TPB

About two months ago, The Pirate Bay went offline after a police raid on its servers. Apparently, not even police action against the site can kill it off, as the original site is now back online.

According to TorrentFreak, the site had been teasing a countdown to February 1, presumably to promote the site's return, but it re-appeared Saturday, a day earlier than expected. The site is mostly back to where it was, TorrentFreak reports, with "minimal" data loss, but some pages result in 404 errors.

Swedish authorities have raided and shut down one of the world's oldest and certainly its most infamous torrent site, The Pirate Bay, seizing several servers and computers, according to the file-sharing news blog Torrent Freak as well as multiple reports from within the country.

Anti-piracy group BREIN has just released its annual report revealing its activities during 2013. The Hollywood-affiliated group says that in addition to taking down more than 500 torrent, linking , streaming and Usenet sites, 206 Pirate Bay proxies fell victim to its threats.

During the first few months of each year, infamous Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN details its successes of the previous 12 months.

A court in The Hague has ruled that local internet service providers (ISPs) can stop trying to block The Pirate Bay, because blocks are overbearing and do not work.

A ruling from the Dutch court (pdf) sees justice side with two ISPs that have baulked at implementing whackamole blocks and take a different view of the hard line pursued by local copyright cartel enforcer Brein.

Brein approached the courts in 2010 with a request that the ISP Ziggo put a wall around The Pirate Bay. Ziggo resisted the rightsholders' demand and was joined by another ISP called Xs4all.

The Pirate Bay has set sail to a new domain for the third time in a week. After just a few days Peru decided to suspend the site’s .PE domain forcing the torrent site to move to the Guyana-based .GY ccTLD. The Pirate Bay team is not too worried about the domain whack-a-mole and says they have some 70 domain names in reserve, and plenty of other options for people to access the site.

The past week has been a busy one for The Pirate Bay’s IT department, with the site skipping from domain to domain every other day.

Following pressure from the entertainment industry the domain registry of Sint Maarten appears to have seized The Pirate Bay’s .SX domain name.

The torrent site itself hasn’t been taken down and has quickly relocated to a new address on Ascension Island’s .AC ccTLD. The Pirate Bay team informs TorrentFreak that this UK-controlled domain isn’t their final destination and they will sail to a safer haven in the near future.

The operators of The Pirate Bay, one of the most (in)famous piracy sites on the Internet, have decided to celebrate the site's 10th anniversary by releasing a web browser that allows users to access TPB or other sites censored in their country.

"PirateBrowser is a bundle package of the Tor client (Vidalia), Firefox Portable browser (with foxyproxy addon) and some custom configs," they explained on the browser's official website.

 The Swedish founder of the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay is suspected along with a Dane of hacking into a company handling sensitive information for the Danish police, officials have said.

Denmark's justice minister said hackers accessed "some information" from the Schengen Information System, a large European database on police and judicial co-operation. He didn't give further details.

Peter Sunde, one of four cofounders of notorious BitTorrent search site The Pirate Bay, says he plans to run in next year's European Parliament elections, despite his impending incarceration for copyright violation.

Sunde, along with partners Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, were convicted of "accessory to breaching copyright laws" by a Swedish court in 2009.

The Pirate Bay says it has been offered virtual asylum in North Korea. The move comes after the Norwegian Pirate Party was forced to stop routing traffic for the infamous BitTorrent site by a local copyright group. “We can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the Republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network,” the Pirate Bay says. A traceroute indeed suggests that The Pirate Bay is now being routed through the dictatorial country.