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Piracy The Internet

Demonoid Domain Names Up For Grabs 293

hypnosec writes "One of the most famous Torrent tracking sites, Demonoid, which was shut down recently by Ukrainian authorities, is on the receiving end of one more blow, as the domain names for the site are up for grabs. As it stands, three Demonoid domains: Demonoid.me, Demonoid.com and Demonoid.ph are up for sale on Sedo. The time is ripe as of now for the sale of the domain names as it has caught the attention of many on and off the web. The traffic that Demonoid used to attract was huge, and internet marketers would definitely want to bank on this. Initially thought of as being under a series of DDoS attacks, the torrent tracking site was out for a prolonged duration, following which it started serving malware-laden ads."
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Demonoid Domain Names Up For Grabs

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  • Come on, this part of the summary sounds like something I'd expect to find in email or blog-comment spam:

    The time is ripe as of now for the sale of the domain names as it has caught the attention of many on and off the web. The traffic that Demonoid used to attract was huge and internet marketers would definitely want to bank on this.

    These kinds of stories are often intended as marketing disguised as news stories (news is 'domain for sale', real purpose is to advertise 'domain for sale'), but usually it's not this blatant!

  • Shame.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by gallondr00nk ( 868673 ) on Monday August 13, 2012 @07:59AM (#40972037)

    Demonoid was a decent site.

    The Sedo link returns a 404, so much for that submission.

  • Textbooks (Score:2, Interesting)

    by cffrost ( 885375 )

    This is very disappointing. Demonoid had the largest selection of textbooks that I was aware of. Does anyone know another good source with a comparable or next-best selection of textbooks?

    • Or just about anything else that was more serious than the typical Pirate Bay fare. Where are you guys going? I've been resorting to eMule.
    • by h4rr4r ( 612664 ) on Monday August 13, 2012 @08:29AM (#40972231)

      I would highly suggest the university library. You will have to leave your chair though.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The textbook industry is a scam. If anyone deserves to have their products pirated, it's those bastards. Retail prices are insane; resale prices are absurd, especially in light of what book stores will give you for your used books - that has to be on the order of 200%-300% profit on a resale; if resales begin to impact the bottom line of new book sales, they'll just make a minor edit and release a new revision. Certainly profitable for everyone involved except the student, but hardly a business practice wor

        • And college professors are guilty of aiding and abetting by forcing their students to buy the crap by assigning homework out of it.

          Thing is those textbooks have super convenient instructor-only support material that professors love.

          Students are in fact not the target market for textbooks. Just like husbands aren't the target market for diamonds, even though the money to buy them comes out of their pockets.

          Catering to people who can squeeze money out of other people's pockets is a powerful marketing tool.

      • Re:Textbooks (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Monday August 13, 2012 @11:24AM (#40974279) Journal

        Not everyone who wants to read a textbook is a member of an academic institution. A good introductory text to a field you're not familiar with is usually better reading than whatever happens to be on top of the NYT best seller list.

        • Re:Textbooks (Score:4, Informative)

          by h4rr4r ( 612664 ) on Monday August 13, 2012 @11:34AM (#40974401)

          Generally speaking university libraries are open to the public. I went to a private university in the North East and any member of the public was free to read books in the library and only requirements to check one out were to have some form of state ID to get a library card.

      • For many people I know, that would be leaving their chars and taking a plane ride.

        Not that they're much interested in reading textbooks anyway.

    • Re:Textbooks (Score:5, Informative)

      by Scarred Intellect ( 1648867 ) on Monday August 13, 2012 @10:01AM (#40973159) Homepage Journal

      http://www.ebooks-shares.org/ [ebooks-shares.org]

      http://LibraryPirate.ph [librarypirate.ph]

  • by Havenwar ( 867124 ) on Monday August 13, 2012 @08:10AM (#40972079)

    Sounds like shady marketers would be the only ones who would actually want it, after all for the rest of us it's just an open invitation for various agencies to start digging for dirt on us. If getting caught for torrenting small amounts of pirated goods is about as likely as getting hit by lightning, then buying this domain would be akin to climbing up onto the highest building around during a lightningstorm wearing your special copper-clad "protection from girls +3" homemade armour and swinging a long copper rod angrily at the skies.

