The Pirate Bay down, forever?
blog.brokep.com
blog.brokep.com
[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.
From the technical side of showing the torrent/magnet links on the TPB page, it's indeed a minor difference.
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.
If you mean all the 'thepiratebay' domains, I think you are mistaken. This one works for me:
haven't tried any else yet
If the page loads that doesn't mean it works correctly.
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?
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?
Or let's say I'm an electrician who wires indoor marihuana plantations. That is illegal. Do you think it would be OK to stand next to some other guy and tell him what switch to connect to which socket and which tools to use to strip the wire? 'Oh your honor I was just distributing instructions on how to build a plantation, not doing it!'. You might want to prepare your diddly hole when you rely on such argumentation as a legal defense.
Again: INTENT MATTERS. When something is done with enough proximity to actual illegal actions, that 'something' is quite likely also illegal and punishable. Which is why Uncle Fester is a free man and Kim Dotcom isn't (well only barely).
Don't get me wrong; I torrent tv shows and the like. But what I find silly is the way people are trying to boil the intent and action away from torrenting, spin-doctoring it to sound as innocent as possible.
It's not at all obvious that saying "42" (with the other operations unstated) is or should be illegal speech, and it's by no means comparable to putting a small bullet into somebody.
And in any case, if someone says "hey, where can I get meth", and you say "42, just deconstruct the number with this algorithm", you've done the same thing as just handing over a phone number - you've facilitated the contact.
Note: picture is illegal.
Most of the "intent" of going from a hash to a download is in the torrent client. It's a smart tool. But to my best knowledge, the law assumes that intent has to happen in a human. If you have two humans, and both have weak criminal intent, but they're connected by a program that makes illegal acts very easy, I don't know how the law judges that. Probably badly.
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.
I hear about things like this every once in a while, but where's the proof?
So assuming that you are making a practical argument: should there be no laws that are hard to enforce? Let's take domestic abuse, or child abuse. Hard to detect, even harder to prosecute because there is usually little physical evidence. So should we just throw our hands in the air and go home?
"Such laws are still absurd in a world where there is no practical way to limit the distribution of such ideas."
Well a largish number of raids over the last years on sites hosting torrents, causing these sites to disappear, would say that you're wrong. Sure, it's hard to completely restrict all illegal distribution. That's not even a practical goal. But with TPB down, it's become quite a bit more difficult to find illegal content for people who are occasional torrenters (i.e. not people who are members of private sites, or who use IRC - a tiny subset of all people).
People have been saying for years 'you can't shut down the torrent sites!'. Well there aren't a whole lot of them left, are there? So it does seem that IP law enforcement isn't as impossible as you claim it to be.
Yes. Yes there are. Not to mention hundreds of sites (especially forums) where torrent files and magnet links are distributed.
We keep child pornography illegal, and indeed take measures to limit its distribution. It isn't clear that laws are necessarily absurd because of the difficulty of their enforcement.
The absurdity of a law might be better measured based by the effects of the thing the law prohibits on society or individuals.
Every story has a million differnet sides.
It seems like thats the lawyers JOB to prove varying degrees of intent.
Was their 'intent' to merely share magnet links in an open forum or was it to destroy copyright protections,ruin the entertainment industry, and starve all artists to death.
Did I put 115 grain in your head by accident or was I intentionally trying to murder you? (Ie accidental manslaughter vs 1st degree)
Intent does matter and the client with the smaller pockets usually has the worst intentions.
Indeed, how could it possibly be illegal to share pieces of Pi? :)
What if they share positional information from a known sequence: pi[3000:3040].
OTOH assume knlowedge of nothing but the magnet link list torrent file, if you just downloaded the linked torrent files without to procede to download when in doubt about copyright infringement, that woould not be careless.
Your argument extends to how can any string of data be illegal, putting copyright into question, but that's a different debate.
Yeah, it's not unusual for short messages containing numbers to be illegal. Like:
"The guy at 42 Foo St. is looking to sell a kilo of coke if anyone's interested."
or
"Everyone show up at the mall at 11PM exactly, grab something, and run. They can't catch us all!"[1]
or
"Thank you for your payment to personaldeetz.com! Bill Jones has the social security number 001-23-4567 and the date of birth 1/2/34 and the bank account number ..."
There's nothing illegal about any of the numbers involved here, including the hash of the latest blockbuster. But there can certainly be something illegal about conveying information (in whatever encoding) that's intended to help someone commit a crime. Proving intent is the fun part.
- 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.
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 "The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website" (2010, already)
Citation?
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.
So I guess the court believed the prosecutor.
How do you figure? Their fine was not based on their advertising revenue was it?
And, two, given the current legal environment in most of the West including Sweden, "the court believed the prosecutor" doesn't mean shit, really. Of course the court believed the prosecutor - they are on the same team, after all.
I've never paid for StackOverflow, TheDailyWTF or CNN.com yet somehow they all keep running.
Using website X witout paying doesn't mean website X makes no money.
How much they make can be argued, but to think they don't rake in mad money (Look at how much contemporaries like Dotcom made)... is a bit shortsighted to say the least.
The assumption is that that companies are willing to spend the same amount of money to advertise on a torrent site as a international news paper.
Another citation: me, but not going to prove it. I am friends with an ad network TPB used. They made $10k daily from adware installers alone in 2013.
Maybe 30%, worst case?
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.
You mentioned you had to switch computers multiple times, about how many times was that? Sorry on the off-topic...
I am not sure if it was anti-spam or anti-ddos or just anti-scraper measure.
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.)
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?
