Finally one of the leading BitTorrent website of its times is rising from the ashes. Demonoid one of the leading private BitTorrent trackers was pulled down by CRIA in November last year. Deimos the admin of Demonoid has finally handed over the reins of Demonoid to a fellow admin whom he apparently trusts with the comeback of Demonoid.

Deimos will not be the admin of Demonoid anymore because he is tied with some personal real life issues. Here’s the message he posted in the Subdemon forums :

Hello Everyone,

It is with great sadness (and not a little relief) that I announce that I will be stepping down as admin of Demonoid, with effect from today.

Demonoid is currently suffering from a number of things, prime amongst these being my distraction with real-world issues, and so I have handed the reins over to a new administrator – a close friend of mine, which I trust completely and has the knowledge and time to take care of the site.

He will, in due course, be making his own announcements about the future of Demonoid. Of course, speculation over the future of the site is fun, but it is ultimately fruitless – you will all, in the near future, become aware of what the future holds. I trust that you will all give your support to the new admin as he finds his feet while he resurrects Demonoid.

Thanks again for your support in making Demonoid what it was and is.
Goodbye and good wishes – it has been a blast!

- Deimos

It surely is great news for the BitTorrent community. I was once upon a time an active user of Demonoid and the quality of torrents over there was simply too good. Demonoid is by far the best when it comes to finding software or weird music/stuff you know you’re not gonna find on IsoHunt or ThePirateBay. Glad to see the demonoid is coming back.

What do you think of this development? Do you think Demonoid can ever be the same again? (I just hope it is!!)

I’m looking forward to Demonoid resurrecting- what a great torrent community

Via TorrentFreak

The extremely popular media hosting site ImageShack has just begun a free BitTorrent downloading service that allows you to download torrents straight from ImageShack servers, and later download them from ImageShack via a HTTP link.

The Torrent download service is at the moment in a public beta, but nonetheless it works as advertised. Just point ImageShack to the torrent file either via URL or by uploading the torrent file itself. The download will begin immediately and once it is completed you can easily download the files to your computer.

Services such as this aren’t new but until now we haven’t seen a compelling free solution such as the one offered by ImageShack. ImageShack does have some restriction, like you can download at the most only 15GB a month.

Here’s what Jack Levin, the founder of ImageShack told TorrentFreak: “We think its going to be a great service for users, especially in the light of ISPs ratelimiting torrent traffic.There is a lot of free and legal torrents out there, that people should have easy access to. We have the capacity to do it, and the world needs it.”

If you are worried about the anonymity of the service, here’s what Jack Levin said: “We will not look at what you download and simply provide you, an account, with bandwidth and space. What you do with it is up to you. The DMCA applies, so, if we get reports from copyright owners to take down content, we will comply.”

There are some neat features like Selective File Downloading which means you can select only the files that you want to download and leave out the rest. The Download speeds are pretty fast and I could download a couple of torrents of about 1GB each in under 2 hours.

The only thing is that as soon the download completes,, ImageShack disconnects. This means that you will be sharing less than you would do. On the torrents I downloaded the share ratio was just 13% and 15% respectively. I hope ImageShack improves the share ratio to atleast 100% because its good karma!

So far ImageShack’s Torrent download service looks very promising and is something that I plan to use regularly in the future. Go Check it out for yourself and let us know what you feel about it?

ImageShack Torrent Download Service | Via Torrentfreak

The much hyped Qtrax (read as disgusting) that released yesterday to much fanfare, had one of the most disastrous launches a product or a service could have probably asked for. The people behind Qtrax thought that it was Ok for a web company to lie to its user base. When I first read about Qtrax, my first thought was “hey this could probably take everyone by storm”. I put up a note on my To-Do list and made it a point to check them out once they launched.

But things didn’t work out the way they would have probably planned. Here’s a list of things that went wrong for them.. 

• They never had any deals signed with any of the Big 4 labels.
• Once the Site came alive, the download link to the software was disabled causing lot of anger for the people who were waiting to get their hands on the software.
• The 25million songs for free was just a catchphrase aptly described as vaporware, even after launch you have nothing that you could download and listen.

Seeing all the negative press surrounding their launch, I’d be surprised if they are able to pick themselves up after all this bungled up launch. If they can come back with a good return, this will be forgotten about. Right now they have got a lot more press than they probably would have had with another boring “another start-up launches yay!” post….. People’s memories are short about stuff like this (again assuming they come back with grace). Otherwise they are probably heading for the deadpool, unless they can pull of something magical.

Well for me they are just dead, and I expect something more promising in the near future. So shall we award Qtrax with the award for being the startup to end up in deadpool in the first week of its launch.

