An anonymous reader writes Demonii is the tracker behind the scenes for many BitTorrent sites serving pirated content. This week the tracker broke through the barrier of 30 million connected peers, handling no less than 2 billion connections per day. In other words, the scale of operation has become massive. TorrentFreak interviewed an operator of the site, and it was revealed that the tracker runs smoothly on just three dedicated servers, communicating at 180 Mb/s while serving 4 million torrents. Some people have argued that trackers are obsolete in the first place, as DHT and PEX allow peers to share the same information among each other, but Demonii’s operator reminds that having trackers speeds up the initial peer finding significantly. In any case, Demonii is not going away anytime soon. The tracker is already on its way to another milestone. The 40 million peer milestone will probably come into view later this year, but first there are a trillion more connections to process. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Wall Street Journal reports Netflix and Nintendo are in the early stages of producing a live-action series based on The Legend of Zelda . Read more… 
The results of a massive new DNA sequencing project on the New York City subway have just been published . And y up, there’s a lot of bacteria on the subway—though we know most of it is harmless. What’s really important, though, is what we don’t know about it. Read more… 
The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive. Read more… 
I’ve always been captivated by biohackers who implant tiny magnets under their skin, giving themselves the ability to physically feel magnetic fields. However, I’m not quite dedicated enough to go through the hassle (or commitment) of actually going under the knife. Read more… 
