Aug 10, 2012

More on Demonoid. What We Hope They Did, and What All Torrent Sites Should Be Doing

Demonoid Logo
Demonoid Logo (Photo credit: Dekuwa)
The excitement about the Demonoid take down didn't stop in the Ukraine. It also spilled into Mexico in a joint investigation by Interpol, IFPI and Mexican Authorities where the operators of Demonoid were arrested.

According to Torrent Freak:

After a few days of no comment, the actors behind the raid and closure of Demonoid have stepped forward. The IFPI and Interpol say they worked together with the Attorney General of Mexico and Ukrainian police to shutter the popular file-sharing service. In addition to equipment seized in Ukraine, they have now confirmed “a number of arrests” and seizures of assets in Mexico.

IFPI's anti-piracy director, Jeremy Banks had this to say:

Demonoid was a leading global player in digital music piracy which acted as unfair competition to the more than 500 licensed digital music services that offer great value music to consumers while respecting the rights of artists, songwriters and record companies.

Not surprisingly, Anonymous has vowed to take action in this Youtube video:



That's all well and good, but in the end it will probably not solve anything. Demonoid's servers have still been seized, and the authorities are now rummaging through the logs on those servers. I am sure many Demonoid users are hoping that the Demonoid admins were smart enough to use full hard drive encryption on their servers. That way, when the authorities powered down those servers, they would have nothing.

Since hindsight is 20/20, it's time that current torrent hosts look at what has happened to Mega Upload, Demonoid and The Pirate Bay if they haven't already, and learn something. Although there are many of us that do use torrent sites legally, there are many who do not and these raids could incriminate their users. I for one used Demonoid to track Bauer-Puntu linux, which is distributed under a GPL license completely legally, yet I'm sure my IP's show up in their logs. It would be nice if they protected me by encrypting their data.

If you didn't know, full hard drive encryption is available on many Linux servers at install time, and there are lots of free hard drive encryption options for Windows servers as well. Torrent sites need to be proactive in protecting their data and their users data and implement full hard drive encryption.

Do you agree or disagree? Let us know in the comments.



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