8 ms·

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

by Kequc 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.
- meesterdude 12y ago
  Actually, there is a difference between hosting the files and just linking to them, and is by no means a "minor technical difference". Although to be fair I think it was done not only to increase portability but also to decrease legal targeting, the latter of which seems like it didn't pan out in the end though may have thwarted some legal efforts along the way.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >Actually, there is a difference between hosting the files and just linking to them, and is by no means a "minor technical difference". From the technical side of showing the torrent/magnet links on the TPB page, it's indeed a minor difference.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    But a torrent was already just a link to the actual content.
  - darsham 12y ago
    I think you misunderstand. They never hosted any content, they only linked to it. What we're saying is that the torrent database was upgraded from plain old filesystem storage of .torrent files to a more efficient/specialized database.
- Kequc 12y ago
  Sorry. I was mistaken it didn't go open source, the proxybay was literally proxies to the main site and now all of them are down. You can in fact download a copy of every torrent and magnet link, then build your own site that searches through them. Magnet links are just a short string of text so one who does isn't hosting anything as far as I'm concerned. That isn't the law apparently.
  - xerophyte12932 12y ago
    > all of them are down If you mean all the 'thepiratebay' domains, I think you are mistaken. This one works for me: https://thepiratebay.cr/ https://thepiratebay.cr/ haven't tried any else yet
    - cdevfr 12y ago
      500 Internal Server Error If the page loads that doesn't mean it works correctly.
      - barsonme 12y ago
        Works for me: http://i.imgur.com/GD3rZuv.png http://i.imgur.com/GD3rZuv.png but it wasn't earlier. Got the same error.
        mintplant 12y ago
        No, you won't be able to search for anything. That site just proxies your searches to thepiratebay.se, which is down.
        Alupis 12y ago
        It now searches just fine.
        cdevfr 12y ago
        You are getting some text with a picture, that is not a working site.
- lelandbatey 12y ago
  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?
  - sysk 12y ago
    I understand that magnet links might make a difference legally. What I meant is that switching to magnet links instead of torrent files is not what I would consider a big technical achievement (TPB didn't actually invent the magnet URI scheme, they simply adopted it). My main point being that I agree with Peter Sunde, TPB hasn't changed much in 8 years. Here's TPB in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061007080151/http://thepiratebay.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20061007080151/http://thepirateb...
  - roel_v 12y ago
    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?
    - mc808 12y ago
      That's a terrible analogy. Try: "Yes, making meth is illegal. Yes, selling meth-lab kits is illegal. Okay, maybe publishing instructions for building a meth lab is illegal. Wait, linking to someone else's instructions is illegal? And now you're telling me that sharing a short hash that validates someone else's link to someone else's instructions is also illegal?" (Is it even illegal in the meth lab scenario?)
- jimmaswell 12y ago
  Broken UI? Really? The posters here are so peciliar about UI sometimes. It's bewildering. Nothing was wrong with TPB's UI. It did exactly what it was meant to cleanly and in an easy to use way. Nothing was difficult or unintuitive about it. Did it not look starkly minimalist enough? Did it not use enough css3? Did it use a table and that just ruined the whole thing? Not enough fancy javascript transitions?
  - Cooro 12y ago
    The search results where garbage if you didn't know that you had to click "SE" to sort by number of seeders.
    - sysk 12y ago
