The site has grown steadily over the years and continues to do so, despite a setback in court this summer. In fact, today the 10 billionth torrent file was downloaded from Mininova, an impressive achievement to say the least.

Although the site is still going strong, with the increasing visitor numbers month after month, things have definitely changed behind the scenes.

When asked for a comment on whether they had predicted the site would grow this rapidly, Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak: “We never really expected anything. We don’t really tend to focus on these numbers, we are just trying to run the site the best way we can.”

Previously the Mininova team welcomed these download records with more enthusiasm, but times have changed. In common with their counterparts at the Pirate Bay, we get the impression that the torrent site is not their core business anymore, which is not really that surprising considering the legal troubles Mininova faces.

In August, Mininova lost in court against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The judge ruled that the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer had to clean up its site and remove all torrents that link to infringing content. Mininova has yet to decide whether or not they will appeal the case.

Possibly related to this uncertain future, Erik said that they are not going to release any new features or major upgrades to the site anytime soon. “At the moment we are mainly focusing on other projects besides Mininova,” he informed us.

This year has undoubtedly been a turbulent one for Mininova. Nevertheless, we want to congratulate the Mininova team for reaching this new milestone, whether they like it or not.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“The idea is to sell USB drives using this brand,” said Sandryds Handel spokesman Bengt Wessborg.

“We saw that it was not already allocated to someone else. It was not registered.”

The company went on to register an almost exact copy of the logo, differing only slightly in color and lacking a capital letter on the word ‘Bay’. The move was accepted by PRV, Sweden’s Patent and Registration Office.

Ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde was not happy with the move.

“They [Sandryds] knew that [the logo] was not owned or created by them and they [registered the logo] to attain a position of power against The Pirate Bay,” he wrote in an email protest to PRV.

After earlier saying that they were prepared to strike a deal with The Pirate Bay over the logo, that offer appears to have come to pass. Following discussions with Sunde, Sandryds have now backtracked and agreed to de-register the trademark. But they don’t come away empty-handed.

Company spokesman Bengt Wessborg told SR they are happy with their achievement, having secured permission to use the Pirate Bay logo on a new product.

“We have had permission from The Pirate Bay to sell a media player with the logo on,” said Wessborg.

Although the mechanism by which Sandryds achieved this permission was more than a little dubious, admittedly the choice of end-product to display the logo seems the perfect fit.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Those who take a few minutes to browse through the site will discover all kinds of other neat features. One of the latest additions to the site is the option to download files directly, through partner site httpTorrents.

The integration with httpTorrents gives users the option to download the files directly without having to use a BitTorrent client. Music tracks can also be streamed directly from the site itself. The service works in a similar way to most other files hosting services such as Rapidshare, but only works with torrents and doesn’t allow users to upload files themselves.

The owner of the site told TorrentFreak that direct http downloads may be useful to users who have restricted access to BitTorrent, such as those whose ISP or firewall blocks or slows down transfers. There are currently 4000 files available as a direct download, but this number is growing rapidly.

KickassTorrents’ users can submit a request for files that are not yet available as direct downloads. “If someone clicks on the http download button at KickassTorrents and the file is not available yet, it places it in the request queue at httpTorrents. Only popular torrents are downloaded during the beta stage,” TorrentFreak was told by the site’s owner.

“KickassTorrents and httpTorrents are not directly connected. However we use their API to get hashes of the torrents available for the direct download,” the owner said, adding that if the beta tests are successful this API will also be available to other torrent sites.

Everyone can use httpTorrents, but in the future the download speed and number of simultaneous downloads will be limited for free users. Those who want to use it more than occasionally will have the option to sign up for a premium account without restrictions.

Since the service is actually hosting files (on an external CDN) it might run into complaints from copyright holders. The owner of the site told TorrentFreak that he’s not too worried about the legal implications, and hopes that a takedown policy will prevent the site from running into trouble.

It will be interesting to see how the service develops in the future, and we will definitely be keeping a close eye on it. Although direct downloads may be preferred in some cases, for those looking for (free) high speed downloads, BitTorrent probably remains the best solution.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Some user data and torrent files are unfortunately gone for good and the site’s code has been permanently damaged. This resulted in the extended downtime that persists through today.