    • Don't count out the non-believers or believers of alternative religions who might be tempted into buying such an evil-sounding website name. Might also work for a hardcore gamer's site.
      • Actually I do count them out. It's an unlikely market at best, and what little of it do exist won't be wanting to pay for the amount of traffic/page rank and so on that those domains likely have accrued. And no serious hardcorce gamer site would be unaware of the domains background, which means they'd pretty much be paying a lot of money just to guarantee that they are from day one linked to illegal activities. Not that they do anything illegal, no... But that people have a reasonable suspicion that they mi

    • Newzbin2 did it for a while as they transitioned over to their own domains. Seemed to work out quite well, actually.
      • Proving my point in other posts. Quote from wikipedia: "Newzbin is a British Usenet indexing website, intended to facilitate access to content on Usenet. The site has caused controversy over its stance on copyrighted material".

        Operating under this domain is inviting scrutiny from the authorities and other parties, so only people who are already operating fringe businesses or straight out illegal ones would be (should be) interested.

  • by 1u3hr ( 530656 ) on Monday August 13, 2012 @08:12AM (#40972095)
    He's earned it after posting this slashvertisement "the time is ripe as of now for the sale of the domain names"

    What next? Penny stocks? Canadian pharmacy stories?

    • by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      What next? Penny stocks? Canadian pharmacy stories?

      Well, timothy covered the exciting 10% Nook discount just a few hours ago.
      Next would be "FriendOfSlashdot" coupon offers...

  • wtf (Score:4, Interesting)

    by shentino ( 1139071 ) <shentino@gmail.com> on Monday August 13, 2012 @08:25AM (#40972201)

    So they get hacked, start serving malware, and the ukraine computer police bust THEM for the malware and let the hacker get off scot free?

    Methinks the so called "hacker" was an inside job done by a mole of the copyright interests just to give the authorities an excuse to shut them down.

    • Re:wtf (Score:4, Informative)

      by icebraining ( 1313345 ) on Monday August 13, 2012 @01:21PM (#40975825) Homepage

      According to a Russian newspaper, Kommersant [wikipedia.org], there was a source in the Ukranian ministry confirming that the raid was scheduled to coincide with the Prime Ministerâs trip to the United States, where he would be discussing copyright infringement.

      I think it could not be more clear, even if the "source" is fake.

  • Shutting the site down as a "present" to Obama. Such a lousy thing to do, Obama's family probably used Demonoid
    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      No, Obama (D-Kenya) has stated that his family, like many Kenyans, dislike Ukranians. I stems from the Kenyan - Ukranian war in Djibouti (capital Djibouti). {end sarcasm}
      • Shut up. If you have nothing intellectual to add, then please just shut up.
        • by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
          Nope.. soon I will be doing MyCleanPC posts. Enjoy.
        • by Anonymous Coward
          It's painful to read Slashdot now due to that crap. I usually get about 15 comments deep before realizing I haven't read a single comment related to the article. Then it's on to the next article, because I didn't learn my lesson.
  • The webmaster says the site will return but still, I think he should release the platform the site runs on so that Demonoid-like sites can be created.

    Otherwise where's the "whack-a-mole" factor that people mention when a major site is taken down.

    • It serves torrents, you can comment on torrents, it tracks bandwidth, whats the big deal? Its probably a pile of messy code anyway...,

  • by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Monday August 13, 2012 @09:14AM (#40972643) Journal

    Ok so I'm an evil horrible movie pirate....
    *however* in my defence, I'm in Australia - our online streaming offerings are utterly dreadful "Content not available in your region" geo-ip blocking is something you learn to DETEST here.... or of course our internet download limits which would go with them - streaming is often significantly less efficient than a fully buffered, truly local copy of a film. (no stutter, better quality, no need to re-download if you pause half way through and the playback device goes to sleep)

    Furthermore my tastes are incredibly obscure, I'm one of those movie nerds who will watch a film, check imdb trivia and forums (80% bad, 20% good) to find more information about the actors, writers, directors, trivia and so on. Unfortunately for almost every movie I watch, I find 2 to 5 more. Yes I'm a movie junkie, I love them.