Hope that explains some of it and excuse the bumpy-train-ride-spelling.
"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
I was reading both and confused the tabs while clicking on reply, I guess.
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.
Such as?
No, seriously. This is why TPB going down is a big deal. There are plenty of other trackers, but most people don't know about them, and Google makes them somewhat difficult to find. And, of course, the really good trackers are by invitation only.
So enlighten us poor heathens and share some links. :)
From that, you can as well find about http://www.monova.org/ http://kickass.so/ etc...
Also, high quality sites, albeit in russian:
http://nnm-club.me/ is also OK
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.
You don't need any of that if you just want a torrent index. There's no need for consensus and no need to keep a secure record of the past. Bitcoin needs to prevent Joe from forging messages like, "Bob sent Joe one thousand bitcoins," but there's no corresponding scenario for torrents.
I guess a Git repo would do just fine. It just needs to be regularly updated and signed-off by TPB's people.
There are some projects that try to search directly from it :
https://btdigg.org/ http://btindex.org/ https://github.com/laomayi/simDHT
That said, I'm not quite sure why this needs a blockchain... A URI is either in the system or not in the system... Why would one need a consensus algorithm to store URLs?
Blockchains are about consensus, not storage...
The big problem is that TPB was taken offline not because it was buggy but because helped people copyrighted content.
This is a seriouis strawman avoiding the actual issues of censorship, big govt overreach, abuse of power, and all that.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme
which, if I'm not mistaken, will look for peers which have the relevant torrent file, and acquire and use that
- - -
and the 90MB is all the information /except/ torrent files, once again, if I'm not mistaken
The swarm for this would be large enough that it would be self-sustaining, it'd be impossible to shut it down.
I just can't figure out how you'd make it updatable, so that new content could be added to it.
(Also, there's the issue of initial distribution of the html file that let's people get access to it...)
https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/10197331
It was pretty well their entire earnings from the band.
they retired at the top of their fame, and burned stuff both before (their own albums) and after (a million pounds).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I block ads because they annoy me. Maybe I'm completely selfish but I don't give a shit that whoever I'm "freeloading" from isn't receiving any compensation.
I also download books, music and software because if I can get something for free, I'm not going to pay for it (don't care about the content creator, this is purely selfish). I also download movies because it's free, and series because it's free and devoid of ads (which waste my time and I don't care for). Even if you made paying easier, if there's a reasonably easy alternative to getting it for free, I'm going to use it.
Why? Because it leaves me with more money to spend on shit I can't get for free.
It's also not selflessness, because one can be both selfish and recognize that it would be in his best interest to not use ad blockers and to not pirate. This is shortsightedness and it is a pity that it's so prevalent.
I'm not going to click ads and, most importantly, actually buy stuff to feel better about leeching content, anyhow? How would that not be shortsighted nor shelfish?
I am also firmly in the ad-block camp. You have to realize that there is no contract that forces us to follow the expectations of companies' business models. If my lack of cooperation is enough for them to fail at providing the service, they are the ones that need to change. Not me.
For sites whose content I respect who I know rely on per-impression (not click-through) ads, I'll generally add an exception to my ad blocker, and/or buy some merchandise now and then to support them. I'm really excited about systems like Patreon that make this support easier because I don't need more t-shirts.
I respect creators as I'm a creator myself. But at the same time, I think if you're going to put content online and expect something like ads to support it, you need to rethink your business model.
To me it's like putting physical products on a stall on the street, and leaving it unattended with a little bucket for payments hidden in the corner. Yes, morally speaking, people shouldn't steal from it. I wouldn't steal from such a place, but I would not be surprised if others did.
That said, I like AdBlock Plus, and here's why: by default, it doesn't block 'acceptable' ads; i.e. if everyone used it, only the Website operators who show very nice/unobtrusive advertisements get through, and therefore get paid.
However, I don't really complain about ads. I occasionally make fun of them (it's always hilarious when Amazon's targeted ad program decides it makes sense to advertise products I just bought from them) but if a site's ads get to the point where they're worthy of complaint, then the site is worthy of no longer being visited.
I guess that means I find complaints weird for a somewhat different reason. Ads aren't shoved in your face, you choose to visit sites that host them. Talking to a web server and asking it, "Please send me the content of this page," and then complaining when it does what you requested is odd.
I have seen a dozen of better services. Any hidden feature I don't know?
Everybody's heard of it, you didn't have to dig through obscure sites to find it, it was always there and always worked.
Deleted comment
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.
HN: "The pirate bay down forever (Peter Sunde's blog)"
Peter Sunde's Blog: "The Pirate Bay down, forever?"
Certainly enough people have commented about it and it is a grossly misleading omission.
And to what end? More than once the title has changed so significantly I thought it was an entirely new article.
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.
I refuse to upvote misleading information like this.
Pretty much how I feel about this article.
Here's a large excerpt(almost half of the article):
" 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. "
This is basically Peter Sunde lamenting the loss of values in the current iteration of TPB and stating he would be glad if it ended now.
I'm not making any judgement as to whether his viewpoint is valid/warranted or not, but the implication this title gives(given that we know Peter Sunde was a former TPB employee) is that ThePirateBay is closing forever and this is an article explaining why.
That's not what this is. There is nothing concrete here regarding TPB closing forever.
This article provides no new information save the fact that this former contributor is discontent with the direction TPB has gone.
Please note, I still find this article interesting; it is interesting to note how a key contributor during TPB's infancy feels about the site. The title remains misleading though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Or is this not the "original" TPB?
Try to search a torrent on it, it will fail.