The last quarter of 2007 hasn’t been particularly good for the BitTorrent community. We have seen the shutdown of some popular BitTorrent Trackers like OiNK and Demonoid and a lot more countries worldwide have been blocking Torrent Search Engines. In the US Internet companies are prevent access to the BitTorrent protocol itself, thereby preventing users from sharing files.

Yes 2007 has been the year when Torrent Related sites where shutdown faster than they were born, but finally we have a good news from Mininova that has just reached a milestone i.e. it’s millionth torrent was uploaded yesterday by an anonymous user.

Torrent number 1,000,000 was uploaded yesterday by an anonymous user. Unfortunately, the memorable torrent has no seeds, which makes it likely that it wont be around much longer.

One million uploaded torrents is a great accomplishment, especially if you consider that Mininova only allows user uploads. Contrary to what most people assume, Mininova doesn’t scrape any torrents from other websites, all the torrents hosted on the website are uploaded by its users.

My hearty congratulations to Mininova on reaching this commendable milestone. However with growing pressure from Anti Piracy Organizations on ISP’s and Governments supporting the hosting of Torrent Files or Trackers, do you think Mininova will be able to survive in this world of BitTorrent where survival is becoming more and more difficult.

My best wishes are with Mininova..  I want it to remain around for many more years to come..

Via TorrentFreak

I just couldn’t prevent myself from trying it out, so I downloaded it, and trust me, it completely blew me off. I was using Joost till now to watch quality Video content online, but now Miro is going to replace Joost, Believe me, its that good.

Miro is way better than Joost in many aspects, and let me list out some of them…

• It’s open-source
• It’s DRM-free
• It’s friendly to all content creators, professional and user-generated alike
• It’s high definition
• It’s BitTorrent enabled
• It has 2,700 channels listed in the Miro Guide
• Of those 2,700, about 200 are from commercial broadcasters
• It connects you to all the video-sharing sites like YouTube, Revver etc.. 
• Miro uses the VLC video engine to play nearly every video format you’ve ever come across.

Miro beats Joost hands down in just about every department, but one place where Joost really shines is the professionally produced content. There is just no alternative to Joost if you are looking for high quality content.

Here are a few screenshots of Miro that I would like to share with you guys (damn its too sexy!!)  :

Guess what Joost  has finished uninstalling itself on my PC and Miro works like a charm. Thanks Miro team! So go ahead and download yourself a copy of Miro today (Works on Linux, OSX, Windows etc..)..

The basic principle of DNA is the same as what Bittorrent already does, the only big difference is how you download and consume the content. All you need to do is just get the Bittorrent Client (About 330KB). Once installed when you visit a DNA enabled site, you can download all the content from the DNA enabled site and by using the P2P technology you are reducing costs for the Big Media Companies.

Well the main selling point of DNA is that it should reduce bandwidth costs for the Content Providers. Online Video Portal Brightcove will be one of the launch partners. Brightcove will be using DNA in its upcoming Brightcove Show, which will be highly bandwidth intensive.

My favorite P2P Application, Joost has received a major makeover in the first public beta release. Joost 1.0 comes with a revamped UI, that is super slick and is better than the old one. I have really fallen in love with the new UI. Joost 1.0 has everything rearranged, and the new Navigation system is the best I have seen in a P2P Application.

Now coming to technical side of it, Joost now has become more tolerant of poor network performance and will attempt to retry and restart streams that have become stalled. This is one of the biggest problems I had with the earlier versions of Joost. Also added is an updater service that will automatically update Joost whenever there is a new version available.

For more details on what is new in Joost 1.0 see the Release Notes.

According the information given on the MSCD webpage

The Microsoft Secure Content Downloader (MSCD) is a peer-assisted download manager capable of securely downloading specific files. MSCD is intended for consumers who are downloading from a home PC, or business users whose computers are not behind a corporate firewall. If you use MSCD from behind a corporate firewall, you may be unable to download content, and may adversely affect other clients’ ability to download content.

Some MSCD clients may be connected to each other via peer connections, forming a ‘cloud’ of clients. Pieces of the file you are downloading are sent through these peer connections between clients, as well as through connections with the file server. As a member of the cloud, your computer both serves as a client and server to other members of the cloud. Data destined for the cloud may be routed through your computer and sent to other cloud members. The other cloud members connected to you will be able to access only pieces of the file you are downloading via MSCD – they have no access to any other data on your computer.

This is only a Community Technology Preview and will expire in August. To optimize performance, make sure you enable UPnP on your router and Teredo on your computer (can be enabled by typing netsh int ipv6 set ter cli at the command prompt)

Also currently, the downloads are limited to Microsoft Visual Studio and MSDN Library Beta. Supported Operating systems are Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Download Microsoft Secure Content Downloader here