Battleangel

In a surprising turn of events, the tracker (though not the site itself) seems to be responding again.

The frontend of Demonoid is still hosted in the US, together with the popular Subdemon forums. Interestingly, the tracker - which has been offline for months - is now hosted in Malaysia, and has started to respond again, approximately 30 hours ago.

It is of course not clear what this all means, but without an official message from the Demonoid team, speculation has started. Could it be that the site has found a new host, and preparing a return? Many former Demonoid members are secretly hoping that this is indeed the case.

An all around important move if it proves to be true. Sure enough, there are many public trackers around, but Demonoid was bigger than most of them. And the content was broader and better kept compared to lets say the even larger Pirate Bay. Demonoid was simply the place for good, rare and non-scene releases.

Public trackers remain immensely important for a number of reasons. And it all boils down to democracy. Firstly, they give access regardless of social and economic standing. You don’t need to be well connected, wait in line, nor do you need to have the latest and greatest broadband connection with unlimited bandwidth to work your way up a ratio / upload system. In most parts of the world, bandwidth comes at a premium. Second, public trackers have a spectacular value when it comes to disseminating information freely and speedily. A bit like the recently attacked Wikileaks (now offline, IP = 88.80.13.160). One cannot disregard the possibility that a respectable portion of the p2p antagonists are in fact motivated by a fear and dislike of the idea of freedom of information. Sometimes, the need to protect dirty secrets and maintain social control through intellectual property converge, such as in the case with the Church of Scientology or for that matter Wikileaks.

On another note: Appropriately, Cryptome has posted a link to the entire Wikileaks archive, hosted at the Pirate Bay of course …