15 ms·

The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid

634 points by speckx 5mo ago

palmotea 5mo ago
> For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way. I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now. Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.
- Jeremy1026 5mo ago
  I've never not found something that has been publicly released on it. Though, I don't typically stray too far from the mainstream path for the media I'm looking for.
  - Pay08 5mo ago
    For one, not every entry of the Stormlight Archives is on it.
- xnx 5mo ago
  > on newer (public) sites Example of said sites?
  - Retr0id 5mo ago
    rutracker, 1337x, nyaa are the first that come to mind.
    - b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
      newer? my rutracker account is an adult, I'm pretty sure.
      - Retr0id 5mo ago
        It's marginally newer than TPB
  - johncoltrane 5mo ago
    ext in tonga
- dyauspitr 5mo ago
  Torrenting is alive and well… for recent releases and new stuff. All the old stuff is pretty hard to find now. When demonoid was around you could find just about everything. The worst part is for a lot of it there isn’t a legal way to get them either.
  - everyone 5mo ago
    That's the tragedy of the MAFIAA death throes period imo.. With all their lawsuits and bullshit they never even slowed down the big public trackers and torrents of the popular stuff they were trying to stop being shared.. Instead they killed loads of small private trackers which housed exquisitely curated collections of stuff that wasn't available anywhere else for neither love nor money.
- 1970-01-01 5mo ago
  /top/48hall seems pretty fresh and healthy. What do you mean by stagnant?
- moi2388 5mo ago
  I use Stremio with pirate bay torrents. There literally isn’t anything that came out and isn’t on there.
  - ranger_danger 5mo ago
    Tons of Japanese shows and movies are not there at all. Not a single Utaban episode is there, even though there's many on youtube.
- voidUpdate 5mo ago
  I can absolutely find new stuff on there. It took Project Hail Mary a little while to get on there, presumably because it was a cinema release only for quite a while but a good quality version popped up after a couple of weeks, and a bad quality "guy holding a camcorder in the cinema" version showed up after about 1 week, IIRC
  - busterarm 5mo ago
    once it hit streaming services the webrip was on it within hours.
    - voidUpdate 5mo ago
      I don't recall exactly when it went onto streaming, but I'm pretty sure I got a good quality version before that. It may have been released for streaming in other regions earlier than I thought though, I don't keep super up to date with that sort of thing, as I generally don't watch movies super soon after they're released
    - everyone 5mo ago
      I find the stream rips to be really shitty quality.. The original source is very low bitrate, compressed tae fuck. I find for stream rips from netflix for example I need to download a 4k rip in order to watch in 1080, and that's acceptable.
everyone 5mo ago
<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.
- kobieps 5mo ago
  agreed. the walls are closing in so skills need to remain sharp.
t1234s 5mo ago
If its not on their top 100/48 hr list then its not worth watching.
- mmh0000 5mo ago
  This has been my go-to for discovering new things to watch for 15 years. If something doesn't show up in the top-100 list, I'm generally unaware of it.
TFNA 5mo ago
When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.
- dmos62 5mo ago
  Where do you find those? I use 1337 and dht search engines. Can't be bothered to fiddle with private trackers. Wondering if you found something better.
  - Anonyneko 5mo ago
    E.g. ext.to aggregates torrents from a lot of public trackers, very often you can find good releases there.
  - Retr0id 5mo ago
    RARBG used to be the way to go, until they shut down. I'm not aware of a good public replacement.
    - stevenwoo 5mo ago
      thepiratebay is fine they just don’t run indexes often so searches often fail for stuff just uploaded within last hour or two. Limetorrents updates indices frequently but uses ad providers that try to hijack your clicks and presses so it takes three or four clicks to get one click that isn’t hijacked. There is a bit of non overlap between those two sites.
      - nobleach 5mo ago
        Sounds like something that a browser like Brave was built to combat. I haven't visited the site in question but for a lot of the ad-heavy sites I do visit, I jump over to Brave to deal with the nonsense.
    - 5mo ago
alex1138 5mo ago
So not to hijack this thread or anything but there's one good metric (if nothing else... the fact FB overwrote your email while Google seems to believe in data liberation, and fewer breaches) to tell apart the difference between those two companies Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing) Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"
- dizhn 5mo ago
  Try to use Yandex for some shady stuff and see what actually google blocks and doesn't.
Unai 5mo ago
I haven't visited a torrent site since I found out I could search for them from within qBittorrent.
- Hoodedcrow 5mo ago
  I don't think I'd prefer this, tbh. I would want to see the whole topic information when choosing what exact torrent to download. Is it marked "verified" or "questionable"? If it's "questionable", is it for some arbitrary formality, or something like "the audio is desynced"? Are there many different dubs (because I'd rather prefer not to have them, as they're bloating the files?)...
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Pay08 5mo ago
    I've never seen a torrent site that had things marked.
    - ls612 5mo ago
      What he is describing is how Rutracker does things.
    - dpoloncsak 5mo ago
      Not those exact markings, but TPB does have user-markings displayed that can serve as a vouch for credibility. - Normal User, no special status (No Skull) - Trusted (Pink Skull) - VIP (Green Skull) - Helper (Blue Skull, Legacy) - Moderator (Black MOD Tag) - Super Moderator (Red MOD Tag) - Administrator (Black ADMIN Tag) https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-ThePirateBay-Want-Trusted-VIP-Status-Pink-Green-Skull-See-Here https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-ThePirateBay-Want-Trusted-V...
