“Since a few months ago, Deimos, the site administrator, lacks the necessary time to take care of the website, because of personal matters he’s been needing to attend to. For this reason, he has decided to leave the site staff.

Before leaving, he assigned a new site administrator from among his friends to take care of the site. The old moderator team will continue helping with the site, unchanged. We will try to keep running everything just as it always has been.

The trackers and website seem to be working properly, and should any issues arise, they will be taken care of as soon as possible. The site might be going on and offline over the next days as we work out any problems.

Welcome back, and enjoy your stay!

- Umlauf
Demonoid Site admin”

All though I have found the Demonoid tracker to be a great service in the past I find my self extremely cautious due to the previous CRIA scare and the recent downtime. More information with regards to the CRIA issue and why Canadian can no longer use the Demonoid tracker take a look here.

Who knows what the new admins may be up to… If you have any feeling in this regard please leave them in the comments below.

Torrent Freak has a good follow up and speculative article on the subject.

More on this topic can be found at Torrent Freak .

YouTorrent is relatively new to the torrent search engine space, but they have had resoundingly good reviews across the internet.

The premise is simple: YouTorrent is a meta-search engine that indexes torrents from other sites (such as btjunkie, The Pirate Bay), then prioritizes the results based on the number of seeds and peers each torrent has.

As a meta-search engine YouTorrent doesn’t discriminate against legal and pirated content (yes, there is legal content on BitTorrent) so it’s a case of anything goes, and this is both a strength and a weakness. If you do frequently download using BitTorrent you’ll love YouTorrent, it’s quick and the results it gives negates the need to use other sites when searching for Torrents.

• Torrent Support: Opera has tried to simplify the downloading of torrents through it’s torrent dowloader. It makes downloading torrents as simple as downloading a .exe file. However, it is not intended to replace a full fledged torrent client. So advanced users will probably want to stick with µTorrent
• Widgets : This is another feature that has grabbed a lot of attention. These are similar in functionality to the Konfabulator ( now Yahoo Widgets Engine ) or the Dashboard widgets on Mac OS X. They act like tiny web applications. They use HTML, AJAX, JavaScript and CSS, and can use other technologies such as SVG. Though these are not Opera’s answer to Firefox’s extensions. There are some very neat widgets available in the official widget gallery…. like Circular Tetris (w00t) …
• Thumbnail Preview of Tabs : If you hover your mouse pointer over the tabs, a thumbnail preview of that page will pop-up. This is a great feature as I can’t tell you how many times I have to preview every single tab in Firefox to remember what I had loaded there. Opera has added another small feature to it’s tabs. You can now lock tabs, so that you don’t accidentally close them. One of my favorite features that Opera includes is the ability to create new tabs next to the tab you are currently working in. This really helps to group works together over time.
• Site Specific Preferences : This is a great new feature as it allows you to set a specific set of rules for a given website. You can choose to allow pop-ups/block all pop-ups from a site, you can change the way cookies are handled, the useragent that opera uses and a host of other options including applying custom stylesheets. You can now disable javascript at certain malicious sites. Overall, this is incredibly useful, especially for those nasty cracks sites (cracks.am, shame on you!)
• Source Viewer : Opera has added an internal source viewer which highlights known syntaxes. One very weird thing is that if you switch to the Source viewer, Edit –> Find option becomes unavailable. You have to use Ctrl+F to bring up the Search Box.

Other Small Changes:

* You can now use CTRL+T to open new tabs (was CTRL+N in tab mode).
* Find will highlight all instances of your search including text in form fileds.
* Support for importing and exporting news feed lists in OPML format has been added.
* Opera now passes the acid2 test.
* Default useragent string is now Opera ( that’s a smart move ).
* Opera now uses MSI installer. 30 Language packs are included with the international build. However, this has significantly increased opera’s size. The size has jumped up from 3.66mb to 6.17mb, even after removing Macromedia Flash Player from the installer. On top of that Opera still hasn’t included an update manager, that will download and update the newer files when an update is released.

This article covers the setup for Azureus, Bitcomet and UTorrent, so most of the torrent bases are covered. I have successfully been downloading with UTorrent encryption turned on for about a week now without any notice of a decrease in speed, though the system processor is a bit more taxed though.