If you were a member of the semi private BitTorrent tracker SnowTigers, you might have noticed the site’s recent downtime. Unfortunately, SnowTigers is not offline due to a hardware failure or any other technical fault of that sort. The the site has been hit by one of the worst things that could happen to a BitTorrent tracker – a police raid. According to available information French police have seized 21 severs associated with SnowTigers and have also arrested 10 of the site’s administrators.
At the time of its demise, Snowtigers had a huge user base of over 250000 members (Alexa rank of ~5000) and was one of the largest French BitTorrent trackers. It was an extremely popular tracker for French content and tracked movies, music and drama including some rare, unique, local releases not found on most other BitTorrent trackers. As things stand right now, it is highly unlikely that the site would make a return anytime soon. More information about the raid can be found in this article (you might need Google translate as it’s French news source).
To be honest France has not been a file sharing friendly place from the very beginning. They’ve only recently passed a ‘three strikes’ anti piracy law that could be easily be manipulated with a little money and power to rape all file sharers in the country.
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"was one of the largest BitTorrent trackers hosted in France"
It was certainly a french tracker, but it wasn't hosted in France.
Source (use google traductor to see it) : http://www.zataz.com/news/19094/snowtiger.html
oh man thats something else, arrested?!
Martin,
Corrected. Thanks for pointing it out.
Anders,
It seems they were arrested:
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=n&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zataz.com%2Fnews%2F19094%2Fsnowtiger.html&sl=auto&tl=en&history_state0=
I am shocked. 10 of our french friends arrested :(
But then, I forgot: this is (was :( ) a huge tracker tracking general/0-day/popular content, so they're asking for it. If you're a likely target and want to survive, you gotta do what the What.CD admins do, and they do crazy stuff to protect themselves from both being caught, and prosecution.
Thanks for posting the news. I've not seen it posted by sharky or TF.
Carl,
You are welcome. TF just posted it today:
http://torrentfreak.com/military-intelligence-used-to-shutdown-250k-user-bittorrent-site-090606/
Email from Snowtigers datacenter in canada:
Hello,
There were no server seized in our Data Center and we never got any information from any police entity.
msa,
I think the raid was carried out in France, not in Canada. It's the police who claim they seized 21 servers. I don't know but maybe hey had some of the severs set up in France as well?
Yes, this is surely possible.
But main site '' snowtigers.net '' is hosted in canada and servers as been shutdown by the servers owner.
He only need to reboot servers to be online again.
Did you have any proof of these servers in ''France'' as been seized?
msa,
No. We did not have any confirmation other than the news report linked to in the article.
In France, you are guilty until proven innocent as opposed to here in North America. Perhaps this is why servers haven't been rebooted yet. They have to get a bail first as I doubt the French Gendarmerie will allow them access to a computer!1
In France, you are guilty until proven innocent as opposed to here in North America. Perhaps this is why servers haven't been rebooted yet. They have to get a bail first as I doubt the French Gendarmerie will allow them access to a computer!1
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