The Old Pirate Bay | Hacker News Reader

The Old Pirate Bay

oldpiratebay.org

344 pointsdil8102 comments

The Pirate Bay will be back. They just had their load balancer taken out. All this doom and gloom about how the TPB is gone for good is ridiculous. It's a cash cow, it's not going to go away anytime soon.

I knew something was wrong with TPB before it was announced that it was raided and subsequently taken down. I noticed an uptick in in sessions on google analytics for my movie meta-torrent search engine https://moviemagnet.net

Legitimate question: Cash cow for whom? With everyone in jail, who gets the money? Did they take salaries before? Where is this money stored? (I imagine freezing assets is easier than taking down a website; with money you have to play within the system)

Almost all the money went towards purchasing equipment and legal fees. I don't think anyone in particular (except maybe the lawyers) got rich off the site.

To be fair, I don't think anyone has any idea where that money is going (though maybe someone has an estimate for how much money is involved). Statements from pseudonymous site operators can't reasonably be trusted. If they were getting rich off of a site of questionable legality, they certainly wouldn't be advertising that fact.

Keep believing the sob stories. One of the most frequently visited websites is "barely paying for the servers", yeah right. Wish Wikileaks would publish real numbers and profit they make.

It's not like they needed an exorbitant amount of servers either, they host magnet links.

They handed it over to Sweden's Pirate Party allegedly. I forget the exact article, but it was over at TorrentFreak: http://torrentfreak.com

They were bought out some time ago. It's current owners are an anonymous shell corporation.[1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/08/pirate-bay-sale-s...

I don't think any of the founding members (some, or all of which have served time in jail) are involved in running the site (or have been in years) – at least not officially.

Seems to be back. http://thepiratebay.cr/

That's a clone using old database like OP's post.

Considering how longs its been down for, it is much more likely that they found the actual backends this time.

It shouldn't take this long to get a new load balancer up.

Speculation is that it's the load balancer; they have 21 VPS all over the world: torrentfreak.com/can-pirate-bay-make-comeback-141210/

Ok I searched a few porn movies to verify whether they have it completely or not. Glad to tell you that it's really the 'Pirate Bay'

Hey Adnan, might not be a good idea to tie your porn habbits quite so publicly with all your linkedIn and social media info so clearly visible. Just a heads up from a fellow developer who's done plenty of dumb shit :-)

What is porn?

Otherwise, I gather that everybody has porn habits!

Good thing about that is you can use anyone's username as your own on any site.

Never trust a man who says he doesn't watch porn.

Or woman.

Or alien.

Or cat.

Or me.

I don't

Are you worried that they might be lying, or that they might be asexual?

He's worried they might not be the same as him.

hahaha. That's a joke. In reality Porn is boring. It was fun when I was teen :-)

Update: I did remove it anyway for a while. World is crazy and people these days are not good at jokes :). Who knows some of my potential client or recruiter ask me about latest porn which I can't answer anyway :/

Are you suggesting that there's anything wrong with an adult viewing filmed consensual sex acts between other adults?

There's nothing wrong with it, but that doesn't mean it is smart to broadcast your porn habits to the world.

I didn't see anyone broadcasting their porn habits. OP only mentioned searching for porn; not which kind of porn, or whether he had downloaded it in the past.

I love my HN fellows who love to _hack_ others's comments :)

To downvoter, I was just praising the talent. No sarcasm intended.

There is... when you're supposed to be in prison for the murder of Hae Min Lee!!

recently, people have been fired from their jobs when their political affiliations/donations have been made public

i wouldn't put it past someone somewhere out there in the politically correct machine to fire/not hire someone because they admit that they watch porn

I hope you're not referring to Brendan Eich, because he was not fired: he left Mozilla of his own free will, in spite of the board's request that he stay.

It was his non-apology apology and his stubborn refusal to transparently and honestly explain and justify his actions, which did the most damage to Mozilla and his own reputation.

He decided on his own to leave Mozilla, because he didn't believe he owed anyone an explanation of why he paid to destroy other people's marriages, and that wasn't compatible with leading an organization dedicated to openness and inclusiveness. That's not getting fired.

I think you should be more worried about the politically incorrect right wing religious zealot hate machine firing people for watching porn, not the "politically correct machine" that you wouldn't put it past.

Oh here we go again, please! While Eich resigned there was no way he could have continued at Mozilla and the way you frame your frustrated demand for his explanation, there was no way anything he said short of a complete reversal, abject apology (as if he didn't actually apologize for hurt he caused), and compensation to a pro Marriage Equality cause that would begin to please your grievances. I actually respect him more for quietly departing after the crap that was flung at him, rather than pull a weaselly Obama and "evolve". You means justify the ends types will be very sorry when you're on the losing side of your approach.