      - Pay08 5mo ago
        Weird, I don't think I have ever seen that. Granted, I'm not a frequent user of TPB.
tokai 5mo ago
The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays. edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.
- everyone 5mo ago
  Yes! thank fuck!
- han1 5mo ago
  [dead]
- dmos62 5mo ago
  Paradoxically, it's also a good example of the kind of soft power the US still has: we're all watching their movies.
  - ffsm8 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - MajorTakeaway 5mo ago
      U.S. population pyramid graph is sobering enough.
  - gverrilla 5mo ago
    Speak for yourself.
    - dmos62 5mo ago
      You've not seen Dune?
      - Biganon 5mo ago
        I have not seen Dune.
hbn 5mo ago
Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience. Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years. Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.
- a1o 5mo ago
  On missing audio: usually I notice this when I watch with subtitles at night and then end up rewatching during the day with audio at much higher volume… And the thing that is said to be said is just… Not there?
  - Geonode 5mo ago
    The fact that they refuse to balance audio for standard stereo setups is a whole other nightmare.
    - skarz 5mo ago
      Lately whenever I watch movies my remote stays in my hand so I can boost the volume during dialogue and turn it down during loud action scenes. I've had two different soundbars, one of them quite expensive, and it's an issue on both.
boramalper 5mo ago
From "The Pirate Bay down, forever?" (2014) > TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse. > As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it. https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.brokep.com/2014/12/09/the-pirate-bay-down-forever/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.broke...
- razakel 5mo ago
  > As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. For anyone who doesn't know, the KLF took a million pounds in cash, and set it on fire. For no obvious reason.
  - ab5tract 5mo ago
    Making art for no obvious reason is the norm for making art. KLF burned down a million pounds. Has anyone else in history done anything like this? Even if so, KLF’s in rarefied company because it’s not something that happens even remotely close to regularly. And the amount of anger I see in people when discussing what KLF did with their own money means the art was significant enough to generate strong opinions.
tayo42 5mo ago
For some reason I thought the pirate bay was like fake/scam urls now. Is that or was that not the case? I thought I was remember the URL constantly changing and it was hard to keep up.
- Cockbrand 5mo ago
  It's been thepiratebay.org for ages now (or so I heard, not that I'd ever go there ever, of course).
  - kypro 5mo ago
    You're probably in the US? Doesn't work here in the UK like half of the internet these days.
    - akimbostrawman 5mo ago
      Living in authoritarian countries makes VPNs and proxies mandatory
- smallstepforman 5mo ago
  In non free countries it wont show up since the ISP will block the domain (eg. Oz). Free countries show it …
- gosub100 5mo ago
  The industry combats piracy by making fake websites that deliver scam URLs. But I've almost never had a problem finding the real TPB link.
elar_verole 5mo ago
Sometimes feel like I'm the only one still using it around me, but the service is still great and functional
- goolz 5mo ago
  Ya I still have mad love for TPB. My ISP was blocking my private tracker recently and while I would usually just run things through a seedbox it made me happy I could still turn to my trusty ol' friend.
kobieps 5mo ago
Great documentary on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6qcJt2NPY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6qcJt2NPY8
- rglover 5mo ago
  I was hoping someone shared this! Truly a great doc.
blablabla123 5mo ago
It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this. On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims. That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...
- lenerdenator 5mo ago
  They're organizations run by people who may or may not have something that could be described as narcissistic personality disorder. It's not particularly strange; the rationale for organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI is to be immune to any and all rules that could possibly foreseeably impact shareholder value. If you're not paying for their wares, you're impacting shareholder value. If you're asking them to actually license out content that they're training an AI on, you're impacting shareholder value. Rules for thee, not for me, especially when it makes me - the special person who charitably graces society with my presence - a rich person.
- ronsor 5mo ago
  The software industry mostly gave up when they saw it wasn't working. Even the music industry (of all of them!) mostly gave up. Only Hollywood and the wider film/TV industry is so stubborn.
  - tsss 5mo ago
    The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
someguyiguess 5mo ago
It works great with a nice stremio setup for live streaming. No subscriptions necessary anymore.
bronlund 5mo ago
I think the site has been hosted by the police since them. They probably use it as a honeypot or something - except the site is so poorly managed that no one really comes :D
- efnx 5mo ago
  References for this claim?
  - bronlund 5mo ago
    [flagged]
- platevoltage 5mo ago
  I can't wait to be indicted for downloading Daria with the original soundtrack, something no one will sell me.
yieldcrv 5mo ago
All the best stuff doesn’t get licensed by streaming services at all Entire generations of people have no idea something exists
- system2 5mo ago
  Yandex is the best search engine. Sites like Fmovies or moviesjoy include nearly everything. I couldn't find the Monty Python series, but Yandex's first results were ready to play it for me in seconds.
