The popular BitTorrent tracker Demonoid was resurrected, under a new administrator. The site has made its comeback after exactly 6 months of downtime.

A message posted on the Demonoid frontpage confirms that Deimos, the former administrator, left the Demonoid staff. The site seems to be working properly, as does the tracker, but there could be some downtime in the next few days. All the people who had an account at the time the site shut down can still sign in with the same username and password.

The resurrection of the popular BitTorrent traffic marks the end of a tough year for the site. The trouble for Demonoid started back in June last year, when the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN started to put pressure on Demonoid and their ISP, Leaseweb. Deimos decided that the Netherlands wasn’t the safe haven it used to be and he to moved the site to Canada, which resulted in a few days of downtime.

Deimos never really told the administrators or members of the site exactly what was happening. Initially, most members assumed that there was some hardware failure, but after a few days it became clear that Demonoid was more or less forced to move. Maybe there could have been hardware failures too, who knows, but the outcome was the same – Canada here we come.

Relocating the servers to Canada initially solved the problems, but, by the end of September Deimos took Demonoid offline for the second time. Again, nobody knew what was going on until we found out that the CRIA was responsible for the downtime, which was later confirmed by Deimos. It turned out that Canada wasn’t the best choice after all.

After 5 days of downtime the site returned, now blocking all traffic from Canadian users in an attempt to calm down the CRIA. At first it looked like the storm was finally over, but on November 9th Demonoid’s users were welcomed by a disappointing message on the frontpage explaining that the CRIA was indeed responsible for the downtime.

The site never came back after November last year, up until now that is. Let’s hope it lasts this time.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a new, more cost-effective way of measuring the intensity of a hurricane.

Right now, the official way of determining hurricane strength is by sending in “hurricane hunters” that fly into the middle of the storm in durable airplanes, clocking the wind speeds as they pass.

However, according to MIT, the planes cost nearly $100 million each, and each individual flight costs around $50,000. This makes monitoring a single hurricane a very expensive ordeal, and the technology surrounding it hasn’t changed all that much.

The new research from MIT has looked at placing out underwater microphones in the path of a hurricane. By measuring the amount of sound an oceanic storm produces, scientists can determine how fast the sustained winds are.

“There was almost a perfect relationship between the power of the wind and the power of the wind-generated noise,” said MIT’s director of undersea remote sensing and a researcher in the project Nicholas Makris.

In the future, weather trackers could place the hydrophones underwater before the storm approaches and remotely monitor the results, leading to a cost of just a fraction of conventional hurricane measuring techniques.

Moreover, say scientists, the technology could also be used to more effectively study climate change. According to MIT, the hydrophones can measure the amount of sea salt coming into the atmosphere, which it says is an indicator of the planet’s climate.

Source: tomshardware.com

The origin of these movies is not clear, but it is probable that they’ve been downloaded via p2p at some point, either on these systems, or on the personal systems of officers and transferred over.

Senior officials of the SA police force have been made aware of the findings, including its commissioner Mel Hyde. However, police sources have told press that there will not be any investigation into this, citing the large numbers of police officers involved.

The Australian Federation against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has said it will write to the commissioner to seek an explanation, presumably as to why the police officers are being let off with what it considers a heinous crime. Quite ironically, AFACT boasts of “working closely with police” – perhaps this closeness has shown the police officers involved just how unimportant and meaningless this so-called ‘crime’ is in the grand scheme of things.

If the officers do go unpunished, it could create a favorable precedent for filesharers in South Australia. If police officers, who are expected to be held to a greater level of accountability regarding the law, show this level of contempt for the current copyright laws, are unpunished, it will make it harder to convince a court that regular citizen should be punished for similar acts.

On the other hand, if the officers are punished under the law, which allows for upto AUS$60,500 (About US$55,700 or 35,500Euro) per infringement and up to 5 years imprisonment, the ability to effectively police the state will be severely diminished.

Either way, this case will bring to a head the vastly disproportionate penalties for an act that, as yet, has never been proven to be even financially damaging. One thing is certain, when even the police officers join large numbers of citizens in flouting such laws, the law’s place in society should be called into serious question.

The South Australian police force had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

Due to the new copyright legislation that are going to take effect from today we had to move all of the system outside of Europe.

We decided to move to the desert of Sinai in Egypt since we feel that we’ll be safe there. Tiamo has already got himself a permanent place to live and will reside in Sinai from now. Those of you who need to get in contact with him can use the contact page.

In Sinai we’ve set up the systems with three redundant fibre links. Besides local connectivity in Egypt we also have connectivity to Saudi-Arabia and Israel. Jordan is quite close and we hope to install a link there as well as soon as our budget will reach that level. This way we’re actually hosted in Asia as well as Africa.

More updates on this will come later today, hopefully. Everything will be the same as before, we will have slightly higher latency for European and American visitors.

A special note to Ifpi: Moses walked in the desert of Sinai for 40 years. Our servers will be active for at least another 40 as well.

It’s probably another Aprils Fool’s Day Joke like the one they did last year, when they announced on their blog that they are moving all their servers to the North Korean embassy in Stockholm

PirateBay

The order of the list is not indicative of the difficulty it is to get in; rather, it’s a reflection of what is in hot demand. Without further introduction, here are the hottest Private BT sites of 2008 (that you likely can’t get into :)

Some of you may already be using ORC – this is where we’ve put a new spin on it. We’ve painstakingly taken their “trackers.tlist” database file and completely revamped and updated it with all the newest and hottest private BT sites. Not even the file they offer on their website even comes close to offering the same functionality. Additionally, we’ve removed the public trackers and any other non-working BT sites from the list.

Installing Open Registrations Checker (with the new trackers.tlist file).

1.Download ORC and install. (Requires .NET framework 2.0 or higher).

2.Download our trackers.rar file (Torrent List File). You’ll need to extract it into TWO locations (choose to ‘overwrite’ the old file in both cases):

— C:\Program Files\Torrents Open Registrations Checker\

— C:\Documents and Settings\ [Your Computer Name] \

3.Launch ORC from the Start Button – the private trackers will be updated. The program is self-explanatory – check off what you want it to check; click the magnifying glass icon in the corner.

4.Outwit your next door neighbour the plumber by getting into these sites first!