Not today. Who knows after the next elections. Didn't Romney say he would support a porn ban? Look what's happening in UK. Certain sex acts "on camera" are being criminalized.

If he was denied a job or fired because he admitted to searching for porn on the internet then he would be applying/working at the wrong kind of place.

People who hold such fear about sex and sexuality need to lighten up. It's just sex, it's just porn. Let's be a little more mature here.

Some functionality is missing. E.g. no users, thus no way to see what else that user has uploaded. On PB some uploaders maintained rather interesting personal collections.

They are using ASP Classic and MsAccess so give them a break

Surely they would see significant performance/licensing/sysops gains by moving to something simpler, like PHP + (MySQL or Flatfile)? I would find it amusing if the original TPB was inadvertently paying licensing fees to Microsoft

It is not "The Pirate Bay", I searched for Robogeisha and I get "No results found".

Maybe I'm saying something stupid, but couldn't the pirate bay be distributed as a torrent that is continually updated, and then you have a torrent client that can search the database?

Yeah, it's a clever idea but torrents are basically just content hashes, so they can't be updated by nature.

In fact TPB was already not serving torrent files in large part; every torrent with more than a handful of peers is stored as a magnet link, which literally is just a content hash. I'm positive there's something rather clever to be done there, but we can't put it into a torrent.

Actually that's not true anymore : http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html.

That's not updating the content of a torrent, that's updating a torrent file given a URL and a signature. It's not even BitTorrent, more like embedded RSS. Doesn't really help us out here.

The nice thing about BitTorrent is that if you point the new .torrent file at the same location as the old one, your client should incrementally download just the new parts. All you need is a way to distribute and switch over to new .torrent files automatically - something like BEP 0039, for example.

I've been thinking about this. Let's say we have a small html file, which loads the javascript torrent library. You keep this file on your desktop (and give it to friends), maybe even bookmark it to make it easier to open.

The javascript fires off, accesses a torrent (hard-coded into the html itself), which loads content for the website... images, js files, everything. It also loads the data (I'm assuming it's small, but I've read claims that the data is only about 90 megs) into javascript storage, ready to be searched locally.

The torrent swarm itself could become so big that it'd be self-sustaining, no original seeders would need to stay online vulnerable to legal threats.

To have the torrent continually update with new content, you'd have to break the protocol (which, for this one purpose, might not be bad). But I don't understand it well enough to know this is even possible for certain. With magnet links, you first have to download the whole torrent file before you can start downloading, and it may not be possible to coax it into get the updated torrent file again.

Even if you can't do that, updates themselves might just be new torrents... we can run javascript on this page, so we can be clever and have it derive new torrents/hashes to download. It would be good if anyone could update the data, for instance, adding torrents (though how to police that so they don't add junk or poison the thing... not sure).

The issue is that BitTorrent as a protocol converts hashes into files, but it's got no mechanism to associate a hash with some other identity. That means you don't need trust to operate it, but conversely there's no way make changes to a torrent after it's been seeded.

A system like Bitcoin+BitTorrent could do what you're describing, with Bitcoin filling in the missing distributed hash identification function. I don't really follow the distributed web scene, but I'm sure that's an area of active research.

the guys who developed bittorrent created a sync protocol. It's not open source though and people don't trust it. However this technique could lend itself to a bittorrent style protocol that continually updates.

It's a combination of people who have read-write access and people who have read only access but still contribute to the swarm. I think it's got potential.

http://www.getsync.com/

What if there's a conflict? Who merges it? There would be thousands updates every day.

I do wonder why a more decentralised approach hasn't taken off.

Basically, centralization is needed for deleting fakes, viruses, wrongly labeled stuff.

Totally decentralized approach will have all the negatives KaZaA had in the 00s ("matrix.avi.exe").

a crowd funded approach could work to filter out "bad content".

Same way as here on HN, people could vote (plus or minus) to help rank the content.

You'd have to mitigate against the Sybil attack. Crowd funding is one way (ironic since I think you meant crowdsourced?) but as we know from SEO optimisation, all that does is force you to pay to get your spam/malware promoted.

Decentralized with quality control would be a hard but interesting problem. You could do upvotes/downvotes using cryptographic signatures use a little web-based authority to let people know whose signatures are reputable.

I've been thinking about this problem, too. (Reputation in a decentralised & anonymous web.) What would stop someone from creating fake users? They could easily form a realistic 'social network' over time, giving them some legitimacy. Together a large number of fake users can defeat any form of voting / quality control.

I find this stuff very interesting, let me know if I'm missing an obvious approach.