  - steve-atx-7600 5mo ago
    Also any ebook I’ve ever wanted to preview before purchasing has been available from the first results page.
shevy-java 5mo ago
We need to raid those lobbyists. How much money did the get from the USA? So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006 they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure there are many more people who don't support what the swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they get there?
jstummbillig 5mo ago
It's kind of cool but also kind of spooky: A legally targeted site just staying online for 20 years, not because of obscurity, but simply because it can't be taken down. Are our institutions this incapable?
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
  I don't know who's included in your "our", but I rather strongly like that American/Swedish/EU/whoever institutions don't have the capability to control the entire world and would prefer it stay that way. That's the beauty of the internet, and it's concerning that many people regard that lack of complete global control as an "incapability". Your laws don't, and shouldn't, apply to me.
- ProjectArcturis 5mo ago
  I'm astounded that they've been able to keep that domain name.
- squibonpig 5mo ago
  God I hope so
2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo ago
Remember how liberating it was to record TV shows or movies to VHS tape? My dad still has VHS tapes of Simpsons recordings that I'd rewatch as a kid.
- marysol5 5mo ago
  Quite a lot of old TV has been lost, and only resurrected by random re4cording that people have on VHS. Always funny to see adverts and old title cards
dlev_pika 5mo ago
For a brief moment I used Netflix, but very quickly went back to actually watching anything by I want. I feel for the kids that are waking up to this enshitification, without a clue on how to sail.
arwhatever 5mo ago
I'm happy making one-shot payments for most types of media. But I want to start a new bittorrent tracker for individual movies or episodes for which the provider requires you to create a recurring subscription, to rip off such content unabashedly.
gitowiec 5mo ago
So many gigabytes downloaded! Long live the King !
gamblor956 5mo ago
The hypocrisy of tech bros claiming to make well into the six figures being unwilling up pay a few dollars a month for dozens or hundreds of hours of entertainment while simultaneously expecting that everyone else should pay for the increasingly buggier software that pays their salaries.... Most of the problems many of you are complaining about with streamers are the result of your fellow programmers doing poor work. Consider the irony that many in this discussion won't pay for Disney+ because of the technical issues on the software side of things.
WarOnPrivacy 5mo ago
For most of that 20y, TPB was behind OVPN (vpn provider). They're the other provider I trust besides Mullvad.
theLiminator 5mo ago
I'm curious why IPFS never took off (I haven't dug into it much), but it seems more decentralized than BT.
- akimbostrawman 5mo ago
  Horrible UX that is fragmented and confusing even to nerds. If they had a easy and featureful client like qbittorrent they would have had a lot more of a chance.
nwellinghoff 5mo ago
A much more interesting article would cover HOW they are still up. Would love to know the details of the how in this case.
- sleight42 5mo ago
  ... said the FBI/NSA agent
- lobf 5mo ago
  Here you go: https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proof-virtual-machines-140921/ https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...
  - marysol5 5mo ago
    That always read as a load of nonsense, because you still have an ingress point of failure. Which is why so many trackers shift through TLD's all the time.
    - merpkz 5mo ago
      Isn't that just Cloudflare? thepiratebay.org resolves to CF IPs at the moment.
WarOnPrivacy 5mo ago
Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind the scenes. As for why the US Gov was willing to act as MPAA's private enforcer... (2012) Chris Dodd [MPAA chief] went on Fox News to explicitly threaten politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they’d better pass Hollywood’s favorite legislation… or else: Trading law for campaign donations is a place one might go after years of trading Gov power for campaign donations. https://www.techdirt.com/2012/01/20/mpaa-directly-publicly-threatens-politicians-who-arent-corrupt-enough-to-stay-bought/ https://www.techdirt.com/2012/01/20/mpaa-directly-publicly-t...
Automator666 5mo ago
[flagged]
dspillett 5mo ago
If the corporates are OK downloading content in breach of licences for training their intelligences, which apparently they are, I consider myself OK doing the same to train the model in my head.
- 31337Logic 5mo ago
  Since there is no Love button, please settle for my lowly Like instead. ;-)
robertwt7 5mo ago
private trackers are the only way to go nowadays I think. I've stopped using TPB for 11 years now since I joined private trackers. safer, less dead torrents, higher quality
- DarkNova6 5mo ago
  Can you give examples?
aboardRat4 5mo ago
thepiratebay founders got fined for 7$ million I wonder if they ever paid the fine. Probably they will be in debt forever.
crossroadsguy 5mo ago
Stremio is a good place to do this. I of course use it to watch freely and legaly available science and craft videos and nothing else. By the way, Stremio is not at all torrent or p2p software. It's just a streaming software and you can plug in any streaming source/add-on for this, including torrents, of course just to watch legally available videos. Maybe check it out: https://github.com/stremio https://github.com/stremio https://www.stremio.com https://www.stremio.com
sureglymop 5mo ago
I wish the same was true for LibGen and SciHub. I feel sad that the short period of easy open access to any knowledge (text), even for people not in academia, is over...
numron-dev 5mo ago
For us from poor country that can't really afford the online price of movies and games . Pirate bay is like the Google search . . . Thanks for existing.

