Huge Russian BitTorrent Site Has Domain Suspended
A massive Russian BitTorrent site has seen its domain name suspended by order of the authorities. Torrents.ru, the largest torrent site in the country indexing just about every type of media one can think of, has set up a temporary domain in order to keep serving its 4 million users.
In the Western world, sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt get plenty of publicity, largely due to their size and prominence. Of course, there are other sites elsewhere that attract relatively little attention in English speaking countries and around Europe, despite being very large indeed.
One such giant is Torrents.ru, a huge Russian BitTorrent site with 4 million users and one million torrents which has operated relatively trouble-free – until now.
RU-Center, Russia’s largest domain name registrar and web-hosting provider, today pulled the plug on the Torrents.ru domain name, suspending it with immediate effect.
Andrey Vorobiev, Director of Public Relations at RU-Center said that the domain was blocked on the orders of the Investigative Division of the regional prosecutor’s office in Chertanovskaya, Moscow, but could not disclose the reasons.
In the meantime, the operators of Torrents.ru have been working on some counter-measures to mitigate the effects of the suspension.
Already they have set up an alternative domain at Rutracker.org in order for users to keep accessing the site, but of course this doesn’t help to keep existing torrents running since they contain the URL of the tracker located at the old domain.
To fix this issue users can change the announce URL in old torrents from bt.torrents.ru, to bt.rutracker.org. Alternatively it’s possible to simply go to the site under the new domain and re-download the torrents which now contain the new tracker URL.
A video report is available here (Russian).
