Demonoid Domains Go Up For Sale | Hacker News Reader

Demonoid Domains Go Up For Sale

torrentfreak.com

49 pointsuladzislau23 comments

I know piracy is always rampant and for every site taken down there will be a new popping up, but the shut down of ISOHunt, Demonoid, even the PirateBay is only offering magnet now seems to be taking a hit.

For those of who us who aren't active in the community, the sites that we used to find torrents is slowly diminishing, or at least the quality of the sites is diminishing.

isoHunt is shut down? (I don't follow this stuff much, but I saw some of the people from isoHunt at DEFCON and the website still seems to be online; I could totally be misunderstanding the situation, though.)

HaloZero could be referring to this news: https://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-forced-to-shut-down-in-the-...

That article is from 2010. ISOHunt is alive and well. You can do there right now: isohunt [dot] com

I stand corrected, I didn't know they came back up.

Rather than being big, public, Wal-Mart-esque torrent sites (where one can find a little of everything), most sites are going the route of Private Trackers and only specializing in TV Shows, or Music, or whatever.

Also mininova.org went legal, they're not technically dead but for piracy and for the overwhelming majority of their users who only wanted them for piracy they are.

PirateBay is using magnet URLs to make them near-impossible to shut down. It'll be interesting if more sites follow their footsteps.

How do magnet links make them harder to shutdown? Is there a significant legal benefit to them over torrent files, given that as a user the two options function nearly identically.

Magnet links take up much less space and it's much easier to mirror TPB

They're using DHT, a "distributed hash table". Basically this means you can find "peers" (other people that have or want the data for a particular torrent) without needing a centralised tracker. This means if TPB goes down, everyone's torrents keep on working.

Now the magnet links mean you don't even need to download a torrent file, you JUST need that magic hash, which uses the DHT to find the torrent metadata itself, as well as the data. Neat! All you need to disseminate data to other people is to give them that tiny hash, you don't even need a website for that - you could spray paint a QR code somewhere.

The last part of the equation is that anyone can download a dump of The Pirate Bay to put up their own clone, so even if the canonical site does get taken down, all the torrents will live on.

What really sucks is that the admins of demonoid didn't release an archive with all magnet links/data like thepiratebay did.

Anyway. There are still hundreds if not thousands private trackers out there.

I fear a copyright lobbyist organisation will buy the domain, relaunch it under the moniker of a torrent website and then track user information to sue people for exorbitant amounts of money that artists will never see a single cent of. It's obvious the domain is going to sell quite well, the amount of backlinks and traffic to the site alone is enough to drive the price up into double digit millions. The domain will either fall into the wrong hands or it will fall into the right ones.

So how long until someone makes the first private tracker plugin for a social network? It would be some bona fide utility from these things, at least...

facebook would shut it down instantly. A "Share with your friends" app would be awesome, and a powerful tool, but it wouldn't last a minute. Likewise, Google+.

Which is another good reason for us to hope an open social web continues to grow.

Just wanted to point at a nostalgic event from 2009, when Facebook began censoring Piratebay links: http://torrentfreak.com/facebook-blocks-all-pirate-bay-links...

I might be remembering wrong, but I think in the very early days of facebook there was something that allowed you to file share through it that Mark had added in. I believe it was taken out though because the hostility that would have come from the entertainment industry wasn't worth the risk.

Looking for the link.

It was called Wirehog and was a seperate website which was linked to Facebook users accounts. Sean Parker encouraged Mark to shut it down (although Mark seemed interested in the idea at the time) because he saw another Napster situation coming and knew Facebook could be big without the hassle.

How much longer will usenet be safe? I'm dreading the day...

The people that run the major subscription services must be making way more money than Demonoid ever did.

I am surprised serious pirates bother with torrents, as you say Usenet is the easy way to go, buy a subscription. Your only point of failure is if your usenet provider is a front or cooperating with the MPAA

Anyone have an idea how much could these domains go for or how they could be monetized legally?

The obvious way to monetize it is to take advantage of all the incoming links from when it was a big torrent site. Just fill it full of stuff and it might rank highly for lots of keywords.

The h33t.com logo shows the demonoid logo now. Maybe they work together now?

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