634 points by speckx 5mo ago

> For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way. I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now. Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.

Jeremy1026 5mo ago
I've never not found something that has been publicly released on it. Though, I don't typically stray too far from the mainstream path for the media I'm looking for.
- Pay08 5mo ago
  For one, not every entry of the Stormlight Archives is on it.
xnx 5mo ago
> on newer (public) sites Example of said sites?
- Retr0id 5mo ago
  rutracker, 1337x, nyaa are the first that come to mind.
  - b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
    newer? my rutracker account is an adult, I'm pretty sure.
    - Retr0id 5mo ago
      It's marginally newer than TPB
- johncoltrane 5mo ago
  ext in tonga
dyauspitr 5mo ago
Torrenting is alive and well… for recent releases and new stuff. All the old stuff is pretty hard to find now. When demonoid was around you could find just about everything. The worst part is for a lot of it there isn’t a legal way to get them either.
- everyone 5mo ago
  That's the tragedy of the MAFIAA death throes period imo.. With all their lawsuits and bullshit they never even slowed down the big public trackers and torrents of the popular stuff they were trying to stop being shared.. Instead they killed loads of small private trackers which housed exquisitely curated collections of stuff that wasn't available anywhere else for neither love nor money.
1970-01-01 5mo ago
/top/48hall seems pretty fresh and healthy. What do you mean by stagnant?
moi2388 5mo ago
I use Stremio with pirate bay torrents. There literally isn’t anything that came out and isn’t on there.
- ranger_danger 5mo ago
  Tons of Japanese shows and movies are not there at all. Not a single Utaban episode is there, even though there's many on youtube.
voidUpdate 5mo ago
I can absolutely find new stuff on there. It took Project Hail Mary a little while to get on there, presumably because it was a cinema release only for quite a while but a good quality version popped up after a couple of weeks, and a bad quality "guy holding a camcorder in the cinema" version showed up after about 1 week, IIRC
- busterarm 5mo ago
  once it hit streaming services the webrip was on it within hours.
  - voidUpdate 5mo ago
    I don't recall exactly when it went onto streaming, but I'm pretty sure I got a good quality version before that. It may have been released for streaming in other regions earlier than I thought though, I don't keep super up to date with that sort of thing, as I generally don't watch movies super soon after they're released
  - everyone 5mo ago
    I find the stream rips to be really shitty quality.. The original source is very low bitrate, compressed tae fuck. I find for stream rips from netflix for example I need to download a 4k rip in order to watch in 1080, and that's acceptable.

