
The Pirate Bay down, forever? - Apaze
http://blog.brokep.com/2014/12/09/the-pirate-bay-down-forever/http://blog.brokep.com/2014/12/09/the-pirate-bay-down-forever/
======
Kequc
In the last 8 years the pirate bay hasn't changed? It went open source and
embraced magnet links entirely. Making it so that almost nothing was being
hosted on the server itself. You can download the entire pirate bay in 90MB to
put one up of your own. There are hundreds of pirate bays all over the world
running on almost nothing allowing everyone to download the same things at the
same speeds.

[edit: It didn't go open source.]

To suggest the pirate bay hasn't done anything is just lame. Not as lame as
sending 20 something's to jail over it but getting there.

The ads were because of legal defence fees, which can be huge.

~~~
sysk
The fact that it's hosting torrents in flat files or in database rows seems
like a minor technical difference to me. Apart from that, the same broken UI
doesn't seem to have changed much in the past 8 years. I didn't know that TPB
was open source... surprised that the community didn't try to improve the UX a
bit.

~~~
lelandbatey
The thing is that to download a torrent, the absolute minimum amount of
information you need is the torrent hash. The torrent hash is on the order of
~40 characters long, requiring no other information. All you have to do is
paste that short sting into a torrent client to download a set of files.

Are we really going to say that these 40 character strings are illegal to
share? If I paste the hash for the latest blockbuster in this comment, can
legal action be taken against me?

~~~
roel_v
It's sad that I have to beat that tired old drum again, but in law, _intent
matters_ (yes I have a law degree but I think it's fair to say that one
doesn't need one to know that). After 15 years I should have been desensitized
by farcically naive 'reasoning' (or I should say, farcically naive sophistry,
because let's face it, that's what it is) like 'they don't post torrents, the
users do' and 'how can a small string be illegal' but it still annoys me.

At the risk of going down the shitty analogy path, let's consider 'How can
putting just a tiny bit of lead into somebody's head be illegal? It's only
_115 grain_! I mean, of course, putting 500 grain into somebody would be
illegal, but if I put only 115 grain of lead into somebody, can legal action
be taken against me?' Really?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Maybe a better analogy would be hiring a hall for a music copiers swap meet
and charging advertisers for wall space around the hall?

Now, as crimes go I happen to think TPB are far less guilty of offences
against humanity than - say - the bankers who cause the 2008 meltdown, or the
torturers at the CIA.

And it's also debatable just how many sales of mainstream CDs are lost due to
piracy.

But I know a couple of small music software/plugin devs who shut up shop
because piracy killed their revenue stream, and it just wasn't worth their
time any more.

So it's counterfactual for the supporters to pretend there are no negative
consequences to file sharing, and it's all about heroically sticking it to The
Man.

It really isn't.

~~~
clarry
> piracy killed their revenue stream

I hear about things like this every once in a while, but where's the proof?

------
zerr
Can anybody explain what's the fuzz regarding pirate bay? I mean, there are
tons of good torrent sites and search engines everybody use every day... I
don't even remember when I last time used TPB...

~~~
ghshephard
The authorities, indeed even the Movie industry, don't care about the niche
search engines and torrent sites that the 1% of people into the scene use,
they care about the big ones that 99% of the people use.

By shutting down TPB, they've just eliminated the site that >99% of people are
using, which is all that really matters to them.

Moral: Stay off the Radar of those in power, and you can do whatever you want.

~~~
evgen
Alternative explanation: when trying to solve a problem attack the biggest
issue first. If TPB was the torrent site for a majority of users (and
especially for casual users) then you attack that site first. Now that it is
down you move on to #2, #3, etc. The niche sites are less important than the
mega-site, but that does not mean that they are not on someone's radar or not
going to be next on the list. The "why go after me when TPB is out there doing
much worse to you" excuse also goes away.

------
thesorrow
Is there any existing project or PoC for a blockchain based torrent index ?

~~~
evgen
I do just love how people think a blockchain is magic crypto fairy dust that
solves all problems...

