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.

snowtigers logo

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.


13 Comments

  1. mArTi // 6/05/2009 11:59:00 PM  
    This comment has been removed by the author.
  2. mArTi // 6/06/2009 01:05:00 AM  

    "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

  3. Anders // 6/06/2009 02:36:00 AM  

    oh man thats something else, arrested?!

  4. TEAM FILEnetworks // 6/06/2009 03:56:00 AM  

    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=

  5. Anonymous // 6/07/2009 10:43:00 AM  

    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.

  6. TEAM FILEnetworks // 6/07/2009 10:56:00 AM  

    Carl,
    You are welcome. TF just posted it today:
    http://torrentfreak.com/military-intelligence-used-to-shutdown-250k-user-bittorrent-site-090606/

  7. Unknown // 6/07/2009 02:31:00 PM  

    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.

  8. Lightning_Struck_Tower // 6/07/2009 07:51:00 PM  

    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?

  9. Unknown // 6/07/2009 11:10:00 PM  

    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?

  10. TEAM FILEnetworks // 6/07/2009 11:13:00 PM  

    msa,
    No. We did not have any confirmation other than the news report linked to in the article.

  11. Chubb // 8/20/2009 10:02:00 PM  

    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

  12. Chubb // 8/20/2009 10:03:00 PM  

    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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