Since Demonoid’s owners are not very talkative it didn’t take long before imposters created their own news about the site, causing wild rumors to spread among Demonoid’s fans. Some reported that the site would return under a new name and others claimed that the authorities had permanently shut it down.

In a rare update, Demonoid staff have informed their users that none of this is true. Demonoid will return and things will return to normal as soon as possible.

“There are some rumors about the site shutting down for good and we [sic] starting a new tracker next year. The rumors are of course, lies. There are no plans of shutting down or creating another site,” Demonoid staff write.

Aside from refuting those rumors, the staff update brings more good news. A full comeback of the Demonoid site is looming. Parts of the code had to be rewritten in order to get the site back up and this process is almost finished.

“The parts of the site code that got deleted are being rewritten and should be ready soon. We are also working to try and minimize the data loss as much as possible,” the Demonoid team adds.

As reported earlier, the tracker is already back up and running smoothly, and considering the latest update from Demonoid staff, it shouldn’t take long before the site itself is also recovered.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Today the project releases the film ‘In Guantanamo’ which makes a worldwide premiere on BitTorrent. The film documents filmmaker David Miller’s three day tour of the controversial camps, invited by the U.S. government.

“Although the event was presented as a chance to ’see inside’ the working of Guantanamo, it was in fact a carefully staged PR exercise designed to yield predictable, stale, controlled media images,” we read on the Gitmo’s VODO release page.

The film has been officially released on VODO today and is currently featured on both isoHunt and The Pirate Bay. With help from these sites and several other partners well known to the file-sharing community, the project is able to attract a lot of eyeballs for upcoming and already established film talent.

VODO founder Jamie King told TorrentFreak that the project’s first film performed really well. “I think the first VODO release was a great success,” he said. “Around 250,000 downloads through our DISCO partners — as the filmmaker put it, that was more than his terrestrial TV release in the UK.”

As the project’s name already reveals, downloaders are encouraged to donate to the filmmakers if they appreciate their work. King told TorrentFreak that quite a few downloaders have donated generously. Not enough to fund a new movie obviously, but as the project gains more attention it is likely to bring in some serious income for the filmmakers.

In Guantanamo can be downloaded for free here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

As always, Demonoid staff kept quiet about the site’s future and all its users could do is wait for a sign of life, which quietly arrived earlier today.

A few hours ago Demonoid’s tracker started to respond again. It appears that it’s still hosted in Ukraine, and although the frontend of the site hasn’t updated yet, this comeback might indicate that the site is preparing for a full return.

The current situation stirs memories of Demonoid’s downtime back in 2007. At the time the tracker also returned before the site itself became accessible again, which took two more months. Many Demonoid members are undoubtedly hoping that this chain of events will complete more quickly this time around.

When the site returns, it’s likely that members that joined the site more recently will have to sign up again, while others may have to resubmit their torrents. “A loss of some months worth of activity including registered users and torrent submissions is to be expected,” Demonoid staff warned earlier.

The tracker’s return in itself is already being welcomed by the thousands of users whose torrent clients are not supporting trackerless torrents. Many of them might have been staring at several unfinished downloads for weeks, and now they are finally able to complete their downloads.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

When writing this article we were faced with a problem. Technically there isn’t really an alternative to Demonoid, as the site acted both as a private and public tracker with a library of hundreds of thousands of user uploaded torrent files. We have to admit that the sites listed here don’t quite compare to the ‘late’ Demonoid, but when combined they go someway to filling the gap for those struggling for ideas.

We previously listed 25 Pirate Bay alternatives. Because many of these could also serve as Demonoid replacements we decided not to include any duplicates here, hence the absence of sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and Torrentz. Here are some of the options that Demonoid users have while the site is down. If you’re looking for high speed downloads you could also consider to try Usenet instead (our Usenet guide).

Join another private tracker

The Internet is populated with thousands of smaller BitTorrent trackers that require users to signup, mostly through an invite system like Demonoid’s. Luckily for those new to the private tracker phenomenon, there are always a few dozen sites that allow newcomers to join without being invited. We’ve listed 5 of these sites below, more are available at Btracs.

