One of the web’s most infamous torrent tracker sites, Demonoid, is back online after nearly a year and a half of inactivity. TorrentFreak claims that the site has re-emerged with links to nearly 400k torrent files and more than 1m peers, making it one of the largest in its category.
Hosted in Sweden, it’s unclear how many of the original people who ran Demonoid are still involved with the site now in its rebooted incarnation. Expect rightsholder bodies to prick up their ears, as Demonoid was a regular in lists of “notorious” piracy sites provided by the music and film industries to governments back in the day.
The site went dark in August 2012 after a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack, followed by a police raid in the Ukraine (Bulletin, 7-Aug-12). At the time, music body the IFPI said that it had been involved in “a great example of international cooperation to tackle a service that was facilitating the illegal distribution of music on a vast scale”.
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