Well, obviously PGP has the whole "web of trust" thing but that's a bit hard to use. You can use crypto to "sign" things, so simply "signing" your upvotes and downvotes attaches a person to a vote. Then you let users upvote and downvote other users building a web of trust and a black-list. Signed-upvotes and downvotes would get passed around in the swarm itself as content.

The hard part is the new-user bootstrap. They need a starting list of trusted people - as they pull down information from the swarm, they get a good picture of the "web of trust". Then they can look for signed upvotes or downvotes on any content they're researching - that is, instead of just looking for the latest Game of Thrones vid, the system also looks for all upvotes and downvotes about each particular copy of the latest Game of Thrones vid and compares it against the user's personal "web of trust" to know which votes are respectable. The user sees this as just "here's the most popular copy".

Of course, passing around millions of upvotes and downvotes P2P would not be an easy problem.

Thanks for the reply. This sounds a little like the page-rank algorithm. :)

What stops someone from creating fake users on TPB, though?

Maybe a vote weighting that gradually gets heavier, the more honest your account is measured - you are observed upvoting good content, and flagging spam or viruses (imagine if the top HN commenters votes counted more than regular commenters...)? And rapid banning for those who upvote spam. Maybe you unlock additional feaures (like HNs downvote ability as you level up with karma). It might create a "race to the top" if you published a "karma list" of the top accounts... sort of like HN has with the leaders list https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

By whom? Remember, we're talking decentralized. In Gnutella and the like there is no authority.

So if you want to take the Pirate Bay approach of providing a small authoritative list of "trusted moderators" through the web and have all the users use that filter, you have to keep it simple so that it can be easily replicated if the web-component gets taken down.

Complicating the web/authority component means mirroring it and resurrecting it becomes hard.

The problem with those is always going to be sybil attacks: anyone can create tons of accounts and upvote themselves. Even cross-verification can be defeated: you just make a small network that upvotes each other in some obfuscated manner.

I think there are only two long term solutions:

- Introducing some kind of proof of work -- e.g. you do work to downvote/upvote;

- Some very "localized" reputation -- e.g. you trust the friends of your friends more.

Those ideas are behind the Bitcoin protocol and the Web of Trust, respectively.

In this case each would have it's problems: proof of work is inefficient by design and needs a good hash function not to be exploited; local reputation by design makes it hard to find new/unrelated content.

I don't think "proof of work" works here because upvoting/downvoting content needs to be cheap... how do you make it expensive for a dedicated malicious force but cheap for legitimate ratings? Proof-of-work as a sort of "sign-on" to enable propagating a new "account"? That is, you need to have 1 Ghz-hour of wasted computation in order to introduce a new cryptographic hash into the network as a sort of "payment to create an account"? Again, a dedicated spammer could have a machine farming accounts 24/7 while this "payment" to create an account would be frustratingly expensive to a new user.

The user wouldn't have to pay anything to create an account, just to vote. Sure, spammers can farm large amounts of reputation through botnets, but that's really expensive: you're putting a cost on it. The returns are already not so high for disseminating this kind of spam.

Having no reputation wouldn't mean you can't do anything -- just that what you do is less trusted and has lower priority.

It's not entirely implausible that authorities might attack the certificate provider. It's a single point of failure... the MPAA decides to fuck with it, gets them shut down, and suddenly no one can filter comments anymore?

Point, but that's a much smaller system to mirror. It can be static. You could bundle a cert list into the client, even.

What do you mean was the worse negative: downloading an exe, or downloading The Matrix? ;)

> I do wonder why a more decentralised approach hasn't taken off.

In a way, it has!

Compared to what it was when it launched 10 years ago, or even what its predecessors (e.g. Napster, Limewire) were, the current TPB is almost completely decentralized, with only one exception.

It stopped running its own tracker years ago, relying on other trackers that don't allow for searching (thus absolving themselves of some of the legal risks). And TPB has used DHT[0] for many torrents for a while, theoretically eliminating the need for trackers altogether.

So in 2014, The Pirate Bay is now effectively just a search board for magnet links, with usernames and comments attached only to provide some modicum of reputation (and therefore quality). Those magnet links point to content which is then exchanged either in a truly distributed fashion (DHT) or through these third-party trackers.

So the centralization doesn't provide "core functionality" to torrenting per se - it just provides a degree of quality. Nothing's preventing you from sharing magnet links on other forums (heck, you could paste one in an HN comment). But someone needs to be able to trust that what you're posting is, in fact, the content that you say it is and not a virus, honeypot, etc. Any forum that a group of people trust could serve this functionality (Reddit, HN, Yahoo Answers, etc.[1]) instead of TPB. The competitive advantage of TPB is not the content that it has, but the reputation that it's built over the last decade.

