However, for this content to travel from A to B the BitTorrent ecosystem needs reliable trackers. Unfortunately, good public trackers are harder to find.

For several years PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent have been dominating this space, coordinating the communication between dozens of millions of peers every day. The two trackers surfaced after The Pirate Bay shut down its BitTorrent tracker back in 2009 and haven’t seen much competition since.

In recent weeks, however, a new tracker called “Demonii” entered the scene. Similar to other standalone trackers Demonii doesn’t host any torrents. TorrentFreak caught up with the operator behind this new kid in town, and he told us that the name is inspired by Demonoid.

“I planned to revive Demonoid because they disappeared so quickly, so I registered the domains demonii.com, net and org,” Demonii’s Qarizma tells TorrentFreak.

“Then I actually realized that for me it wasn’t a good idea to start something like Demonoid. It would get me into trouble which I’m not interested in. So I decided to start the Demonii Tracker Project.”

After a slow start, traffic to the new tracker suddenly experienced a massive spike in traffic two weeks ago. Overnight it went from dealing with a handful of peers to millions, a surge that can be solely attributed to The Pirate Bay.

As it turned out, TPB had added the new tracker to all their magnet links, as they also do with OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent. Needless to say, Demonii wasn’t prepared and the newly gained attention quickly took the tracker offline.

“I didn’t expect it, Demonii was tracking about 100 torrents for testing and debugging, then I heard TPB used Demonii as tracker. That explained why my server went down,” Qarizma tells us.

However, Demonii did welcome the Pirate Bay blessing and after moving to a new server it quickly recovered. At the time of writing Demonii tracks 875,365 torrents and handles 4,165,485 peers, which makes it the fifth largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet.

Like most of the other large BitTorrent trackers Demonii runs on the beerware licensed Opentracker software. Demonii’s operator made some small modifications to make it run smoothly on his VPS, which he can expand later if needed.

“Demonii currently runs on a KVM based VPS on my own nodes. The main node is a Xeon X5677, and the VPS specs are 512MB RAM and 1000Mhz is still enough to run it now. When it needs more I can simply allocate more resources to the VPS.”

In addition to operating the Demonii tracker the owner also offers privacy protection software that may come in handy for some.

Dprotect

The free application named “dProtect” is a blocklist addon for uTorrent. It bans a long list of IP-ranges that may be connected to monitoring companies, government agencies and other outfits that may interfere with BitTorrent traffic.

“dProtect is our software released to increase people’s privacy on the internet. The software adds a layer of protection when you are downloading using uTorrent,” Qarizma says.

The dProtect software uses a list of ranges maintained by The Blocklist Group. Similar to other blocklists, the list is only partially effective.

It will be interesting to see if Demonii remains among the top trackers in the months to come. If The Pirate Bay keeps supporting it there is no doubt that the new kid in town will stick around for a while.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Despite claims that millions of BitTorrent downloads would cease to work if a major BitTorrent tracker closed down, most downloaders today don’t even notice when a tracker stops working. Thanks to technologies such as DHT and PEX central trackers have become a luxury good to some degree.

Indeed, larger torrents with thousands of peers will work just fine without a central tracker. But the majority of torrents out there only have a handful of peers and for these files a central tracker is still an essential part of the downloading process.

It’s therefore good to know that several new players took the place of The Pirate Bay’s tracker when it shut down last year. Below we show a list of the five largest public BitTorrent trackers based on the number of torrents and peers (downloaders+uploaders) they track.

The first thing that stands out in the top five above is that the first three spots are taken by standalone trackers that do not have a torrent index or search engine attached to them. These three trackers are responsible for the coordination of millions of public downloads on BitTorrent but do not provide any torrents on their sites like The Pirate Bay used to do.

PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent, number one and two in the list, are both relatively new trackers that emerged after The Pirate Bay announced that it would sell the site last year. This sale eventually failed to go through, but The Pirate Bay did close its tracker so both trackers became a very welcome addition to the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Another observation is that there is a lot of weight on the shoulders of the top three trackers. Although there are close to 50,000 known BitTorrent trackers, only a fraction of these are active, and of these only a few dozen track more than 1,000 torrent files. Without the five trackers in the list above most of the smaller public torrents could quickly become unavailable.

Although trackers in the top five are all public ones, there are a few private ones that should be in this list if it was only based on the number of torrents tracked. The music tracker What.cd, for example, currently tracks more than 800,000 torrents alone. A dazzling number that puts the site in fourth place based on the number of torrents, not peers.

For BitTorrent’s long tail content reliable public trackers are still invaluable. The good news is that the ecosystem is better off than a year ago when The Pirate Bay was carrying this burden alone, but it’s far from bulletproof yet.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“We noticed that you, through the activities with swedvdr.org, similarly engaged in copyright infringement of several works whose rights belong to our principals. You are hereby requested to immediately take the necessary measures to prevent the ongoing incursions,” wrote Antipiratbyrån in an email to the operator of the Swedvdr BitTorrent tracker.

The demands are as follows:

- Delete all Torrent files from swedvdr.org referring to copyrighted works.
- Take steps to prevent future uploads to swedvdr.org of torrent files.
- Take measures to prevent the ability to upload or download torrents.

The email from the anti-piracy office of course ends with a threat. “Unless your contribution to the incursions have stopped by 29th April 2009, we have advised our clients to take legal action against you,” they write.

While Swedvdr did indeed comply with the request to shut down the site, TTi, another popular private tracker announced that it will only post torrents with consent from the copyright holders from now on. “TTi will only concentrate on bands/artists that want to spread their material on the Internet and are waiting for a record contract,” TTi staff announced.

“Because of all the turbulence and insecurity about whether it’s okay to run a tracker or not, we have now decided to go full out on bands that want to be discovered through the Internet. We of course realize that many of you are disappointed about this suggestion, but we have decided that this is the best for the future of TTi,” they add.

Closing the site is not an option according to TTi staff.

It came as no surprise that Antipiratbyrån was going to use the TPB verdict to their advantage. Their counterpart in The Netherlands, BREIN, has been doing the same thing for years. Ironically, this will only mean that The Pirate Bay will see an increase in visitors.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Outlaw.lv, one of the largest trackers in Latvia is currently offline following pressure from the Economic Police, while rumors say that one of the top uploaders was detained for a few hours. “Economic Police has shut down our project. Outlaw LV will be back in a new way and with a new mission,” reads a message on the front page.

It is clear though that the authorities aim to take more sites offline. Danger.lv is another tracker that has received a letter from the police, and they decided to pull the plug voluntarily, for the time being.

Similar to last summer, several other BitTorrent trackers became extra cautious after the renewed attention from the authorities. Bithack.lv was one of the trackers that took action. The site didn’t close however, but now serves recipes instead of torrent files.

TorrentFreak spoke with one admin of a local BitTorrent tracker, who informed us that they have also been receiving letters from anti-piracy organizations. “A handful of popular trackers are taking severe countermeasures to avoid any possibility of takedown and continue to serve the community for now, hoping that no takedowns will follow,” he said.

As with many of the takedown attempts in other parts of the world, lobbyists from the entertainment industry are the ones tipping off the police, and assisting in ‘evidence gathering’ and even raids. In Latvia it’s LAmpA, but the BPI and IFPI have also been assisting the authorities, most notably with the raid on the popular music tracker OiNK.

Needless to say, these anti-piracy outfits are not the most objective partner when it comes to solving these type of digital ‘offenses’, and it’s worrisome to see how they appear to be increasingly intertwined with local authorities.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.