everyone 5mo ago

<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.

kobieps 5mo ago
agreed. the walls are closing in so skills need to remain sharp.

t1234s 5mo ago

If its not on their top 100/48 hr list then its not worth watching.

mmh0000 5mo ago
This has been my go-to for discovering new things to watch for 15 years. If something doesn't show up in the top-100 list, I'm generally unaware of it.

TFNA 5mo ago

When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.

dmos62 5mo ago
Where do you find those? I use 1337 and dht search engines. Can't be bothered to fiddle with private trackers. Wondering if you found something better.
- Anonyneko 5mo ago
  E.g. ext.to aggregates torrents from a lot of public trackers, very often you can find good releases there.
- Retr0id 5mo ago
  RARBG used to be the way to go, until they shut down. I'm not aware of a good public replacement.
  - stevenwoo 5mo ago
    thepiratebay is fine they just don’t run indexes often so searches often fail for stuff just uploaded within last hour or two. Limetorrents updates indices frequently but uses ad providers that try to hijack your clicks and presses so it takes three or four clicks to get one click that isn’t hijacked. There is a bit of non overlap between those two sites.
    - nobleach 5mo ago
      Sounds like something that a browser like Brave was built to combat. I haven't visited the site in question but for a lot of the ad-heavy sites I do visit, I jump over to Brave to deal with the nonsense.
  - 5mo ago

alex1138 5mo ago

So not to hijack this thread or anything but there's one good metric (if nothing else... the fact FB overwrote your email while Google seems to believe in data liberation, and fewer breaches) to tell apart the difference between those two companies Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing) Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"

dizhn 5mo ago
Try to use Yandex for some shady stuff and see what actually google blocks and doesn't.

Unai 5mo ago

I haven't visited a torrent site since I found out I could search for them from within qBittorrent.

Hoodedcrow 5mo ago
I don't think I'd prefer this, tbh. I would want to see the whole topic information when choosing what exact torrent to download. Is it marked "verified" or "questionable"? If it's "questionable", is it for some arbitrary formality, or something like "the audio is desynced"? Are there many different dubs (because I'd rather prefer not to have them, as they're bloating the files?)...
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- Pay08 5mo ago
  I've never seen a torrent site that had things marked.
  - ls612 5mo ago
    What he is describing is how Rutracker does things.
  - dpoloncsak 5mo ago
    Not those exact markings, but TPB does have user-markings displayed that can serve as a vouch for credibility. - Normal User, no special status (No Skull) - Trusted (Pink Skull) - VIP (Green Skull) - Helper (Blue Skull, Legacy) - Moderator (Black MOD Tag) - Super Moderator (Red MOD Tag) - Administrator (Black ADMIN Tag) https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-ThePirateBay-Want-Trusted-VIP-Status-Pink-Green-Skull-See-Here https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-ThePirateBay-Want-Trusted-V...
    - Pay08 5mo ago
      Weird, I don't think I have ever seen that. Granted, I'm not a frequent user of TPB.

tokai 5mo ago

The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays. edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.

everyone 5mo ago
Yes! thank fuck!
han1 5mo ago
[dead]
dmos62 5mo ago
Paradoxically, it's also a good example of the kind of soft power the US still has: we're all watching their movies.
- ffsm8 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - MajorTakeaway 5mo ago
    U.S. population pyramid graph is sobering enough.
- gverrilla 5mo ago
  Speak for yourself.
  - dmos62 5mo ago
    You've not seen Dune?
    - Biganon 5mo ago
      I have not seen Dune.

hbn 5mo ago

Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience. Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years. Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.

a1o 5mo ago
On missing audio: usually I notice this when I watch with subtitles at night and then end up rewatching during the day with audio at much higher volume… And the thing that is said to be said is just… Not there?
- Geonode 5mo ago
  The fact that they refuse to balance audio for standard stereo setups is a whole other nightmare.
  - skarz 5mo ago
    Lately whenever I watch movies my remote stays in my hand so I can boost the volume during dialogue and turn it down during loud action scenes. I've had two different soundbars, one of them quite expensive, and it's an issue on both.