1. TorrentZilla

2. TorrentsForAll

3. All4Nothin

4. Midnight-Torrents

5. ThePeerHub

Switch to Public BitTorrent Indexers and Meta-Search Engines

One of the downsides of most (smaller) private trackers is that they don’t offer as many torrents as Demonoid did. Those looking for more obscure or niche content are often better off at one of the public torrent indexes or meta-search engines. We’ve listed 5 lesser known torrent sites below. Although these are perfectly suited to find the latest torrents, we have to admit that their existence relies on other torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Mininova (where they get torrents from), and public trackers such as OpenBitTorrent and PublicBT.

6. KickassTorrents

7. yourBitTorrent

8. TorrentDownloads

9. AliveTorrents

10. RSSTorrents

We understand that this list isn’t complete, we could have mentioned isoHunt’s new project Hexagon and there are many other torrent sites we could have included, but we have a secret weapon – the readers of TorrentFreak – who can list alternative sites by the dozen.

So, in the spirit of sharing, if you know a public or private site which is open for signups that is not already listed here or in our Pirate Bay alternative article, we encourage you to list it in the comment section below.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

What’s most interesting about the site is that its users can also browse torrents based on an actor or director, a feature that other torrent sites lack. With just a single click users can list all the films where Patrick Swayze made an appearance, or all the films directed by Quentin Tarantino.

“The actors and directors can be added by the users when they upload a torrent file,” Files24 founder Oleg told TorrentFreak. “Also if we recognize the movie, we automatically check and fill in any missing data,” he added.

Although the site also lists music and games, thus far these advanced searches only work for movies. TV-shows are oddly enough listed in the movies section but Oleg told TorrentFreak that a TV and software section will be added in the near future.

The navigational structure and design of the site is not the only thing that’s unique to Files24 though. According to one of the site’s founders, Files24 also has a dedicated tracker that is optimized to facilitate the highest download speeds.

“We track which country users come from and the tracker then gives priority to peers from their own country. As a result users can download at much higher speeds,” Files24’s Oleg told TorrentFreak.

One of the downsides of the site is that users are only permitted to upload torrents with a Files24 tracker, so this may severely limit the number of torrents that will be added to the site. On the other hand this is also one of the upsides, since this will stop a great deal of spam and fake files from being uploaded.

Files24 went live yesterday and currently lists some 40,000 torrents. It is clear that the site is still work in progress but the new features the site has to offer will be welcomed by many BitTorrent users. Of course they will also be frowned upon by Hollywood. Nothing new there.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

This level of coverage is a great accomplishment for a new torrent site, but the fun didn’t last very long. Those who took a closer look at the site could easily see that TaffyBox was simply using the resources of another torrent site, BTjunkie, without informing the site’s founder.

Needless to say, the BTjunkie team was not amused when they found out and they responded by preventing TaffyBox from accessing the site’s backend. As a result, the newly launched site no longer functions.

“Sites like TaffyBox drain costly resources without putting into the pot. Most sites that utilize our backend reciprocate and when they don’t we ban them,” the founder of BTjunkie told TorrentFreak. “He just ripped off the site and stripped the ads,” he added.

The disconnection which rendered TaffyBox useless didn’t go unnoticed by Jake who runs the site. Just minutes after BTjunkie disallowed the newcomer from using their resources he offered to link back to BTjunkie, but unfortunately for him that is not enough to earn a reprieve.

BTjunkie’s founder explained to TorrentFreak that those who want to use the search have to link to the site’s download page instead of hotlinking the torrents. “You would think the least he would do is put some reference to BTjunkie, not wait until I cut him off and offer to add one link,” he added.

What happened to TaffyBox is probably a good lesson for all the people that want to use existing torrent indexers to create their own torrent search engine. Sites like BTjunkie don’t see any problems in sharing some of their resources, as long as they get something in return. After all, BitTorrent is all about reciprocity.

Update: TaffyBox switched to The Pirate Day and seems to be working again.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Once upon a time there was a popular TV show eD2K link site called The Real World. Of course, it wasn’t long before the site’s popularity caused it have legal problems, and in August 2005 it all came crashing down.

However, just as people recently copied The Pirate Bay when waters started to get choppy, the same thing also happened with The Real World, with the site’s database being shared around on eD2K. Soon after The Free World was born, run by an Austrian national, but that site didn’t last long either and was shut down following MPAA action.

On October 23rd 2005, exactly four years ago today, yet another site came out of the ashes. That site, TV Underground (TVU), remains to this today and claims to be the biggest site for eD2K link TV shows. TVU has a unique feature – it is believed to be the only site to run its very own eD2K server.

“We take pride in running the only P2P server sponsored by the P2P community
and not by some shady porn site,” TVU admin CheGuevara told TorrentFreak. For those interested, stats for the server (currently indexing 8.6million files) can be found here.

While eD2K remains popular, BitTorrent is the current darling of the P2P file-sharing world and is particularly popular with fans of TV shows. This is clearly something the TV Underground team wish to exploit.

“We have launched a new version of our site today to allow users to submit torrents,” CheGuevara told us. “At first we will allow users to submit torrents to seasons that already have eD2K links, but we are planning to expand to torrent-only seasons and per show torrents after the launch.”

So what motivated this development at TVU?

“We love ed2k, but we acknowledge that BitTorrent has it’s own advantages and some users prefer to use that,” they explained.

“Our mission is to spread quality TV Shows to every corner of the world. We think the current system of how the rest of the world has to wait months and years to see a show that has been shown in the US or elsewhere as totally unfair,” CheGuevara notes. “I myself am a big fan of House. It is on Season 6 right now, but where I live they are just only showing Season 4… Fair? No. You get the point.”

TV Underground will have to go a long way in the torrent world to catch up with the likes of EZTV, but with the site currently down because of maintenance, many will be grateful for an alternative.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In the months that followed its traffic exploded and the site soon settled itself among the ten most popular torrent sites, with more than a million unique visitors a day.

NowTorrents attributed its success mostly to Google. The owner had spent a lot of effort in optimizing the site for search engines and this certainly paid off, as 90% of the visitors came through the search mogul. But two weeks ago, everything changed. Suddenly the traffic wave from Google was reduced to a trickle, causing the number of visitors to plunge.

NowTorrents’ founder told TorrentFreak that he tried to contact Google about the issue, but the company said it couldn’t comment on the rankings of search results. It’s clear that the site has not been removed from Google, as all of its pages remained indexed. However, NowTorrents pages do show up much lower in the search results, an indication that Google may have penalized the site.

It is not unlikely that Google decided to downgrade NowTorrents because it was a little ‘too well’ optimized, so to speak. Google has been known to punish sites that try to artificially inflate their search rankings. Although the site’s founder is not aware of anything that might have upset Google, the traffic drop was irreversible.

For the site’s founder there was no other option than to start over from scratch. In fact, he took the opportunity to relaunch the site under a new name, hoping to get back some of the Google juice. He was already working on a new version of the site, so the timing couldn’t have been better.

The new and improved NowTorrents has been renamed to TorrentFly today, and regular visitors will notice quite a few changes to the site’s layout and search functionality.

One of the new features is that members can not only can pick which sites TorrentFly should search, but also in what order the results should appear. Another advantage for members is that they won’t see any advertising.

“Aside from the layout change and added features, TorrentFly has a ton of minor changes and improvements to the backend, which should result in better and faster search results,” the site’s founder told TorrentFreak.

Indeed, the search results on TorrentFly appear within a few milliseconds and the changes to the site are a step in the right direction. Now all TorrentFly can hope for is that Google stays friendly.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One major site that has showed an acute aversion to saying just about anything to outsiders is Demonoid. This semi-private site has nevertheless made the news dozens of times, most recently due to its recent downtime, as reported here on TorrentFreak.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” said Demonoid in a statement six weeks ago, warning that downtime could run to “…days maybe, until we can change the power circuit.”

However, TorrentFreak has received possibly conflicting information from Demonoid’s host, Colocall in Ukraine, who said in a statement: “There were no problems with power supply at the location where Demonoid servers are hosted.”

While information about Demonoid is always scarce, information coming out of Colocall is a rarity too, since the company has previously refused to speak with journalists about their most infamous customer. That’s why it was of great interest when Ukrainian blogger Pavel Golubovskiy contacted TorrentFreak to say he had netted an interview with Colocall. Here is a translation of the questions related to Demonoid;

Why did you choose to host Demonoid?

The customer came to us and ordered a particular service. For us it wasn’t a political decision, Demonoid is an ordinary client for us.

What exactly do you host, the inferno.demonoid.com tracker?

They brought their servers, which are now located in our data center. We don’t know what information is stored there – we do not have access to this information. These servers are supported remotely by Demonoid technical staff.