There are Silk Road-based alternatives, which use the Silk Road model for guaranteeing reputation. I guess Tor isn't technically "decentralized", but it'd be a small step to modify the Silk Road approach to broadcasting the actual magnet links themselves.

If you want to decentralize the last remaining centralized piece of TPB, you'd have to solve the problem of decentralizing reputation. This is something that's been worked on in a number of areas (e.g. Bitcoin) but remains unsolved. Perhaps the next TPB will use the Bitcoin blockchain, and this could somehow "solve" the issue, but there are a number of kinks that would have to be worked out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

[1] Notice that these are all centralized

Reputation? For my use case, I evaluate a torrent based on the number of seeders.

You mentioned that anybody can post a magnet link on any forum. Yes. But where do they get that magnet link from in the first place? I mean, obviously the person who creates the torrent has it. Is that the only way?

You mention DHT. My torrent client does that. Hm, is there a client that I can use to "search" DHT? Failing that, is there a way to dump a list of what hashes/magnet links/torrents my own client is currently hearing about?

Sorry for not just googling this, but there's an awful lot of cargo cult information about torrents out there...

DHT is a way to discover peers who also have pieces of the same torrent you are downloading. It's an alternative to using a centralized Tracker to tell your client about who has the pieces of the file you need.

http://www.tribler.org/

You could create a DHT with all known torrents. Kademila was built basically with that in mind. The Kad network works pretty well, but it does face some problems with spam; just sorting by seeders doesn't cut it since a spammer can fake as many seeders as he'd like.

Yeah. When someone tells me "we must stop this sharing of valuable content!" I answer with something like "Here is all anyone needs to download your content: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:e6da54b1ad507ec6217610dbc71c248a1a49f925"... or whatever the magnet link is for the current LibreOffice ;-)

Thats a board statement.

TPB offered a means of verifying uploaders so that people could trust content. The current P2P system is distributed, however the trust isn't. Magnet links need to add a digital signature of the uploader so people can have faith in them.

However having a digital key means there is a private key that can tie an uploader to lots of illegal activity. Uploaders might not want that.

It's kind of confusing, they make it sound like a snapshot of TPB before it was raided, but it actually contains very recent torrents that weren't yet available when TPB went down.

I really wish somebody would invent a torrent/magnet service distributed on a blockchain.

TPB was/is blocked at ISP level in our country (UK). These sorts of mirrors of course aren't. So there's some Streisand Effect going on here in that more mirrors are being publicised because of the take down basically making it easier for people in the UK to find TPB content than it was last week.

Personally I don't use the site however.

The next 'Pirate Bay' will likely be on a decentralized storage network like Storj, rather than rely on a single point of failure. Much more robust.

Have to agree about the old database, and the search ain't all that accurate. But still, nice finding.

Bear in mind this is isohunt.to, which has no relation whatsoever to the old Isohunt: http://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-to-from-zero-to-the-8th-bigg...

It's a shame, really. I was a big fan of the old Isohunt back in the day.

I had no idea that existed! Thanks for the info, looks like a good sidekick for the good ol' PB.

https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-moves-to-the-cloud-becom...

Sooo, I guess it wasn't "virtually invulnerable to police raids".

It is better, because there is no ads!

The whole internet doesn't have any ads. Oh wait, I have ABP.

You mean ABP + disabled whitelist + fanboy/easylist. ABP on its own is pretty useless.

Don't forget all those web adresses. Browsers alone are pretty useless.

So I'm still not sure why people just don't go to say Kickass Torrents and forget about TPB.

Interesting that they call it the "pilgrim" of freedom, and not the pirate...

That's a very old dump of the database, I'm afraid.

It is better than nothing I suppose.

Not more than a week, e.g. a broadcast recording of Pokemon S17E46 (broadcast Dec 6) is present.

Then it is not complete, or the search system does not work very well, since I can not find a torrent I uploaded over a year ago.

Sounds plausible - I note that the paging links don't work. Compare http://thepiratebay.ee , which has the same problem.

It has an episode I searched for that came out two days ago (after the raid, actually), so it can't be that old.

God Damn I love the internet!!! :)

nice to have it back online..

This is good, no ads. Anyone can share files but if you don't have ads you can't scale and if you are making money by having ads you become a target.

They're only sharing magnet/torrent files, which are pretty small, so it should be possible to get quite far I guess?

This site also seems to work: http://thepiratebay.cr/

This site is a clone of kickass.so, the search results, seeders, and leechers are identical.

I've heard that this site has been redirecting people to a .ee site which asks for a donation to use. This is a malicious site.

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