~~~
Joeboy
If you're trying to create a distributed, censorship resistant public record
then it's a pretty sensible approach to investigate.

~~~
forgottenpass
Only in the general sense that bitcoin is a system with some desirable
properties of a decentralized torrent index. The list of all software with
features desirable in a distributed torrent index is as long as my arm and
it's arguably sensible to "investigate" any one of them.

But the grandparent poster didn't name many technologies, they singled out the
bitcoin blockchain specifically. A technology that through the popularity of
its function has made it a popular target to have other things bolted onto.
But popularity of the blockchain hammer does not turn all problems into nails.

------
vicpara
This article doesn't get the point. It's old, doesn't change, conservative and
outdated? Stop using it.

The big problem is that TPB was taken offline not because it was buggy but
because helped people copyrighted content.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Thank you so much.

This is a seriouis strawman avoiding the actual issues of censorship, big govt
overreach, abuse of power, and all that.

------
thewarrior
How hard would it be to build a distributed hosting system for all the
torrents ever on Piratebay ?

Considering how one poster here says that all of the torrents upto 2013 fit
into 90 MB , its quite feasible. It could tunnel over TOR to make tracking
things a little more difficult.

~~~
cpach
Sure. But how would one manage updates? I.e. accepting new torrents.

~~~
thewarrior
How about just falling back to Gnutella P2P for the torrent hosting layer.

~~~
cpach
Is that really a viable alternative? My impression is that people left the
Gnutella network due to instability and floods of crap files.

------
Aynatix
URLs to alternatives?

~~~
cogburnd02
Sometimes if you Google something with the keyword 'torrent' (e.g. "sia 1000
forms of fear torrent") even if Google doesn't give you anything relevant, you
might get a Google results page that has a DMCA notice at the bottom; click
that, it'll take you to Chilling Effects, and the badly-written (or
excellently-written, depending on your POV) DMCA letters will have _huge_
lists of alternatives to TPB, and relevant links to what you were Googling
for. e.g.

[https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10197331](https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10197331)

[https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10203483](https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10203483)

[https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/1135322](https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/1135322)

------
Fastidious
The article mentions KLF. What is that?

~~~
Fuzzwah
I just want to add a link to the previous replies:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual)

The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) is a 1988 book by The
Timelords (Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty), better known as The KLF. It is a
step by step guide to achieving a No.1 single with no money or musical skills,
and a case study of the duo's UK novelty pop No. 1 "Doctorin' the Tardis".

It is a great read and well worth tracking down.

------
kbart
Another fight against windmills? Google works just fine for searching .torrent
files, I don't even get redirected to TPB lately.

------
witty_username
I must agree; the ads are way too crazy.

~~~
eXpl0it3r
Maybe I'm one of these "jerks", but it's always amusing to me when people
complain about ads on the internet, while there are so many different ad-
blockers out there.

~~~
bad_user
I never understood ad blockers or the people promoting ad blockers.

People complain about ads, yet they are unwilling to pay for content, with the
popularity of something like ThePirateBay being testament to that.

And then, I can understand that many websites are showing distasteful ads, but
if you don't like it, then don't use those websites. This gives a chance to
competing websites, being practically like voting with your wallet. Because in
truth, ad blockers help the companies that are showing distasteful ads, just
like how piracy helped companies like Microsoft.

EDIT: if you're gonna down-vote, at least mention why, otherwise I'm going to
assume you are a just freeloader that wants everything for free.

~~~
lucb1e
> yet they are unwilling to pay for content

Hold it right there. The problem is that there is usually no way to pay. There
is currently no way to automatically reimburse website owners when you just
read a blogpost from them without going through the trouble of finding a
donate button or emailing them for their paypal.

I do use ad blockers and I donate whenever I find something useful. I pirate
books and music and I want to pay when I like it.

> don't use those websites

That's not always as easy as it sounds. I've tried DuckDuckGo for weeks but I
just can't get the same results, so I'm back to Google now. I'd love to pay
google, but I can't and they keep serving me ads.

Now Google is a pretty extreme example with all the data gathering, but you're
almost forced to use some websites because it's a social norm (without
Facebook, I'd miss a lot of events and messages from the school group). And
you can't exactly decide whether ads on the page will be annoying before
clicking on a link from Hacker News.

> ad blockers help the companies that are showing distasteful ads, just like
> how piracy helped companies like Microsoft

That is actually a good point, I hadn't thought of that before. Then again, I
hardly use Microsoft products (just skype, but I could switch over to mumble
any minute), but I see what you mean.

~~~
bad_user
If you pay or donate for the content you like, I've got no beef against you.

