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.