      Yes, among other things: - You often had to scan through the comments for a clickable IMDB link. - Movie meta data was manually entered by uploaders who didn't really bother with it most of the time. - Titles contained a bunch of metadata which shouldn't have been part of the title (e.g. encoding, source, quality, uploader name, etc.). - There was sometimes an extra comment page that was empty. - No moderation whatsoever in the comments. Impossible to find the interesting/useful comments without reading all of them one by one. - A bunch of annoying ads (one of the download buttons was an ad if I recall correctly). There's a recurring meme on HN that all UIs are automatically good if they are old/non-trendy.
      - jimmaswell 12y ago
        The only meme is that old UIs are the /bad/ ones. Those points are all very minor. A major problem would be having an inoperable half-assed mobile version that you were redirected to on mobile.
draugadrotten 12y ago
> The ads were because of legal defence fees, which can be huge. Citation? The ads were making millions(1) to the people behind the TPB, and the legal cost is several orders of magnitude less. update: (1) http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334 http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334 "The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website" (2010, already)
- gcb0 12y ago
  > The ads were making millions Citation?
  - draugadrotten 12y ago
    http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334 http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334 "The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website" (2010, already)
    - cdevfr 12y ago
      The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website, >>>film companies maintained<<< And literally the second paragraph in your link: The claims were dismissed by Jonas Nilsson, legal counsel for one of the defendants, Fredrik Neij. Nilsson argued that instead of being a profits earner most of the work to keep The Pirate Bay running had been undertaken on a voluntary unpaid basis. "The revenues, which were not very large, went to buying new equipment," Nilsson said.
      - draugadrotten 12y ago
        Well, you can say that "the prosecutor said this and the defendant counsel said this", but at the end of the day we know that the four operators of the site were convicted by Stockholm district court on 17 April 2009 and sentenced to one year in jail each and a total of 30 million Swedish kronor (approximately US$3.5 million, €2.7 million) in fines and damages. So I guess the court believed the prosecutor.
runn1ng 12y ago
hey, I am the author of the 90MB archive. I had to do it manually, it was in no way done by TPB, it took a looong time because their anti-DDoS systems were blocking me, and it was in no way open source. (it was endorsed by TPB though, in the way they told me they like it) And I stopped updating it in early 2013. I thought about updating it regularly and putting it somewhere, but that stroke me as slightly more illegal than what I did before, plus I had other priorities (mainly finishing the damn school). I wished TPB did something like wikipedia (daily XML archives), but they don't.
- ZirconCode 12y ago
  I just read through your article, I loved it, Thanks for sharing. Here's the script he used if anyone else is curious: https://github.com/runn1ng/runn1ng.github.io/blob/master/piratebay.pl https://github.com/runn1ng/runn1ng.github.io/blob/master/pir... You mentioned you had to switch computers multiple times, about how many times was that? Sorry on the off-topic...
  - runn1ng 12y ago
    Ooh, I don't remember frankly, it's almost 2 years ago now. I can admit it now - I run it on my school's network that has about 50 computers. I would say I switched computers about 10 times. I am not sure if it was anti-spam or anti-ddos or just anti-scraper measure.
- orbitur 12y ago
  Awesome. So you're saying the "90MB archive", that everyone waves around as evidence that TPB will somehow live forever, was only done a couple times a couple years ago.
  - runn1ng 12y ago
    Well, basically, yeah. (Short write-up on my website here - http://www.karelbilek.com/piratebay/ http://www.karelbilek.com/piratebay/ ) There was another effort by a guy on pirate bay named "andronikov", he did something similar, but stopped last year around november. And nobody is seeding his torrents. (They have literally 0 seeds.)
Stormcaller 12y ago
Btw, can someone explain to me how they can have ads? I mean, if US is willing to go far enough that they seem to have obvious influence on other countries and these countries punish these individuals, when normally they don't(or so I think), surely they very interested in taking down TPB or finding out who runs it? And they had ads when there were no bitcoin etc. So what I'm wondering is that, if I were interested in putting my ads on TPB, I would have to put/give money to somewhere/someone. So if I'm working at NSA, why I don't just go to tpb, look at what companies they advertise on tpb, then look at where that companies sent their money. Surely we are not talking about $10-15 here, at some point they should see "yeaah, you guys seem to give these guys $xxxx(more x?) each month" or "$xxxxx once, why?" To transfer that amount of money I can send via my bank, or transfer it via my personal account. I can use several layers inbetween, and use other people also. Maybe I won't even take money from company but do it personally. I can make it incredibly hard to be found. But looking at how TOR services seem to go down and the lengths they go to make sure they don't stay alive, surely if NSA actually wanted they could track them down? Surely NSA doesn't lack the power to see our transactions and surely they don't lack the power to personally track basically everyone related with whoever gave the ads. Or maybe they do, but they still know what companies TPB advertises. Anyway, if they are not very careful, I could find who currently runs TPB. and if they are, I still might have a shot. Or maybe I'm not interested in finding out who runs TPB, just taking or down/making it harder. Why I(government) don't go to these porn sites and say "well, if we keep seeing your ads there we will have to do something". They did threaten yahoo and others without legal basis(or so I think), why stop now? Then considering they can't easily find new companies to take ads from considering what happened to the first 3 companies that gave ads, no one sane would want to work with tpb, and they couldn't buy or maintain servers, then finally in current form they would go down. Of course some methods to keep it alive(fake ads, donations etc.) will be found, and of course someone else will just create a new one but they seem to be interested in making tpb very hard to maintain, take it down even if it is only for days and make sure no one in their right mind would want to create a torrent site. Now, why I'm wrong and why they don't do just what I said?
- code_duck 12y ago
  The NSA doesn't police copyright issues. Their involvement would be arranging for FBI/police in Europe to get the info they desire to do that.
soneca 12y ago
trivia about flying on helium balloons: "In 1982, Larry Walters flew across Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by weather balloons, eventually reaching several miles in altitude. After passing through LAX airspace, he descended by shooting some of the balloons with a pellet gun." In Brazil, a priest doing a gimmick to raise some funds to his church went on flying with helium balloons. He was drifted to the ocean by the wind and didn't know how to return. He did took a phone and a GPS device. But he didn't know how to use the GPS he took to tell people his location. He died. EDIT: source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli
- cshimmin 12y ago
  Am I missing something here?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - bazzargh 12y ago
    I think the GP post has been edited, I'd guess the helium balloons are a reference to this story http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122789-the-pirate-bay-plans-fleet-of-low-orbit-server-drones-to-evade-the-authorities http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122789-the-pirate-bay-pla... that TPB might move the site to drones/LEO sats/balloons.
    - soneca 12y ago
      Nope, my mistake. This was supposed to be an answer to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8727049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8727049 on another thread. I was reading both and confused the tabs while clicking on reply, I guess.

by Kequc 12y ago

sysk 12y ago

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.

meesterdude 12y ago
Actually, there is a difference between hosting the files and just linking to them, and is by no means a "minor technical difference". Although to be fair I think it was done not only to increase portability but also to decrease legal targeting, the latter of which seems like it didn't pan out in the end though may have thwarted some legal efforts along the way.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Actually, there is a difference between hosting the files and just linking to them, and is by no means a "minor technical difference". From the technical side of showing the torrent/magnet links on the TPB page, it's indeed a minor difference.
- icebraining 12y ago
  But a torrent was already just a link to the actual content.
- darsham 12y ago
  I think you misunderstand. They never hosted any content, they only linked to it. What we're saying is that the torrent database was upgraded from plain old filesystem storage of .torrent files to a more efficient/specialized database.
Kequc 12y ago
Sorry. I was mistaken it didn't go open source, the proxybay was literally proxies to the main site and now all of them are down. You can in fact download a copy of every torrent and magnet link, then build your own site that searches through them. Magnet links are just a short string of text so one who does isn't hosting anything as far as I'm concerned. That isn't the law apparently.
- xerophyte12932 12y ago
  > all of them are down If you mean all the 'thepiratebay' domains, I think you are mistaken. This one works for me: https://thepiratebay.cr/ https://thepiratebay.cr/ haven't tried any else yet
  - cdevfr 12y ago
    500 Internal Server Error If the page loads that doesn't mean it works correctly.
    - barsonme 12y ago
      Works for me: http://i.imgur.com/GD3rZuv.png http://i.imgur.com/GD3rZuv.png but it wasn't earlier. Got the same error.
      - mintplant 12y ago
        No, you won't be able to search for anything. That site just proxies your searches to thepiratebay.se, which is down.
        Alupis 12y ago
        It now searches just fine.
      - cdevfr 12y ago
        You are getting some text with a picture, that is not a working site.
lelandbatey 12y ago
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?
- sysk 12y ago
  I understand that magnet links might make a difference legally. What I meant is that switching to magnet links instead of torrent files is not what I would consider a big technical achievement (TPB didn't actually invent the magnet URI scheme, they simply adopted it). My main point being that I agree with Peter Sunde, TPB hasn't changed much in 8 years. Here's TPB in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061007080151/http://thepiratebay.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20061007080151/http://thepirateb...
- roel_v 12y ago
  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?
  - mc808 12y ago
    That's a terrible analogy. Try: "Yes, making meth is illegal. Yes, selling meth-lab kits is illegal. Okay, maybe publishing instructions for building a meth lab is illegal. Wait, linking to someone else's instructions is illegal? And now you're telling me that sharing a short hash that validates someone else's link to someone else's instructions is also illegal?" (Is it even illegal in the meth lab scenario?)
jimmaswell 12y ago
Broken UI? Really? The posters here are so peciliar about UI sometimes. It's bewildering. Nothing was wrong with TPB's UI. It did exactly what it was meant to cleanly and in an easy to use way. Nothing was difficult or unintuitive about it. Did it not look starkly minimalist enough? Did it not use enough css3? Did it use a table and that just ruined the whole thing? Not enough fancy javascript transitions?
- Cooro 12y ago
  The search results where garbage if you didn't know that you had to click "SE" to sort by number of seeders.
  - sysk 12y ago
    Yes, among other things: - You often had to scan through the comments for a clickable IMDB link. - Movie meta data was manually entered by uploaders who didn't really bother with it most of the time. - Titles contained a bunch of metadata which shouldn't have been part of the title (e.g. encoding, source, quality, uploader name, etc.). - There was sometimes an extra comment page that was empty. - No moderation whatsoever in the comments. Impossible to find the interesting/useful comments without reading all of them one by one. - A bunch of annoying ads (one of the download buttons was an ad if I recall correctly). There's a recurring meme on HN that all UIs are automatically good if they are old/non-trendy.
    - jimmaswell 12y ago
      The only meme is that old UIs are the /bad/ ones. Those points are all very minor. A major problem would be having an inoperable half-assed mobile version that you were redirected to on mobile.

draugadrotten 12y ago

> The ads were because of legal defence fees, which can be huge. Citation? The ads were making millions(1) to the people behind the TPB, and the legal cost is several orders of magnitude less. update: (1) http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334 http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334 "The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website" (2010, already)

gcb0 12y ago
> The ads were making millions Citation?
- draugadrotten 12y ago
  http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334 http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334 "The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website" (2010, already)
  - cdevfr 12y ago
    The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website, >>>film companies maintained<<< And literally the second paragraph in your link: The claims were dismissed by Jonas Nilsson, legal counsel for one of the defendants, Fredrik Neij. Nilsson argued that instead of being a profits earner most of the work to keep The Pirate Bay running had been undertaken on a voluntary unpaid basis. "The revenues, which were not very large, went to buying new equipment," Nilsson said.
    - draugadrotten 12y ago
      Well, you can say that "the prosecutor said this and the defendant counsel said this", but at the end of the day we know that the four operators of the site were convicted by Stockholm district court on 17 April 2009 and sentenced to one year in jail each and a total of 30 million Swedish kronor (approximately US$3.5 million, €2.7 million) in fines and damages. So I guess the court believed the prosecutor.

runn1ng 12y ago

hey, I am the author of the 90MB archive. I had to do it manually, it was in no way done by TPB, it took a looong time because their anti-DDoS systems were blocking me, and it was in no way open source. (it was endorsed by TPB though, in the way they told me they like it) And I stopped updating it in early 2013. I thought about updating it regularly and putting it somewhere, but that stroke me as slightly more illegal than what I did before, plus I had other priorities (mainly finishing the damn school). I wished TPB did something like wikipedia (daily XML archives), but they don't.

ZirconCode 12y ago
I just read through your article, I loved it, Thanks for sharing. Here's the script he used if anyone else is curious: https://github.com/runn1ng/runn1ng.github.io/blob/master/piratebay.pl https://github.com/runn1ng/runn1ng.github.io/blob/master/pir... You mentioned you had to switch computers multiple times, about how many times was that? Sorry on the off-topic...
- runn1ng 12y ago
  Ooh, I don't remember frankly, it's almost 2 years ago now. I can admit it now - I run it on my school's network that has about 50 computers. I would say I switched computers about 10 times. I am not sure if it was anti-spam or anti-ddos or just anti-scraper measure.
orbitur 12y ago
Awesome. So you're saying the "90MB archive", that everyone waves around as evidence that TPB will somehow live forever, was only done a couple times a couple years ago.
- runn1ng 12y ago
  Well, basically, yeah. (Short write-up on my website here - http://www.karelbilek.com/piratebay/ http://www.karelbilek.com/piratebay/ ) There was another effort by a guy on pirate bay named "andronikov", he did something similar, but stopped last year around november. And nobody is seeding his torrents. (They have literally 0 seeds.)

Stormcaller 12y ago

Btw, can someone explain to me how they can have ads? I mean, if US is willing to go far enough that they seem to have obvious influence on other countries and these countries punish these individuals, when normally they don't(or so I think), surely they very interested in taking down TPB or finding out who runs it? And they had ads when there were no bitcoin etc. So what I'm wondering is that, if I were interested in putting my ads on TPB, I would have to put/give money to somewhere/someone. So if I'm working at NSA, why I don't just go to tpb, look at what companies they advertise on tpb, then look at where that companies sent their money. Surely we are not talking about $10-15 here, at some point they should see "yeaah, you guys seem to give these guys $xxxx(more x?) each month" or "$xxxxx once, why?" To transfer that amount of money I can send via my bank, or transfer it via my personal account. I can use several layers inbetween, and use other people also. Maybe I won't even take money from company but do it personally. I can make it incredibly hard to be found. But looking at how TOR services seem to go down and the lengths they go to make sure they don't stay alive, surely if NSA actually wanted they could track them down? Surely NSA doesn't lack the power to see our transactions and surely they don't lack the power to personally track basically everyone related with whoever gave the ads. Or maybe they do, but they still know what companies TPB advertises. Anyway, if they are not very careful, I could find who currently runs TPB. and if they are, I still might have a shot. Or maybe I'm not interested in finding out who runs TPB, just taking or down/making it harder. Why I(government) don't go to these porn sites and say "well, if we keep seeing your ads there we will have to do something". They did threaten yahoo and others without legal basis(or so I think), why stop now? Then considering they can't easily find new companies to take ads from considering what happened to the first 3 companies that gave ads, no one sane would want to work with tpb, and they couldn't buy or maintain servers, then finally in current form they would go down. Of course some methods to keep it alive(fake ads, donations etc.) will be found, and of course someone else will just create a new one but they seem to be interested in making tpb very hard to maintain, take it down even if it is only for days and make sure no one in their right mind would want to create a torrent site. Now, why I'm wrong and why they don't do just what I said?

code_duck 12y ago
The NSA doesn't police copyright issues. Their involvement would be arranging for FBI/police in Europe to get the info they desire to do that.

soneca 12y ago

trivia about flying on helium balloons: "In 1982, Larry Walters flew across Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by weather balloons, eventually reaching several miles in altitude. After passing through LAX airspace, he descended by shooting some of the balloons with a pellet gun." In Brazil, a priest doing a gimmick to raise some funds to his church went on flying with helium balloons. He was drifted to the ocean by the wind and didn't know how to return. He did took a phone and a GPS device. But he didn't know how to use the GPS he took to tell people his location. He died. EDIT: source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli

cshimmin 12y ago
Am I missing something here?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- bazzargh 12y ago
  I think the GP post has been edited, I'd guess the helium balloons are a reference to this story http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122789-the-pirate-bay-plans-fleet-of-low-orbit-server-drones-to-evade-the-authorities http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122789-the-pirate-bay-pla... that TPB might move the site to drones/LEO sats/balloons.
  - soneca 12y ago
    Nope, my mistake. This was supposed to be an answer to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8727049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8727049 on another thread. I was reading both and confused the tabs while clicking on reply, I guess.