T411

» see t411.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

a tracker that keeps a ratio on you is asking for a relationship. you seed back what you took and you watch a number attached to your account, and if that number goes wrong you lose the account. i was never any good at that, and t411 was the largest of those sites in a language i cannot read.

it started as somebody else's disaster. quebectorrent opened in 2006 out of quebec and was closed by a court there in july 2008 after the recording industry went at it. part of the team behind that site put up torrent411.com the same year, carrying over the torrent files and the member list. the 411 was the north american number you dialed for directory assistance, and the slogan the site used, les pages jaunes du torrent, said the same thing in french.

the growth was fast and it stayed french. by june 2013 it was past five million registered members. in december 2014 alexa had it at 86th most visited site in france and first in its category, which for a torrent index in a country that had spent five years building a three strikes enforcement agency is a number worth sitting with.

hadopi was mailing warning letters to french households about their download habits while the site those households were on climbed the national rankings. none of that reached me from close up. what reached me was what always reaches you from outside somebody else's national internet: the name sitting in a list of trackers, filed under a language i was not going to learn for this.

~ the dossier ~

~ the yellow pages of the torrent ~

t411 was semi private, which is a specific thing. registration was open, or open enough, but the tracker knew who you were and kept your upload and download totals. the catalog was clean because of that. an open index fills up with fakes and malware because nobody pays a price for uploading garbage, and on a ratio site the account that does it is the account that disappears.

it was also, and this is what made it france's site rather than a site in france, entirely in french. release names and forum threads both, with french subtitles and french dubs bundled into the uploads. there was nowhere comparable for that audience to go.

~ the domain years ~

the address kept moving. torrent411.com carried it from 2008 until august 2011, when the site went to t411.me to get out from under verisign's reach. february 2015 moved it again, to t411.io, with the.me registry starting to look like a pressure point. in april 2015 a french court ordered dns providers in the country to block t411.me after a complaint from the scpp, the french labels' rights body.

the traffic did not go anywhere. blocking a dns record moves a site's users to a different dns server, and by 2015 that was common knowledge in every country that had tried it. what eventually worked was not a court order against an address.

~ the morning of the raid ~

the site went dark on the evening of sunday 25 june 2017 and for a day the assumption was maintenance. it was not. by the tuesday swedish police had confirmed that two men suspected of running it were under arrest on suspicion of copyright infringement and money laundering, in an operation run jointly with france.

the arrest itself is worth recording for how it was done. a swedish unit normally reserved for terrorism came through the door of a house at seven in the morning. the man they took, a ukrainian living in sweden who handled the systems, later described waking to the sound of the door breaking. his wife was arrested alongside him and released after two days. he spent about two weeks in swedish custody, was extradited to france on 14 july 2017, then let out roughly five weeks after that pending investigation.

nearly five years later he still had not been convicted. the case was open and his house and his bank account were still frozen. the person who actually owned t411, operating under a false name and thought to be canadian, had never been publicly confirmed as arrested at all. the site never came back. what came back were domains with the name on them, which is not the same thing.

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