boramalper 5mo ago

From "The Pirate Bay down, forever?" (2014) > TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse. > As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it. https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.brokep.com/2014/12/09/the-pirate-bay-down-forever/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.broke...

razakel 5mo ago
> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. For anyone who doesn't know, the KLF took a million pounds in cash, and set it on fire. For no obvious reason.
- ab5tract 5mo ago
  Making art for no obvious reason is the norm for making art. KLF burned down a million pounds. Has anyone else in history done anything like this? Even if so, KLF’s in rarefied company because it’s not something that happens even remotely close to regularly. And the amount of anger I see in people when discussing what KLF did with their own money means the art was significant enough to generate strong opinions.

tayo42 5mo ago

For some reason I thought the pirate bay was like fake/scam urls now. Is that or was that not the case? I thought I was remember the URL constantly changing and it was hard to keep up.

Cockbrand 5mo ago
It's been thepiratebay.org for ages now (or so I heard, not that I'd ever go there ever, of course).
- kypro 5mo ago
  You're probably in the US? Doesn't work here in the UK like half of the internet these days.
  - akimbostrawman 5mo ago
    Living in authoritarian countries makes VPNs and proxies mandatory
smallstepforman 5mo ago
In non free countries it wont show up since the ISP will block the domain (eg. Oz). Free countries show it …
gosub100 5mo ago
The industry combats piracy by making fake websites that deliver scam URLs. But I've almost never had a problem finding the real TPB link.

elar_verole 5mo ago

Sometimes feel like I'm the only one still using it around me, but the service is still great and functional

goolz 5mo ago
Ya I still have mad love for TPB. My ISP was blocking my private tracker recently and while I would usually just run things through a seedbox it made me happy I could still turn to my trusty ol' friend.

kobieps 5mo ago

Great documentary on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6qcJt2NPY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6qcJt2NPY8

rglover 5mo ago
I was hoping someone shared this! Truly a great doc.

blablabla123 5mo ago

It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this. On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims. That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...

lenerdenator 5mo ago
They're organizations run by people who may or may not have something that could be described as narcissistic personality disorder. It's not particularly strange; the rationale for organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI is to be immune to any and all rules that could possibly foreseeably impact shareholder value. If you're not paying for their wares, you're impacting shareholder value. If you're asking them to actually license out content that they're training an AI on, you're impacting shareholder value. Rules for thee, not for me, especially when it makes me - the special person who charitably graces society with my presence - a rich person.
ronsor 5mo ago
The software industry mostly gave up when they saw it wasn't working. Even the music industry (of all of them!) mostly gave up. Only Hollywood and the wider film/TV industry is so stubborn.
- tsss 5mo ago
  The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.

someguyiguess 5mo ago

It works great with a nice stremio setup for live streaming. No subscriptions necessary anymore.

bronlund 5mo ago

I think the site has been hosted by the police since them. They probably use it as a honeypot or something - except the site is so poorly managed that no one really comes :D

efnx 5mo ago
References for this claim?
- bronlund 5mo ago
  [flagged]
platevoltage 5mo ago
I can't wait to be indicted for downloading Daria with the original soundtrack, something no one will sell me.

yieldcrv 5mo ago

All the best stuff doesn’t get licensed by streaming services at all Entire generations of people have no idea something exists

system2 5mo ago
Yandex is the best search engine. Sites like Fmovies or moviesjoy include nearly everything. I couldn't find the Monty Python series, but Yandex's first results were ready to play it for me in seconds.
- steve-atx-7600 5mo ago
  Also any ebook I’ve ever wanted to preview before purchasing has been available from the first results page.

shevy-java 5mo ago

We need to raid those lobbyists. How much money did the get from the USA? So the real pirates was the swedish government. It's time to completely change the whole government. Back in 2006 they thought they targeted only few individuals. I am sure there are many more people who don't support what the swedish government did. Did they ever apologize for serving US corporations here? How much financial kickback did they get there?

jstummbillig 5mo ago

It's kind of cool but also kind of spooky: A legally targeted site just staying online for 20 years, not because of obscurity, but simply because it can't be taken down. Are our institutions this incapable?

applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
I don't know who's included in your "our", but I rather strongly like that American/Swedish/EU/whoever institutions don't have the capability to control the entire world and would prefer it stay that way. That's the beauty of the internet, and it's concerning that many people regard that lack of complete global control as an "incapability". Your laws don't, and shouldn't, apply to me.
ProjectArcturis 5mo ago
I'm astounded that they've been able to keep that domain name.
squibonpig 5mo ago
God I hope so

