Thread: Police threats close many bittorent sites

Yesterday we reported the story of RARBG, a 100,000 user tracker currently feeling pressure from anti-piracy group, BREIN. Although popular with Bulgarians, RARBG had an english version of the site and also indexed regular material that could be found on most trackers. Rather than limited action against one site, the picture emerging today shows a concerted attempt by the police to take down many other Bulgarian trackers, both those hosted in their home country and others hosted elsewhere. A special police unit usually dedicated to fighting organized crime recently starting working to identify the administrators of the sites. Once identified, the police set about making contact with them, and each was invited to a meeting.

At the meeting the administrators were ordered to shut down the sites. There were no explanations as to why they should, or which laws were being put into effect, but the order was clear - shut down the sites or the police will come and take the servers. Below is a rundown of sites that are currently affected, but we can’t confirm yet that all of these administrators were actually at the meetings.
ArenaBG, at one stage thought to be one of the larger European trackers, currently displays the message, “Dear user, We were forced to close our website.” The site was hosted at LeaseWeb in The Netherlands. However, the site has an alternative URL at 0.arenabg.com and appears to be setting up a new open tracker, which can be found at free.arenabg.com.



With 120,000 users, P2PBG is a pretty significant site. Although still visible, the site has been ordered by the police to cease tracking torrents. P2PBG is hosted in Bulgaria.
The MastersTB tracker has disappeared. AvatarBG, another Bulgarian tracker is currently down, but links on the homepage show a forum and alternative domain available elsewhere.
A site which intends to close altogether is Torrent-BG. There is no longer a torrent section on the site and the site owner says he will even give away the domain to a worthwhile new owner. Another site set to disappear is WordBG, and the administrators of Zarta.org have announced that the site will no longer have a BitTorrent tracker, and that it will go in a new direction. All sites were hosted in Bulgaria.
Currently, Bulgaria’s largest BitTorrent tracker Zamunda.net is fully operational. It has around 500,000 members with a tracker serving up to a peak of 1.8 million peers.
If any reader has additional information on this developing story, please contact us in confidence.


Source: Torrentfreak

Is this... the beginning??? :>

This is bad news, shit's starting to happen. I hope this "ways" won't spread to other countries. I live in Italy and my ISP's starting to bust my balls about my data traffic and I have to reset my router every 2 - 3 just to keep a good connection betwen me and my trackers. When TL was blocked for a few days I was one of the first victims.
Don't wanna seem offtopic here, is just that I think that now more than ever are serious movemets - at any kind of level - all around against p2p and not only. The law is becoming "cheeky" =))

Originally Posted by TheVlad

Is this... the beginning??? :>

This is bad news, shit's starting to happen. I hope this "ways" won't spread to other countries. I live in Italy and my ISP's starting to bust my balls about my data traffic and I have to reset my router every 2 - 3 just to keep a good connection betwen me and my trackers. When TL was blocked for a few days I was one of the first victims.
Don't wanna seem offtopic here, is just that I think that now more than ever are serious movemets - at any kind of level - all around against p2p and not only. The law is becoming "cheeky" =))

Good to see u here

Originally Posted by dragoi92

Good to see u here

Thanks...I guess. Didn't quite get you, but nevermind. :)

Regards.

i living in Slovakia, and theres everything seems to be cool

Originally Posted by Dave

A special police unit usually dedicated to fighting organized crime recently starting working to identify the administrators of the sites.

WHAT.THE.HELL.

Let me try to understand.

Organized crime = mob, mafia, large international organization dedicated to smuggle drugs, weapons and prostitutes. A real thread to ANY society. A REAL threat. Many victims. Real victims.

This police is being used to fight.... guys....sharing files. (worth noting that sharing files hasn't even the consensus in the courts if it is bad good or neutral to society).

So basically they are neglecting fighting the mob, a real threat, to fight guys sharing files, something that people don't even know if is legal or illegal. Cool. Awesome.

Well...considering that the law enforcement suck in every matter, they decided that...Hey! If we can`t catch up with murderers and mafia, from whom we are (anyway) taking some...money -no, sir! it`s not bribe...it`s money, for the good we do!- let`s kiss every company`s ass and bust those guys who have "illegal torrent servers"!!! Even tho` it`s not their fault...
Gizus! [Jesus] Why not even bust the guy who owns Rapid Share? ... It`s the same bullshit! But...hey...those are the law enforcements! Suckative!
I don`t understand, what`s their problem if major companies have bilions of dollars loss? I bet every cop pirated something in his/her life! It`s a simple fact!

Every time they shut down a tracker, a new one springs up to fill the void... when will they learn?

oink was the biggest shutdown by far. Greatly missed.