Is there a way to contact the Demonoid admins?

They will not answer you. Many people want to contact them – journalists, fans, police, local authorities from different countries. But the Demonoid admins have a very selective approach to e-mail correspondence. When the police wanted to contact them, I specifically warned the admins that they had to respond to this request.

So the police already inquired about Demonoid?

Well, our local authorities are interested in Demonoid all the time. Rightholders associations are constantly trying to put pressure on us, including pressure with the help of Ukrainian authorities. We redirect them to the admins, but do not interfere or try to negotiate.

Are they putting any serious pressure on you?

It sounds strange, but Ukraine is still a jural state. Therefore IFPI’s personal opinion is just that, their personal opinion, despite the fact that the budgets of the IFPI participants are comparable to the budget of the Ukraine.

Aren’t you afraid that there can be a similar situation with Demonoid’s servers as there was with Infostore.org site? [famous Ukrainian file-sharing site, its servers were confiscated by police about a year ago]

As a hosting-provider we take such risks into account. This can happen not only with Demonoid, but with any client. We do not control what information is stored on servers, anybody can buy our hosting service.

Anti-pirates and the media-lobby are now trying to shift all the responsibility for file-sharing onto Internet providers, so that providers will have to monitor user activities. Will this affect hosting providers too?

We have such laws in draft in our parliament periodically. But the Ukrainian law “On communication” is clear about this: providers are not responsible for what their customers do. And the fact that rights holders want to change that is their personal opinion, they are not legislative bodies. Let them buy a parliament member and lobby for such law, then we will observe this law. But until then they are nobody to us, and we are nobody for them too.

About a month ago Demonoid reported technical problems. Due to those problems all data for the last several months has vanished. In an attempt to recover from these problems the site went offline. Do you know what happened?

Some time ago several of their hard-drives crashed. But that was several months ago and we don’t know what was the reason of recent problems.

According to their admins, the man who can restore the tracker is not available. Are they speaking about some Colocall programmer?

No, all the technical support of servers is performed remotely. They aren’t speaking about one of our specialists.

Torrentfreak wrote about the president of Lithuanian antipirates, who demanded the closure of access to Demonoid. He said that it is very hard to even make contact with you. Have you spoken with him?

Yes, someone called us. We just could not speak with him: from the start of the conversation he immediately began to threaten us, he was absolutely non-constructive. We sent him to the court and have said that if he brings the court’s decision, we will be happy to execute it, because we observe all Ukrainian laws. Until then we are not going to speak with him.

Access to Demonoid is blocked for several countries including Ukraine. Is this your initiative or the tracker’s decision?

It is the tracker’s policy, not our initiative. I think this is due to DDoS-attacks.

Are there any DDoS-attacks aiming at Demonoid?

Yes, there are many large and serious DDoS-attacks. But they are always the problem of every hosting provider. We have learned how to neutralize them, so such attacks have almost no effect on Demonoid’s operations. And, incidentally, Demonoid isn’t the only site to be attacked: during the last election we hosted the server of the central election commission committee, it was constantly under DDoS-attacks.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

After receiving a complaint from Microsoft, GoDaddy temporary hijacked the myBittorrent domain, but after emails back and forth the owners managed to regain control. In the years that followed the two founders continued business as usual, frequently changing the look and layout of the site.

In fact, the two changed plans so often that they never really managed to add new features to the site. “Instead of adding new things we were always spending time on fixing features that used to work just fine,” Rex, one of the site’s founders told TorrentFreak.

Nevertheless, myBittorrent grew out to become one of the largest torrent sites, serving torrents to millions of visitors every month. This popularity, together with the increased legal pressure against fellow torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova, raised doubts with Rex’s partner, who wanted to scale down.

Eventually this led to a rift between the two owners. Rex wanted to continue with the site, but his partner opted to close down the operation permanently. To resolve the dispute the two decided to go their separate ways. This summer myBittorrent was shut down for good, but not before a replacement was in place.

To fill the gap left by myBitTorrent, Rex launched a new site under a new name – yourBittorrent.

“The biggest difference between both sites is that yourBittorrent has verified and adult torrents,” Rex told TorrentFreak, adding that he plans to include many new features in the near future, including an integrated subtitle search engine.

“YourBittorrent will soon have a few million subtitles and IMDB-links linked to all movies and TV-shows. The advanced search will also be extended to allow people to look for subtitles. YourBittorrent is going to be the first site where you can do that,” Rex said.

Another key feature is that the site will verify torrents to prevent the appearance of fake files and spam. “YourBittorrent has its own verification system with 60,000 verified torrents, and unlike some other torrent sites, we do take measures against fake files,” Rex told TorrentFreak.

Thus far 2009 has not been the best year for BitTorrent. Many sites have gone down or received negative verdicts in court, so it’s good to see that yourBittorrent continues where myBittorrent left off.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

However, BitSnoop has one big advantage compared to other torrent search engines with a feature called TrackerMatch. Before a torrent appears on BitSnoop they make sure that the torrents include as many reliable backup trackers as possible. Duplicate and fake trackers on the other hand are carefully removed.

“Each tracker we scrape gets rigorously analyzed and filtered to exclude typos, errors and just junk in tracker URLs. We know about backup tracker hosts, redirects, DNS aliases, tracker clusters etc. — and we know how to deal with them so you don’t have to,” the BitSnoop team explains.

The advantage of TrackerMatch is two-fold. Firstly, it makes sure that users will be able to connect to as much peers as possible by including all trackers that are found for the same download. On the other hand it will save tracker owners resources because there are no unnecessary announces due to a torrent containing duplicate trackers.

Don’t expect too much in the way of speed increases though – in most cases it will be hardly noticeable. However, having multiple backup trackers will come in handy when a torrent’s main tracker goes down. With the recent troubles over at The Pirate Bay and Demonoid, this is no longer a hypothetical situation.

BitSnoop is definitely worth a bookmark. Even if you’re not planning to use it on a daily basis it will surely come in handy when you come across a torrent with a dead tracker on your preferred torrent search engine.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One major site having serious technical issues at the moment is Demonoid. At the beginning of September, TorrrentFreak reported that the Ukranian-based site would go down for possibly-extended downtime due to some hardware problems.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues,” site staff sad in a statement. “We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” they added, while warning that the site could disappear for days while the site’s power circuit received maintenance.

Since we receive questions daily from worried users on the situation at Demonoid, an update seems in order. Unfortunately, at this stage it doesn’t seem like good news.

Although staff at the site say they hope Demonoid will return as soon as possible, they have confirmed that the hardware issues have caused severe data loss. This problem is compounded by the fact that the person who can get the data back is unavailable to assist at the moment.

“A loss of a some months worth of activity including registered users and torrent submissions is to be expected because the backup we are hoping to get back is not up to date, so please be prepared for it,” Demonoid staff said in a statement.

When ‘the backup guy’ has worked his magic the site will return. In the meantime, anyone getting public BitTorrent site withdrawal symptoms can check out our alternatives list.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

However, in the current climate where media moguls send their lawyers after everything that could be used to infringe copyrights, a paradigm shift might be needed. This is exactly what Piracy Bureau co-founder and Pirate Bay insider Rasmus Fleischer is hinting at.

“The symbolic value of The Pirate Bay has enabled us to make a difference in many ways. But there are also problems with it which are becoming ever more clear. After all, P2P was never meant to have one single ship as its almighty symbol,” he writes in a recent blog post.

“It’s time to sink the ship and move on,” Rasmus adds, as he links to a presentation (see below) where he explains how it may live on in a more decentralized setup. In short he argues that The Pirate Bay will dissolve, but in its place many “new TPBs” will return, just without the familiar domain name and pirate ship logo.

This is very similar to a concept Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde had in mind for the new Pirate Bay. A decentralized setup through which the ‘torrent site’ controls only a tiny part of the ’sharing’ process.

At the basis of this new scheme are two services that have launched in recent months, all run by people close to the original Pirate Bay crew. On the one hand there is the new OpenBitTorrent tracker that does not have a searchable index of torrents, but is simply used as a standalone tracker handling communication between peers.

To decentralize even further, friends of The Pirate Bay have launched the new torrent hosting service Torrage. This new service is open to other torrent sites and can be accessed through an API. When Torrage and OpenBitTorrent are combined everyone can run a BitTorrent site of their own with minimal resources.

