TorrentFreak

Earlier this week the Evad3rs dev team pleased the Apple world by releasing their most complex jailbreak yet. Their amazing and super-simple tool allows anyone to run unsigned code on their iOS6 firmware in a matter of minutes, smashing Apple’s control over what can and cannot be installed on their devices. BitTorrent apps are completely outlawed by the Cupertino outfit, but a new version of a torrent client released this week bypasses those restrictions.

IsoHunt, one of the oldest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, turns 10 years old today. The site has been fighting Hollywood in court for more than seven years but has not backed down. IsoHunt founder Gary Fung is determined to protect and facilitate people’s right to share culture legitimately. “One would think the people of the Internet are losing to the copyright cartels, but I think different,” he says.

After more than five months of downtime Demonoid’s website is showing signs of life again. Instead of timing out, demonoid.me has started to redirect to a new demonoid.hk domain, displaying a “403 Forbidden” HTTP status after initially showing a “nothing to see here” notice. While Demonoid is not back yet, these recent developments show that there’s activity behind the scenes.

Continuing a long-standing New Year’s tradition, today we present an up-to-date list of the world’s most-visited BitTorrent sites. At the start of 2013 The Pirate Bay continues to pull in the most visitors, followed by KickassTorrents and Torrentz. Household names BTJunkie and Demonoid have dropped off the list as both sites are no longer online.

The Pirate Bay has launched a new website, entirely dedicated to promoting the work of independent musicians, filmmakers and other content creators. The Promo Bay website was badly needed to archive the many promos and streamline the thousands of incoming artist submissions to the project. In addition, the idea is to provide artists with details on where their content is most downloaded.

BitSoup, one of the Internet’s most established private BitTorrent trackers, has been under attack during the past two weeks. The site has been comprised and defaced, with the hackers gifting ratio credits to site users alongside unsubstantiated claims that money generated by a recent Hurricane Sandy fund-raiser might be misappropriated. BitSoup say the matter is being brought under control and that the new year will see the site shift to a new, less vulnerable domain.

After three and a half months of downtime Demonoid’s tracker is now back online. The unexpected revival of the tracker is the first sign of life in weeks and suggests that the Demonoid team is working to bring the full site back online. While the index and forum remain offline, the many thousands of torrents tracked by Demonoid have been brought back to life.