Why all the attention?

He’s said to have threatened to bomb the offices of the German Federal Employment Services Agency, “and/or kill an employee”.

The operator’s equipment was seized, “on account of a posting he was alleged to have made to a private police forum by the name of CopZone,” says the story.

But the server for the anonymizing The Onion Router network at a hosting provider’s premises wasn’t touched, says Heise, going on:

In the incriminating posting to the forum, which can no longer be found on the Internet, the person whose flat was raided was alleged by the police to have threatened to plant a bomb in the offices and/or kill an employee of the German Federal Employment Services Agency.

As the IP address relating to the forum posting had been anonymized with the help of the network and thus pointed to the Tor exit node, the investigators assumed that it was the server operator who had posted the entry. It took several hours for the police to realize their mistake.

What remains unclear however is why the computers of the man from Düsseldorf were confiscated but the server itself was not (oratoria ).

Heise says the tour operator posted “I’m at the end of my civil courage” in English in his blog entry, decided to shut down wormhole.ynfonatic.de.

He added in Engliosh:

Raiding the premises of the operator of a Tor exit node in an attempt to determine the author(s) of a specific forum posting is a fairly futile exercise. Investigating authorities should instead make use of fundamental weaknesses of anonymization networks. Thus according to a scientific study a party can by seeding the network with manipulated Tor servers monitor the anonymizing network to a certain degree.

A short time ago the Swede Dan Egerstad was able with a manipulated Tor exit node to successfully phish hundreds of passwords belonging to authorities and embassies.

Demonoid down reported yesterday, going on:

The CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America), Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA clown (sorry, clone), is noted more for its failures, which are legion, than its successes, which are few.

However, it may have scored against BitTorrent tracker Demonoid.

We went on to quote Torrentfreak in The Netherlands as the source and today, when you go to http://demonoid.com/, you still get: “The connection has timed out”.

So is this because the CRIA was able to intimidate Demonoid’s ISP?

No, says Demonoid. It’s down, but not out.

“May have” was the operative phrase and, “Ok folks, here it is,” says a chat log with Torrentfreak’s Ernesto, going on:

Demonoid is down. It has been for around 2 day almost. The reason is down is unknown, and is still unknown. It HASNN’T beam RAIDed, shutdown, terminated, deleted, burned, mamed, all thrown under a bridge. There had been speculation as demonoid,com whereabouts, well, the rurmors are false.

The chat goes on to seriously slag Torrentfreak for reporting the CRIA was behind Demonoid’s alleged demise and correctly concludes (oratoria ):

Just for the record, the CRIA (despite the name) does NOT represent Canadian artists, and the Canadian music industry. It is an AMERICAN Association based in Canada to represent the RIAA here.

Actually, guys, it isn’t even American.

The CRIA, RIAA and all the other alphabet Big 4 organised music cartel organisations around the world are run by EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), with Warner Music bringing up the rear as the only US label. And even that’s run by a Canadian.

Meanwhile, a lot of people will be relieved to know Demonoid isn’t dead and will be eagerly looking forward to its early return.

So stay tuned.