TorrentFreak

In their ongoing effort to circumvent the court mandated blockades in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy, The Pirate Bay has added a new website. The site in question is operating from a new IP-address which makes it available directly to blocked subscribers. In addition, the new site is optimized to work with proxies in case the IP-address is blocked in the future.

Efforts by anti-piracy groups to make The Pirate Bay inaccessible have turned into a proxy war, quite literally. After the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN managed to shutter several proxy sites, their Belgian colleagues at BAF are now attempting to do the same. The group has threatened to sue the owner of a proxy if his site stays online, but thus far the threat hasn’t had the desired effect.

Record labels and Hollywood have described The Pirate Bay as one of the biggest threats to their business, but thousands of artists clearly disagree with this view. In recent weeks more than 5000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site. Those who were lucky enough to be featured are overwhelmed by the career boost and the positive responses from the public.

In recent months The Pirate Bay has drastically changed its site to make it less vulnerable to ever increasing censorship attempts across the globe. But that was just the start, as the torrent site now says it’s getting ready to put some of its hardware in GPS controlled drones. “Everyone knows WHAT TPB is. Now they’re going to have to think about WHERE TPB is,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak.

Suspicions that the police have started a new criminal investigation into The Pirate Bay were confirmed by the Swedish hosting company Binero today. Police have requested the company to reveal the personal details of the customer who registered The Pirate Bay domain name. Sources say that the new investigation is a renewed attempt to shut the popular BitTorrent site down.

Traditionally, BitTorrent and cyberlockers are generally seen as two entirely different file-sharing platforms, but the newly launched Netkups shows that this doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, supporting both direct downloads and torrents can have benefits for both site operators and users, the founders claim.

Part of The Pirate Bay’s decision to go torrent-less was to make the site more resistant to outside attacks, but it also has quite an impact on bandwidth bills. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak today that after the switch the site now consumes 30 percent less bandwidth, while the number of visitors remains stable. Despite some annoyances most users appear to be fine with the new magnet-only site.