As the peer-to-peer community was preparing to put to rest their favorite file sharing site The Pirate Bay, their vigil has been disturbed. Black Internet, the ISP that supplied much of the site’s bandwidth, says it has been sabotaged.
Faced with a $70,000 fine, Black Internet complied with the Swedish court’s decision yesterday and has cut off The Pirate Bay. But a few hours later, TorrentFreak is reporting a mysterious “intentional” attack on Black Internet, which caused substantial damage.
Black Internet has called in experts and the police, as its infrastructure is said to be suffering substantial damages and its customers experiencing “serious disruption” to their Internet service, according to TorrentFreak. The attack is said to have been deliberate.
Back in April, a Swedish court found The Pirate Bay co-founders guilty of copyright violations and ordered them to pay $4 million in damages and also spend a year in jail. A ray of light then emerged for the peer-to-peer sharing site, as Global Gaming Factory X (GGFX) offered to acquire The Pirate Bay for almost $8 million and turn it into a legal business.
I had my reservations over whether a legal Pirate Bay would thrive, but it didn’t even go that far in the end. The Pirate Bay acquisition by GGFX was hit by the cold Swedish weather last week, as controversy surrounded the acquiring company. GGFX’s trading stock was stopped on Friday, as the company’s chairman resigned just days before finalizing the deal.
However, there is still hope out there for keen peer-to-peer file-sharers. Torrent sites are like weeds, you cut them off and they grow stronger, or multiply in this case. Dozens of Pirate Bay alternatives are out there, which work just as well the popular original.
Torrent indexers, sites that have a searchable directory of torrent files but don’t host a tracker of their own can give access to thousands of files. Some of the most used indexers are Mininova, isoHunt, and Torrentreactor. Other full Pirate Bay alternatives, open to everyone and also have their own working tracker are Torrentbox and 1337x. Demonoid is a site of the sort as well, but is semi-private and users need an invitation code to join.