There is little doubt that The Pirate Bay as we know it will cease to exist, but with OpenBitTorrent and Torrage it is easy enough to build new ones – and there are already a few promising projects in the making. You’ll be surprised.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

A tow truck took away Pandeya’s car, which we can now reveal was a rather nice BMW 745iA, and his Harley Davidson. The tax authorities valued the car at 150,000 kronor ($20,800) and the motorcycle at 40,000 kronor ($5,550) so his tax debt still wasn’t cleared, not by a long way.

The bailiffs needed to find more funds but it was reported in the Swedish media that they were unable to find any bank accounts. But the trail didn’t go cold.

Following an anonymous tip-off, bailiffs homed in on the Royal Motorboat Club in Stockholm and there they found it – not a torrent galleon with cannons either side, a huge sail and overflowing with pirates, but Hans Pandeya’s luxury boat.

According to the bayliffs who spoke with Realtid.se, unless Pandeya comes up with the money, the authorities will sell the cruiser at auction within the next two months. At the moment they say it’s worth around 450,000 kronor ($62,400), although that figure could be revised. Have a look round, you might like to offer more;

That still leaves a 142,000 kronor tax debt, so who knows what the authorities will seize next.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“The main difference that sets Hexagon.cc apart from other social file sharing and BitTorrent sites, is everything is centered around groups. Be it file sharing networks or flash video sites, a key piece we found missing is social context,” isoHunt’s founder Gary Fung said.

With Hexagon Fung hopes to bridge this gap by allowing people to start groups where they can share content within a certain niche. These groups help to organize content and allow people to share with others who are interested in the same material, privately or in public.

In addition Hexagon is also aimed at content producers and independent artists who want to promote their content using BitTorrent. For this group Hexagon offers monetization opportunities such as direct “fan” contributions and sharing of advertising revenue.

“We have contacts with game publishers and independent musicians and film makers, who are very interested in creating their own groups where they can directly market their music, videos or games and interact with their fans, and generate sales directly or indirectly,” Fung said.

Hexagon is certainly not your average torrent site and we must admit that it took us a while to fully grasp the new sharing interface. That aside, it is great to see that some people are still innovating and trying to improve the BitTorrent sharing experience.

The Hexagon team is offering 500 invites for TorrentFreak readers who want to give Hexagon a spin, so you can decide for yourself. Update, here are 3000 more invites. And 10.000 extra just in case…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Having begun life as ABC Torrents way back in 2003 (you can see the ABC in their current logo), the site now tracks around 10,000 torrents of all varieties and has an enthusiastic userbase.

Last week the community was shocked by the sudden passing away of its founder, Robert – known to his members as Pimpie.

Just 34 years old, Pimpie passed away on August 26th having suffered an aneurysm and will be sorely missed by his spouse, family and friends – both on and offline.

Gozirra, a moderator on the site, told TorrentFreak that PiSexy’s members are understandably deeply affected by Pimpie’s passing. But with great spirit, Leona, Pimpie’s spouse, has said that she will keep the site going with the help and support of the staff.

“He planned to live 100 years,” said Gozirra. “His passing on August 26th has devastated those of us who called him ‘friend’. He was ‘Teh Man From Amsterdam’ – he never could spell ‘the’ :)”

Although he didn’t know they would be his last, here are Pimpie’s parting words with the community;

“Every time you think something or someone is stupid, it just means there is another thing in this world you don’t understand.”

In memory of Robert, 1975-2009

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

During the next few days, maybe hours, Demonoid may go down due to some serious-sounding technical issues. They have already caused some damage to the site so the operators want to limit further damage.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” they say in a statement.

The downtime could be extended, “…days maybe, until we can change the power circuit,” they add.

Several Demonoid users already report connection issues, but the site is still accessible to most people at the time of writing. The blackout won’t mean much to millions of Russian and Ukrainian BitTorrent users though, since they are already blocked from the site.

Over the years Demonoid has had its fair share of downtime. In June 2007 Demonoid was pressured to leave their host in the Netherlands, mainly because of legal threats from the Dutch anti-piracy outfit, BREIN. The site then relocated to Canada, but after threats from the CRIA, it decided to shut down there as well.

In 2008 the site eventually reappeared in full glory after being offline for six months. This time the downtime shouldn’t last that long. Any Demonoid users stuck for ideas on alternatives if the site goes down, can check here. If you’re looking for high speed downloads you could also consider to try Usenet instead (our Usenet guide).

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.