them,” an anonymous ColoCall source confirmed. “Some equipment was not seized, but now it does not work, and we were forced to terminate the agreement with the site.” However, while Demonoid’s servers were in custody, the site’s admin is not, so the site may yet resurrect somewhere else, perhaps on a different domain. However this is by no means certain.

It appears that Demonoid was taken out and shot to please the USA, since it coincides with the very first trip of Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky to the USA with, unsurprisingly, copyright infringement on the agenda, likely at the very top. What makes this whole shambles so galling, is that Demonoid’s activities weren’t even in violation of Ukrainian law. On top of this, of course there has been no due process to determine Demonoid’s guilt, just some pressure from the USA against a much smaller country instead. Nice.