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posted by takyon on Monday August 13 2018, @06:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the people-want-to-be-free dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

The Pirate Bay Turns 15 Years Old

Founded in 2003 by a group of hackers and activists, The Pirate Bay aimed to bring file-sharing to the masses. In the fifteen years that followed, the site transformed from a small community to Hollywood's resilient arch-rival, serving millions of users. And that's not the only thing that changed. Todayish, The Pirate Bay turns 15 years old, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years.

While the exact launch date is a bit of a mystery, even to the site's founders, August 10 was previously chosen as its anniversary. What we do know is that the site was brought online in 2003 by now-disbanded pro-culture organization PiratbyrÄn, which is Swedish for Bureau of Piracy. The group was formed by political activists and hackers in the same year, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral, and power structures.

One of the group's unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit AntpiratbyrÄn. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information.

The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO, kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker.

Related: Anti-Piracy Firm: P2P Piracy Still Relevant


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:47AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:47AM (#721243) Journal

    Ask the many Tor users around here. They notice it and worse.

    CloudFlare seems to be one of the worst offenders and is used by many sites. One symptom is an endless amount of goddamn captchas that you have to solve in order to use a service. Many sites will also throw up huge security red flags if you try to sign up for an account while using a VPN. Google, Discord, and many email services immediately come to mind. They will effectively lock your account due to "suspicious activity" and demand a phone number to continue. If you write to support explaining your position on privacy, you'll essentially get the finger, if you get a response at all. The rationale is probably to prevent bots, spammers, or even trolls from using the service.

    It's hard to say about "crawl speed" since the VPN could dramatically lower your throughput anyway. Especially the free ones (which may be more likely to be detected since they are easier for anyone to use).

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  • (Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday August 15 2018, @03:07AM

    by legont (4179) on Wednesday August 15 2018, @03:07AM (#721657)

    It's hard to say about "crawl speed" since the VPN could dramatically lower your throughput anyway.

    I pay for VPN and it is fast; well, compared to my village only option cable anyway. They definitely do throttle down in addition to what you described. It also is getting worse rather quickly.

    Another observation - some countries have fast internal Internet but throttle it down on the border.

    The whole Internet freedom concept is deteriorating pretty much everywhere.

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