TorrentFreak

Private torrent sites have a much lower profile than say, The Pirate Bay, but there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of them online, going about their business behind closed, invite-only walls. However, when it comes to providing access to content, private trackers are quite different from their public counterparts. Instead of a Pirate Bay-style free-for-all, access to pirate content is held back by site admins and only unlocked when members contribute to the health of the community.

Despite regular complaints from rightsholders and direct pressure from the United States Trade Representative, little has been done to shut down or even damage Bulgaria’s Zamunda BitTorrent tracker. This so-called “Notorious pirate market” has continued against the odds but during the last few days a carefully planned operation has torn the site apart.

All torrent sites rely on seeders, people who effectively donate their upstream bandwidth to provide content for others. Some go the extra mile and use a seedbox, a server-based piece of kit that pumps content into torrent swarms enabling faster downloads for everyone. While this is seen as a good thing by the majority, a private tracker specializing in high definition content has just introduced a set of the toughest and most baffling seedbox rules ever to grace the torrent scene.

In a surprise move the popular BitTorrent site KickassTorrents moved to a new domain today. The immediate effect of the switch is that after the ISP blockade last week, some UK users are once again able to access the site. This is the second domain change in two years for the infamous torrent site. Previously, KickassTorrents traded its .com domain to prevent it from being seized by U.S. authorities.

More than half a year has passed since Demonoid went offline but many of its former users still haven’t lost faith. They cling on to every string of hope and this has led some to believe that the site returned as a meta-search engine under the new domain Demonoid.mk. While most people who are familiar with the old Demonoid know that the new site just trades on the brand of the famous torrent tracker, quite a few believe it’s a legit incarnation.

There are no signs that The Pirate Bay will disappear anytime soon, but pirate preppers anticipating such a doomsday scenario can now download an updated and improved copy of the world’s most resilient BitTorrent site. A backup of all crucial data has been packed into a tiny 75 megabyte archive, small enough to carry with you at all times. The archive of more than 2 million magnet links has received a seal of approval from The Pirate Bay team and is now up for grabs.

Major private BitTorrent trackers including What.cd and IPTorrents have been taken offline by Denial of Service attacks. The disruptions are being coordinated by an individual who had a fight last year with What.cd after the site failed to give him an invitation. That particular dispute was followed up by DDoS attacks against a range of sites including The Pirate Bay but the promised daily follow-ups failed to emerge. The question now is whether these new attacks are a prelude to something bigger.