Earlier in the week we reported on the plight of LeechersLair. Launched in 2006, the BitTorrent tracker has around 20,000 members who enjoy all the usual content.

Not at the moment though since the Content, Consumer and Network Security Division of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (SKMM) ordered Shinjiru, LeechersLair’s webhosting provider, to close down the site citing a breach of Section 41 of the Copyright Act 1987. Shinjiru complied immediately and took the site offline.

And now they’ve shut down SuperFundo too. As an open indexer, SuperFundo doesn’t have a tracker of its own, so perhaps this is a more unusual target for the anti-pirates. Nevertheless, the claims are that SuperFundo breaches the Copyright Act 1987. The site admins weren’t exactly given long to take action either;

You are required to resolve the illegal activities issues within 1 hour after this warning notification. TMNet has the right to block this IP if there is not any notification from your side within this one-hour timeframe.

Plenty of time to sort everything out, then. But never fear, admin at SuperFundo told TorrentFreak that the site will be back, asap. LeechersLair will be back too, as soon as they have secured another host in a different country.

In the meantime the message is pretty clear – Malaysia shouldn’t be on the top of anyone’s torrent hosting list.

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

When BitTorrent sites get into legal trouble or other pressures force a move to a new location, the speculation begins on the safest place to go.

For instance, would a site bail out of the Netherlands and move to Canada? Is Canada too dangerous now, and would a move to Sweden be more appropriate? What about moving to Ukraine-based hosting like Demonoid or further afield – China or Russia maybe? Inevitably, discussions usually involve ideas of moving sites east, to countries like Malaysia. Fairly high-tech countries like this seem an attractive proposition, particularly given their government’s track-record in failing to do much about piracy.

Given this background, BitTorrent tracker admins with their sites hosted in Malaysia were confronted by a very unpleasant surprise today. An administrator from a well known tracker contacted TorrentFreak this morning with worrying news, he told us: “Malaysia’s government suddenly forced all torrent websites to shut down today until further notice, a complete surprise to torrent admins and the offshore hosting companies in Malaysia.”

The news was given to this and other site admins, via an email from their hosting provider, which indicates the action has been ordered down from a high level. The email informs the admins that their servers have been suspended by the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, under the Copyright Act 1987. As the request came from the government, the host makes it clear they had no choice but to shut down the site. Among the affected sites are Extremebits, Rapthe, Superfundo and several others. According to sources, although torrent sites have been taken offline, other sites dealing in pirate material have also been suspended after the government decided to act on mounting copyright-related complaints.

Prominent Malaysian host Shinjiru confirmed the closures, telling TorrentFreak: “We can confirm that this is accurate. We had enforcement officers from MDTCA visiting the office to confirm the closure of BitTorrent sites hosted on our network. We will comply to all shut down instructions from the local authorities or agencies with warrants or documents.”

Update: Contrary to comments from a site admin, sources close to the situation are saying the shutdowns are limited to a small number of sites and aren’t necessarily part of a wider crackdown, despite government involvement.

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

Btswarm.org

Btswarm.org is a fast and clean BitTorrent site that is available in 5 different languages. The site currently indexes 107,907 torrents, which represents over 80TB of data. Btswarm supports search based RSS feeds, a great feature that every site should have in my opinion.

SumoTorrent.com

SumoTorrent who recently partnered with FileSoup, one of the oldest BitTorrent communities, collects the BitTorrent stats for our monthly stats post. But, they also serve torrents and offer not only .torrent links but also Azureus magnet links, and DHT links.

One of the things about SumoTorrent that I particularly like is that they have their own tracker, something more BitTorrent sites should do. At the moment 50% of all the torrents on public trackers are tracked by The Pirate Bay All hell would break loose if they were taken down.

FlixFlux.co.uk

FlixFlux is a BitTorrent site that focuses on movie releases. On the frontpage they list the US box office charts, DVD rental charts, and the UK box office charts. If you register you can also keep track of your favorite movies on the site. FlixFlux has a description for every film including the IMDB rating and plans to add movie trailers and for their torrents soon, which is an interesting feature.

A similar site also dedicated to movies torrents is Superfundo, they focus mainly on Scene and aXXo movie releases.

TorrentTAB.com

TorrentTAB is a new BitTorrent meta-search engine that displays the search results in a tabbed view. Personally I’m not a big fan of meta-search engines, but I know others like it. The tabbed searching works quite well. TorrentTAB site currently searches Isohunt, Mininova, Torrentz, BTjunkie, Meganova, and Torrentspy.

JunkNova.com

JunkNova is a torrent review site that keeps you up to date on all the stuff that’s available on BitTorrent, similar to sites like rlslog and hypoh. JunkNova is brought to you by the makers of TorrentScoop, a Google-powered BitTorent search engine.

MicroTor.org

The last site in our list is Microtor, a site that only indexes TV torrents. MicroTor allows you to browse through the available shows and seasons and they also have a brief plot outline for every TV show.

Do you know any new BitTorrent sites that are worth a visit? Feel free to leave a comment!

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