Personally, I do pay Google for using Google Apps and I'm not getting ads in
Gmail or the other services part of their Apps.

Indeed, I still get ads in their Search, but that doesn't bother me personally
and AdBlock Plus from what I've seen is allowing those ads in their default
configuration. YouTube is the one Google service that greatly annoys me, which
is the reason for why I've searched for alternatives and so I eventually ended
up using Vimeo, SoundCloud and Google Music - US citizens have many more
alternatives available, unfortunately for me I'm being blocked because I'm not
from the US.

------
known
[https://tpb.pirati.cz/](https://tpb.pirati.cz/) FTW

~~~
zymhan
Search works, but links to the torrent's pages are broken.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
I was kind of expecting them to build fully distributed system. But I got
really disappointed when they claimed that "reverse proxy" / "load balancing"
is latest in distributed systems.

------
s_dev
I reckon the next big torrent site will be KickAss torrents @ kat.ph. Shame to
see the guys behind TPB disenfranchised - they've earned it I guess from all
the stress they've endured.

------
laxatives
I'm not familiar with Peter Sunde, but this sounds a lot like Peter isn't
attached to Pirate Bay at all anymore.

~~~
maccam912
Correct. He has done time and decided to move on with his life. Stopped being
involved with TPB in 2009 except for occasionally blogging about it like he
did here.

------
edpichler
What is so special in TPB? I can't figure out.

I have seen a dozen of better services. Any hidden feature I don't know?

~~~
dagw
_What is so special in TPB?_

Everybody's heard of it, you didn't have to dig through obscure sites to find
it, it was always there and always worked.

~~~
edpichler
Hmm... now I got it.

------
known
[http://unblockedpiratebay.com/](http://unblockedpiratebay.com/) FTW

~~~
jmhobbs
That's just a proxy service. Run a search, it'll fail because there is nobody
home. Am I missing something?

------
tomwalker


------
kowdermeister
1 down, 99999 left.

------
sebgeelen
The blog title contain a question mark, I guess this HN topic should also have
it...

~~~
nocman
Yes, this should be edited. It is _very_ misleading.

Rings of someone trying to get more people to click the link because instead
of asking if it might be happening, it sounds like it definitely is going down
forever.

It needs to be changed.

~~~
k_1
exactly!!! this ^

------
mfisher87
NICE TITLE

HN: "The pirate bay down forever (Peter Sunde's blog)"

Peter Sunde's Blog: "The Pirate Bay down, forever?"

~~~
ZoF
I'm genuinely curious as to why an admin hasn't changed this title yet.

Certainly enough people have commented about it and it is a grossly misleading
omission.

~~~
evo_9
Yeah pretty much the silliest thing about HN now - the endless title tweaking
by the mods.

And to what end? More than once the title has changed so significantly I
thought it was an entirely new article.

~~~
ZoF
I agree there should be something that signifies a changed title(perhaps just
an appended asterisk) but I also think it is useful and oftentimes necessary
functionality.

How would it be 'silly' to add the question mark to the end of this posts
title? Especially given that HN guidelines explicitly state that titles should
be the headline of the article.

------
moonshinefe
He never asserts that TPB is down forever. Misleading title.

------
pmalynin
Fix the title, please, its misleading.

~~~
skrause
It's already back up: [https://thepiratebay.cr/](https://thepiratebay.cr/)

~~~
mintplant
No, that's a proxy. Searches don't actually work because the main site is
down.

------
IkmoIkmo
What's that rule again? The one where if a title ends in a question mark, it
can generally be answered with 'No'?

~~~
fredley
Betteridge's Law of Headlines:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

------
Lrigikithumer
Extremely misleading title...

------
xerophyte12932
umm.... this works: [https://thepiratebay.cr/](https://thepiratebay.cr/)

Or is this not the "original" TPB?

~~~
palunon
This is just a proxy. It's down when the main site is down (except for some
static things, like the homepage)

Try to search a torrent on it, it will fail.

------
sly_g
Well, one shouldn't confuse middle age crisis with the failure of his project.

------
ozh
Sometimes I really don't get why stuff get upvoted and frontpaged on HN.

~~~
Raphmedia
I feel as if some links, even when poor, are upvoted in order to have a
comment discussion on the subject they speak about.

~~~
musername
comments alone increase rank, but too many look like spam and therefore get
stooped