2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo ago

Remember how liberating it was to record TV shows or movies to VHS tape? My dad still has VHS tapes of Simpsons recordings that I'd rewatch as a kid.

marysol5 5mo ago
Quite a lot of old TV has been lost, and only resurrected by random re4cording that people have on VHS. Always funny to see adverts and old title cards

dlev_pika 5mo ago

For a brief moment I used Netflix, but very quickly went back to actually watching anything by I want. I feel for the kids that are waking up to this enshitification, without a clue on how to sail.

arwhatever 5mo ago

I'm happy making one-shot payments for most types of media. But I want to start a new bittorrent tracker for individual movies or episodes for which the provider requires you to create a recurring subscription, to rip off such content unabashedly.

gitowiec 5mo ago

So many gigabytes downloaded! Long live the King !

gamblor956 5mo ago

The hypocrisy of tech bros claiming to make well into the six figures being unwilling up pay a few dollars a month for dozens or hundreds of hours of entertainment while simultaneously expecting that everyone else should pay for the increasingly buggier software that pays their salaries.... Most of the problems many of you are complaining about with streamers are the result of your fellow programmers doing poor work. Consider the irony that many in this discussion won't pay for Disney+ because of the technical issues on the software side of things.

WarOnPrivacy 5mo ago

For most of that 20y, TPB was behind OVPN (vpn provider). They're the other provider I trust besides Mullvad.

theLiminator 5mo ago

I'm curious why IPFS never took off (I haven't dug into it much), but it seems more decentralized than BT.

akimbostrawman 5mo ago
Horrible UX that is fragmented and confusing even to nerds. If they had a easy and featureful client like qbittorrent they would have had a lot more of a chance.

nwellinghoff 5mo ago

A much more interesting article would cover HOW they are still up. Would love to know the details of the how in this case.

sleight42 5mo ago
... said the FBI/NSA agent
lobf 5mo ago
Here you go: https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proof-virtual-machines-140921/ https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...
- marysol5 5mo ago
  That always read as a load of nonsense, because you still have an ingress point of failure. Which is why so many trackers shift through TLD's all the time.
  - merpkz 5mo ago
    Isn't that just Cloudflare? thepiratebay.org resolves to CF IPs at the moment.

WarOnPrivacy 5mo ago

Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind the scenes. As for why the US Gov was willing to act as MPAA's private enforcer... (2012) Chris Dodd [MPAA chief] went on Fox News to explicitly threaten politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they’d better pass Hollywood’s favorite legislation… or else: Trading law for campaign donations is a place one might go after years of trading Gov power for campaign donations. https://www.techdirt.com/2012/01/20/mpaa-directly-publicly-threatens-politicians-who-arent-corrupt-enough-to-stay-bought/ https://www.techdirt.com/2012/01/20/mpaa-directly-publicly-t...

Automator666 5mo ago

[flagged]

dspillett 5mo ago

If the corporates are OK downloading content in breach of licences for training their intelligences, which apparently they are, I consider myself OK doing the same to train the model in my head.

31337Logic 5mo ago
Since there is no Love button, please settle for my lowly Like instead. ;-)

robertwt7 5mo ago

private trackers are the only way to go nowadays I think. I've stopped using TPB for 11 years now since I joined private trackers. safer, less dead torrents, higher quality

DarkNova6 5mo ago
Can you give examples?

aboardRat4 5mo ago

thepiratebay founders got fined for 7$ million I wonder if they ever paid the fine. Probably they will be in debt forever.

crossroadsguy 5mo ago

Stremio is a good place to do this. I of course use it to watch freely and legaly available science and craft videos and nothing else. By the way, Stremio is not at all torrent or p2p software. It's just a streaming software and you can plug in any streaming source/add-on for this, including torrents, of course just to watch legally available videos. Maybe check it out: https://github.com/stremio https://github.com/stremio https://www.stremio.com https://www.stremio.com

sureglymop 5mo ago

I wish the same was true for LibGen and SciHub. I feel sad that the short period of easy open access to any knowledge (text), even for people not in academia, is over...

numron-dev 5mo ago

For us from poor country that can't really afford the online price of movies and games . Pirate bay is like the Google search . . . Thanks for existing.