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The Pirate Bay down, forever?

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Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#61

Post by bad_user »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #17
witty_username wrote: post #3

I must agree; the ads are way too crazy.

Maybe I'm one of these "jerks", but it's always amusing to me when people complain about ads on the internet, while there are so many different ad-blockers out there.

I never understood ad blockers or the people promoting ad blockers.

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.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#62

Post by amelius »

lelandbatey wrote: post #10
sysk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it's hosting torrents in flat files or in database rows seems like a minor technical difference to me. Apart from that, the same broken UI doesn't seem to have changed much in the past 8 years. I didn't know that TPB was open source... surprised that the community didn't try to improve the UX a bit.

The thing is that to download a torrent, the absolute minimum amount of information you need is the torrent hash. The torrent hash is on the order of ~40 characters long, requiring no other information. All you have to do is paste that short sting into a torrent client to download a set of files. Are we really going to say that these 40 character strings are illegal to share? If I paste the hash for the latest blockb…

If you wrote down the number Pi in hexadecimal, I conjecture that any possible 40-digit sequence would appear in there somewhere.

Indeed, how could it possibly be illegal to share pieces of Pi? :)

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#63

Post by zikzak »

chii wrote: post #60
caractacus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site had 50m uniques a month. At least 2-3 ads on every page. Even at a terrible CPM rate or CPC conversion rate, they'd have to be ansolute morons not to be making oodles of cash from that setup.

i find that difficult to believe, because almost everyone who would go to the pirate bay would have adblock of some sort no!?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/21/use-of-ad...

Maybe 30%, worst case?

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#65

Post by lucb1e »

bad_user wrote: post #61
eXpl0it3r wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm one of these "jerks", but it's always amusing to me when people complain about ads on the internet, while there are so many different ad-blockers out there.

I never understood ad blockers or the people promoting ad blockers. 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 w…

> yet they are unwilling to pay for content

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.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#66

Post by ZirconCode »

runn1ng wrote: post #24
Kequc wrote: post #4

In the last 8 years the pirate bay hasn't changed? It went open source and embraced magnet links entirely. Making it so that almost nothing was being hosted on the server itself. You can download the entire pirate bay in 90MB to put one up of your own. There are hundreds of pirate bays all over the world running on almost nothing allowing everyone to download the same things at the same speeds. [edit: It didn't go op…

hey, I am the author of the 90MB archive. 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 illega…

I just read through your article, I loved it, Thanks for sharing. Here's the script he used if anyone else is curious: https://github.com/runn1ng/runn1ng.github.io/blob/master/pir...

You mentioned you had to switch computers multiple times, about how many times was that? Sorry on the off-topic...

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#67

Post by dagw »

zerr wrote: post #33

Can anybody explain what's the fuzz regarding pirate bay? I mean, there are tons of good torrent sites and search engines everybody use every day... I don't even remember when I last time used TPB...

TPB was by far the most popular pirate site in the world. It is for example the only torrent site I regularly see mentioned in the news. To know of any other site you have to be fairly into the pirate scene and follow relevant blogs and forums. Very few people bother to do that. The vast majority of people who just want to see Guardians of the Galaxy without paying probably only know about TPB.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#68

Post by runn1ng »

ZirconCode wrote: post #66
runn1ng wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey, I am the author of the 90MB archive. 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 illega…

I just read through your article, I loved it, Thanks for sharing. Here's the script he used if anyone else is curious: https://github.com/runn1ng/runn1ng.github.io/blob/master/pir... You mentioned you had to switch computers multiple times, about how many times was that? Sorry on the off-topic...

Ooh, I don't remember frankly, it's almost 2 years ago now. I can admit it now - I run it on my school's network that has about 50 computers. I would say I switched computers about 10 times.

I am not sure if it was anti-spam or anti-ddos or just anti-scraper measure.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#69

Post by bad_user »

lucb1e wrote: post #65
bad_user wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood ad blockers or the people promoting ad blockers. 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 w…

> yet they are unwilling to pay for content 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…

If you pay or donate for the content you like, I've got no beef against you.

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.

Re: The Pirate Bay down, forever?

#70

Post by vicpara »

This article doesn't get the point. It's old, doesn't change, conservative and outdated? Stop using it.

The big problem is that TPB was taken offline not because it was buggy but because helped people copyrighted content.

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