    Problem is here, Demonoid was the only place I know of with really, really obscure stuff - it's not just the Korean, Japanese, Thai, Hong Kong films - it's also the overall older films or the things which aren't a 7 or higher in IMDB. Finding odd Japanese 1970's film under say IMDB 6.5 LEGALLY is damn near impossible in this country or online (out of print DVDs or collector pricing) it's simply extremely difficult to find a legal, simple and reliable solution.

    So, long story short is, demonoid saved my ass for a long time and already in the few weeks it's been gone I've been finding less and less of the things I'm after. - the movie houses don't make this easy for us in the slightest :/

    RIP Demonoid.

    • by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Monday August 13, 2012 @10:51AM (#40973901)

      Yeah Its fucking bizare the movie industry is still doing this.

      I havent pirated an album in years thanks to itunes more or less solving the music availability puzzle for me. I can afford to blow a tenner here or there for a decent album, and now I do.

      But netflix is blocked, hula is blocked, itunes has terrible movie availability here, and AMV etc just do the shitty "Not available in your region" crap.

      What other options do we have in australia? Sweet fuck all. So australians pirate movies.

      Surely fixing that problem should be a priority but this shits being going on for the better part of a decade.

      Shoot the lawyers, offer the services here, problem solved the studios get fat cash and we get to have the movies and TV shows we want.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Kalriath ( 849904 )

        Your problem is probably the same as ours (in NZ). Foxtel (or Sky, here). I assume they own the content market in Australia as well? And they likely keep spouting how they aren't the reason content is unavailable or slow?

        And the other reason - the pipes into your country are likely as expensive as ours. Unfortunately, you can blame NZ for that as the Southern Cross Cable is majority owned by Telecom NZ, but I hear you guys have a couple of other pipes as ours. We actually had someone from Netflix come

        • Aussie has numerous cables (4 or 5 not including SxC, soon adding another major cable to Singapore) compared to our 1... Would have been 2, but too many of the folks with money are too pussy to put it up for what was Pacific Fibre and now that's been scrapped. They could/should have *at least* got a pipe going from Auckland or Wellington to Sydney for under 1/4 of the cost to get it started so that NZ ISPs would have a chance at buying bandwidth on the Australian market, but alas... anyway, as a result of t

    • You're not looking hard enough if you think Demonoid was the main place to find obscure content. There are many file hosting sites and even Usenet binaries which have even more obscure stuff. Secondly, it's a bit stupid to admit you pirate content on a site like this given the amount of surveillance that this site is subjected to.
      • Well, really all my post has done has told them that their campaign was successful. Also it's not like I don't speak the truth.

        Finally - the movies I'm in to are so obscure I doubt the big American movie houses even give a damn about the films I was obtaining.
        FWIW I did mean to post anonymous but oh well.

  • According to Sedo.. the DEMONOID.COM domain had 7,017 visitors in the last 31 days... hardly an "internet marketers dream"....
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Their .com died years ago, the main site was .me

  • Host it on TOR and they can't take it down...I've been wondering if Pirate Bay had a mirror up in that manner yet as well...using magnets just slapping these sites on TOR would prevent them from ever really going away.
  • As soon as word gets out that Demonoid is down, hits will drop to almost nothing. If the standard domain parking page goes up, they will never get any clicks, and they will never get any repeat hits.

  • Tried to bid on the domain and then I got this....
    "Due to possible legal issues associated with this domain, Sedo is not able to offer services for the domain. Please consider selecting an alternative domain."

  • ... mention a single specific use case of a copyrighted work that had a torrent file on Demonoid that met the following three criteria?

    1. Legally redistributable;
    2. Not readily available as a torrent at another, arguably more relevant location (eg, a link to a Linux distro torrent that could also be found on the distro's web site);or
    3. Was not an artificially contrived example to simply show a possible legitimate use.

    I'm just curious.

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