The Pirate Bay's 20th Anniversary

by HieronymusBosch on 9/19/2023, 12:00 PM with 122 comments
  • by janvdberg on 9/19/2023, 1:27 PM

    Side-note: I will always be in awe of the BitTorrent protocol. A resilient and efficient piece of tech that at its height was responsible for LARGE amounts of internet traffic (facilitated by sites like the TPB) and was (mostly) developed by just one guy: Bram Cohen.

  • by 1970-01-01 on 9/19/2023, 3:00 PM

    There was an article a long time ago about their oldest active torrent:

    "An episode of the Swedish comedy show “High Chaparral” has the honor of being the oldest torrent. The file was originally uploaded on March 25, 2004, and although it lists zero seeders in search results, there are still several people actively sharing the torrent." https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bays-oldest-torrents-survive...

  • by mlsu on 9/19/2023, 5:38 PM

    I recently listened to the Darknet Diaries episode about the PirateBay:

    https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/92/

    Great episode, he interviewed one of the founders. Goes through the whole history of the piratebay and all the times they tried to take it down. Guy seems... interesting. Basically exactly who you might expect would be running that website.

  • by BLKNSLVR on 9/19/2023, 2:12 PM

    I find the opinions of Peter Sunde in this article quite interesting.

    Even seven years ago he was saying that torrent sites had stagnated and there was necessity for innovation to protect against the vulnerabilities inherent in having only few large, popular torrent sites.

    So, this 20th anniversary is somewhat of a bitter pill to swallow for at least one of the founders.

    https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-nee...

  • by MichaelZuo on 9/19/2023, 12:38 PM

    Their tenacity brings to mind that Teddy Roosevelt quote.

  • by 1970-01-01 on 9/19/2023, 8:09 PM

    Some interesting history can be seen via their own doodles:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20110902004820/http://thepirateb...

  • by _mxdo on 9/19/2023, 2:16 PM

    Peak civilization

  • by ghostDancer on 9/19/2023, 3:32 PM

    Almost in talk like a pirate day. It would have been really appropriate.

  • by jiofj on 9/19/2023, 12:45 PM

    The future has always been DHT, but having no built-in search feature like Kademlia is a huge oversight imo.

    There are websites that crawl DHT and you can search using them https://btdig.com but of course it would be better to have something decentralised.

  • by resuresu on 9/19/2023, 12:35 PM

    20 years of being inferior to gnutella in every way imaginable.