After a prolonged battle against 31 Canadian media organizations including the CRIA, the administrator of a torrent site known as QuebecTorrent closed its doors in 2008 after the handing down of a permanent injunction.
“I just wanna say thanks to all the people who supported the cause and me all along,” admin Sebastian Doditz told TorrentFreak at the time.
Initially, it was believed that the 109,000 members of the site would be left homeless but shortly after another torrent site appeared. Called Torrent411 with the slogan The Torrent Yellow Pages (411 is Canada’s version), it launched with around 109,000 members – the number that QuebecTorrent closed with.
No surprise then that all QuebecTorrent user accounts had been transferred to T411, including ratios and even some content categories that were previously excluded due to copyright holder disputes.
“Welcome to one and all!” a notice on the site read. “It is with great pleasure that we launch the Torrent411.com site today. All the team of Torrent411.com wishes you the most cordial of welcomes! Here you will find all the torrents imaginable which will be for you for thousands of hours to come! Filled with surprises that await you!”
Even following its resurrection, pressure on the site continued to build. In 2011, it was forced to move to T411.me, to avoid problems with its .com domain, but against the odds, it continued to grow.
In early 2015, the site decided to move again, from .me to .io, following action to have the site blocked in France.
But later in the year, there was yet more trouble when the site found itself reported to the United States Trade Representative, identified as a “rogue site” by the RIAA.
With a number of copyright holders on its back, it’s clear that T411’s troubles weren’t going away anytime soon, but there are now fears of another crisis.
On Sunday, T411 simply stopped responding on its latest T411.al domain. No warning and no useful messages have been forthcoming from its operators. For a site of this scale and resilience, that’s not something one expects.
Even though the site itself is down, there are some very basic signs of life. For example, the site’s Wiki remains operational which indicates the T411.al domain is intact, at least for now. Unfortunately, the Wiki contains no information surrounding the current status of the site.
However, the main site itself (or quite possibly a gateway to the platform) is not responding. Although the location of the servers is still obscured by Cloudflare, TF has learned they’re located not in France, but elsewhere in Western Europe.
Nevertheless, anti-piracy activity against torrent sites has been high in France during recent months. Last November, torrent icon What.cd shutdown following action by French authorities. Soon after, the cybercrime unit of the French military police targeted the country’s largest pirate site, Zone-Telechargement (1,2).
Members of the huge T411 community will be hoping that this downtime is little more than a technical problem that got out of hand. But, with speculation on the rise in a tough climate, people have a tendency to expect the worst.
TF is informed by two sources more information could become available today. We’ll update this article should that be the case.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
from TorrentFreak http://ift.tt/2rWXmxV
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment