The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After The Raid (torrentfreak.com) 36
Twenty years after Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay's Stockholm data center and seized its servers, the site remains online. In fact, the 2006 crackdown arguably made it more famous, helping turn it into "one of the most resilient and iconic websites on the internet," reports TorrentFreak. From the report: On May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. They had instructions to take the site's servers offline as part of a criminal probe, following pressure from the US government. As the police were about to enter, Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij knew something wasn't quite right. Both men said they had noticed being tailed by private investigators. This time, however, their servers were the target.
At around 10:00 in the morning, Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office. He asked his colleague to head down to the co-location facility and get rid of the 'incriminating evidence', although none of it, whatever it was, related to The Pirate Bay. As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized the problems might be linked to their torrent tracker. Just in case, he decided to make a full backup of the site. When he arrived at the co-location facility, those concerns turned out to be justified. Dozens of police officers were floating around, taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.
In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik's decision to back up the site was probably the most pivotal moment in its history. Because of that backup, the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days. The entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for. Unimpressed, the operators renamed the site "The Police Bay," complete with a new logo shooting cannonballs at Hollywood. A few days later the logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes. Instead of shutting it down, the raid propelled The Pirate Bay into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. The publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike, exactly the opposite of what Hollywood had hoped for.
At around 10:00 in the morning, Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office. He asked his colleague to head down to the co-location facility and get rid of the 'incriminating evidence', although none of it, whatever it was, related to The Pirate Bay. As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized the problems might be linked to their torrent tracker. Just in case, he decided to make a full backup of the site. When he arrived at the co-location facility, those concerns turned out to be justified. Dozens of police officers were floating around, taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.
In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik's decision to back up the site was probably the most pivotal moment in its history. Because of that backup, the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days. The entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for. Unimpressed, the operators renamed the site "The Police Bay," complete with a new logo shooting cannonballs at Hollywood. A few days later the logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes. Instead of shutting it down, the raid propelled The Pirate Bay into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. The publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike, exactly the opposite of what Hollywood had hoped for.
I use it (or it's mirrors everday). (Score:5, Informative)
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I was gonna say -- this was also the moment when it was mirrored to hell and back so it could never be taken down again :)
Re:I use it (or it's mirrors everday). (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no illusions though about how the people who make anime get treated. I know only a tiny fraction of the money I spend ever makes it into their pockets and more often than not they are run out of business repeatedly by rapacious corporations. So at the same time I don't really begrudge anyone who doesn't want to buy into that literally.
I think the correct solution is to buy the official release to support the creators but also change how you vote so that workers stop getting exploited. Worker exploitation is a political problem after all not an economic one.
Of course I have to live in the world the way it is now not the way I wanted to be so again if you're not buying blu-rays I don't be grudge you in the slightest. Although it's an anime fan like I said without the blue ray sales and the merch sales you're not going to get more of that show you like... And it really is the Blu-ray sales the drive the next season even more so than the merch a lot of times.
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Thanks to streaming shows often get cancelled 5 seconds after the last episode of the season airs. They have all the metrics instantly, and don't wait for DVD/Bluray sales figures.
I do buy physical media, but I've given up treating it as a way to support shows. As you say, too little of the money reaches the creators, and it has no impact on the renew/cancel decision. If there is other merch that helps the creators more directly, I'll go for that.
Re: I use it (or it's mirrors everday). (Score:2)
Lucky for you there are pretty much no more modern shows actually worth watching anyway.. the state of the industry is the worst it has ever been. So much so, they grift and latch on to political tribal activism instead of providing entertainment.
Buy a set of TheWire and rewatch it. It is ever more relevant nowadays.
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Who purchases? It all streaming.
There were several years when Netflix was awesome. But then the fragmentation and enshitification happened.
A few days ago I heard about a good show. It was on Prime, - I have that so i go to watch. Adverts!, OK, grumbling I pay up, its only a few bucks. Now I get a message saying i only get 480P or something stupid because I don't have all the right DRM shit lined up.
Fuck Bezos, fuck Hollywood, its back to the high seas for me. This is why I swore
Seeing censorship as damage... (Score:4, Informative)
...and not only routing around it but standing up new servers to deliver more and faster.
I wonder if John Gilmore truly knew just how right he was.
Watch The Pirate Bay: The Movie (Score:1)
The Pirate Bay: The Movie coming soon to a torrent site near you.
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i mean, there was already the documentary in 2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Watch The Pirate Bay: The Movie (Score:2)
Does anyone know if the prosecutor from that documentary have anything to say about that fallout later? I.e. that she won the case but the result was more piracy?
Even pirating sucks (Score:3)
With the absolute crap that has been coming out (both TV and cinema) I don't even find the stuff worth downloading any longer. It's much better to hit the yard sales and flea markets in the summer and snap up box sets of good TV series on DVD and individual movie DVDs for pennies on the dollar. Hollywood has turned into a puke fest.
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It's always been the case that 99% of stuff is crap. We occasionally have periods where there are multiple good shows airing, but they are rare. It only looks better in the past because we remember the good ones, not the rubbish.
There are a few current shows that are worth watching.
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Is this boasting or actual truth?
Having recently tried watching DVDs their image and sound quality is a lot worse than I remembered.
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With the absolute crap that has been coming out (both TV and cinema)
How much of it have you looked at? With over 9500 feature films and over 1100 new TV serials being produced each year, I'm guessing your problem is that you only look at crap rather than having performed an assessment of available entertainment.
There's lots of truly awesome stuff out there both TV and cinema. Just branch out beyond what you seen plastered on a billboard by Warner Bros.
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I like to wonder, huh, what was the best Eastern European intrigue movie of the 2010s, for example. I don't know what it'll be about, but I know I'll enjoy it.
Better quality, too (Score:3)
But their big problem is reinventing all the cable shenanigans people hate without the natural monopoly to enforce it. When you run a wire to someone's house, there's lock-in. Streaming removes that "loyalty'. Now add in all the constant media swapping that means you can't count on things staying in the catalog, and there's no reason to want to use any of them, other than convenience.
And my storage server is a lot more convenient than any offer I've seen from the streamers.
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That was pretty much what happened to "Kim Dotcom's" servers in New Zealand in 2012, except that he was offering an encrypted cloud and had no way of taking backups. Last I heard, the data was gone and a lot of companies / private users were really really screwed. If the servers were ever returned and the data recovered, it will have been years later.
Pirated movies, police raids and politics: A timeline of the Kim Dotcom saga [thespinoff.co.nz] seems fairly accurate, Wikipedia also covers this [wikipedia.org].
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offering an encrypted cloud and had no way of taking backup
Which is, of course, nonsense. Nothing stops you from making a copy of encrypted data. What sucks is that for a backup, you likely can't do incremental.
backups (Score:2)
In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik's decision to back up the site was probably the most pivotal moment in its history.
Maybe he should have made a backup earlier.
When it comes to law enforcement action (Score:2)
This was 20 years ago?? (Score:2)
It seems like it was just last week.
The definitive "Streisand effect" (Score:1)
Streaming quality worse than pirated quality (Score:1)
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The UK blocked it (Score:3)
Long ago, the UK courts ordered all the major consumer ISPs to block The Pirate Bay along with various other popular services. Ever since, we've had to keep up to date on what the latest proxy address might be.
Of course, thanks to the new censorship laws introduced more recently, we're all on VPNs now, so as to avoid having to hand our ID to the wallet inspector for every last website we ever use. And once that was set up, it was nice to discover that the original is still in play!
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I've been using a US VPS for $30 a year running a proxy server to access torrent web sites from my UK ISP for many years now. I rarely go to The Pirate Bay any more though because it doesn't seem to have as many torrents as certain other sites (I've found Limetorrents tends to beat it most of the time). FoxyProxy extension is handy on Firefox to pattern match URLs so you only use the proxy for torrent sites (or Reddit (!)...which now has subreddits ridiculously requiring age verification for UK users - plus