The Internet is littered with torrent indexes and search engines, all offering a wide range of content to their visitors.
However, for this content to travel from A to B the BitTorrent ecosystem needs reliable trackers. Unfortunately, good public trackers are harder to find.
For several years PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent have been dominating this space, coordinating the communication between dozens of millions of peers every day. The two trackers surfaced after The Pirate Bay shut down its BitTorrent tracker back in 2009 and haven’t seen much competition since.
In recent weeks, however, a new tracker called “Demonii” entered the scene. Similar to other standalone trackers Demonii doesn’t host any torrents. TorrentFreak caught up with the operator behind this new kid in town, and he told us that the name is inspired by Demonoid.
“I planned to revive Demonoid because they disappeared so quickly, so I registered the domains demonii.com, net and org,” Demonii’s Qarizma tells TorrentFreak.
“Then I actually realized that for me it wasn’t a good idea to start something like Demonoid. It would get me into trouble which I’m not interested in. So I decided to start the Demonii Tracker Project.”
After a slow start, traffic to the new tracker suddenly experienced a massive spike in traffic two weeks ago. Overnight it went from dealing with a handful of peers to millions, a surge that can be solely attributed to The Pirate Bay.
As it turned out, TPB had added the new tracker to all their magnet links, as they also do with OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent. Needless to say, Demonii wasn’t prepared and the newly gained attention quickly took the tracker offline.
“I didn’t expect it, Demonii was tracking about 100 torrents for testing and debugging, then I heard TPB used Demonii as tracker. That explained why my server went down,” Qarizma tells us.
However, Demonii did welcome the Pirate Bay blessing and after moving to a new server it quickly recovered. At the time of writing Demonii tracks 875,365 torrents and handles 4,165,485 peers, which makes it the fifth largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet.
Like most of the other large BitTorrent trackers Demonii runs on the beerware licensed Opentracker software. Demonii’s operator made some small modifications to make it run smoothly on his VPS, which he can expand later if needed.
“Demonii currently runs on a KVM based VPS on my own nodes. The main node is a Xeon X5677, and the VPS specs are 512MB RAM and 1000Mhz is still enough to run it now. When it needs more I can simply allocate more resources to the VPS.”
In addition to operating the Demonii tracker the owner also offers privacy protection software that may come in handy for some.
Dprotect
The free application named “dProtect” is a blocklist addon for uTorrent. It bans a long list of IP-ranges that may be connected to monitoring companies, government agencies and other outfits that may interfere with BitTorrent traffic.
“dProtect is our software released to increase people’s privacy on the internet. The software adds a layer of protection when you are downloading using uTorrent,” Qarizma says.
The dProtect software uses a list of ranges maintained by The Blocklist Group. Similar to other blocklists, the list is only partially effective.
It will be interesting to see if Demonii remains among the top trackers in the months to come. If The Pirate Bay keeps supporting it there is no doubt that the new kid in town will stick around for a while.
