a little slice of geek

Demonoid is alive and kicking!

That’s right, the popular, semi-private, Netherlands Canadian Brazilian/Ukranian (sp?) hosted bit-torrent search engine and tracker is now back on-line and fully functioning for the first time in EXACTLY 6 months.

To recap for those who have been living under a rock for the past year, here’s a quick account:

• Demonoid is hosted in the Netherlands
• Dutch anti-piracy authority BREIN pressures demonoids’ ISP, “Leaseweb” for a takedown
• Time passes and Deimos (demonoids’ admin and owner) decides the Netherlands are not safe anymore
• Demonoid servers are moved to Canada (the apparent safe-haven due to lack of copyright laws)
• After a few weeks downtime, demonoid is back up and running in Canada, but not for long (for reference, this is June 07)
• Canada didn’t last long, at the beginning of September 07, the CRIA put pressure on demonoids ISP’s and forced a momentary takedown. This takedown was reversed and demonoid came back online, still in Canada but blocking all traffic from Canadian sources, both to the tracker and the HTTP server side of things
• November 9th, the fateful day, after continued and extremely persistent pressure and hassle from the CRIA demonoid closed it’s doors, seemingly for good. Until now that is.

TO fill in the gaps after novemebr 9th to present day, well, a lot of small thigs happened, for example around mid-February demonoids trackers came online, aparently in the ukraine, this was short lived, approx 2 days later they disappeared again.

A forum was quickly set up on the day of demonoids closure, there was very little ACTUAL information in this forum, there was a lot of people offering money, alot of people offering solutions on where to host the new servers (obviously assuming there would still BE servers) but only one or two official words of wisdom from Deimos, which mainly consisted of telling us he had personal issues he needed to sort out before the site would come into play.

Well, it seems these personal issues, whatever they may be, are still present, Deimos has officially signed off from demonoid and handed over the running and administration to a personal friend, he has asked that respect be given to him the same as it was to Deimos.

As a side note, all existing user accounts are active, as long as they were active at the time of closure in November. Registrations are closed, so for the moment at least, demonoid is remaining private.