TorrentFreak

While the major record labels and movie studios do what they can to shutter The Pirate Bay, thousands of lesser known artists are eager to become featured on the site’s homepage. Since the start of the “Promo Bay” initiative in January, 10,000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site. Those who were lucky enough to be featured have enjoyed a healthy career boost and in some cases earned thousands of dollars from file-sharing fans..

On the first day of October, police in Sweden raided so-called “bulletproof hoster” PRQ. The action took dozens of file-sharing sites offline, but it was later announced that the main target was Tankafetast, Sweden’s second favorite torrent site. A few days later Antipiratbyran confirmed the site’s demise but now, just three weeks later, Tankafetast is back, taunting the anti-piracy group not only with a return online and the launch of a clothing range, but by renting cinemas in celebration.

After its move to the cloud earlier this week The Pirate Bay became more portable and raid-proof than ever before. The entire website and six months of database and code backups have a storage footprint of just 500 gigabytes. At the same time, The Pirate Bay claims to be the greenest site in the list of 100 most visited websites on the Internet. In its new setup the site uses just 2.5 kilowatts to serve mllions of users a day, which is equivalent to the consumption of a regular vacuum cleaner.

The Pirate Bay has made an important change to its infrastructure. The world’s most famous BitTorrent site has switched its entire operation to the cloud. From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids — all while keeping user data secure.

In an unprecedented data breach, tens of thousands of usernames and passwords from large private BitTorrent tracker RevTT have been leaked onto the Internet. The attackers, who call themselves Afghanistan Hackers, leaked the user/pass combinations via The Pirate Bay. The initial response from RevTT was to censor all discussion of the data breach, even as hundreds – possibly thousands – of accounts were being used without their owners’ permission.

The Pirate Bay turns nine years old today, a truly remarkable achievement considering the history of the site. What started out in 2003 as a fun project of a small group of friends turned into one of the largest websites on the Internet. The site has become a global icon; hated by Hollywood and other entertainment industries, but loved by millions of file-sharers.

A few days ago Demonoid showed the first signs of life in weeks when the domain’s nameservers were updated. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the site is preparing to make a comeback. The site’s tech admin informs TorrentFreak that the Demonoid crew is “not looking into putting the site back up at the moment.” However, the troubled BitTorrent site is not giving up entirely just yet.