TPB

After legal threats from the music industry the UK Pirate Party saw no other option than to shut down their Pirate Bay proxy service. However, as is usually the case with censorship, the Internet has found a way to route around it. Responding to the UK situation Pirate parties in Argentina and Luxembourg have decided to start fresh Pirate Bay proxies.

pirate bayAs reported earlier, the UK Pirate Party has taken the difficult decision to shut down their Pirate Bay proxy service.

Founded in 2006 by a group of Swedes close to the Pirate Bay illegal download website, the Pirate Party has spread across Europe. The Pirates are the spiritual heirs of the libertarian hackers from the late 20th century, who dreamed of a free circulation of culture and knowledge on the Internet.

The Pirate Bay has added a new IP address to access the popular website, in the intention of helping users in the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy bypass their countries' court-mandated blockades, reports TorrentFreak.

Virgin and Orange, two U.K. Internet providers, have already blocked The Pirate Bay. Five more of the largest Internet providers in the U.K., including Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, and O2, will also have to implement the block before the end of May.

ZDNet's Emil Protalinski reports that a hacker calling himself "Nyre" has claimed responsibility for a recent cyber attack that took down The Pirate Bay.

In a Pastebin post, Nyre writes, "I am highly against Anonymous. I do not support Anonymous anymore. I sometimes help the feds. The Pirate Bay was a press-release website for Anonymous, then I had a idea, why not take it down? Why not make it impossible for Anonymous? Get on your knees, Anonymous. I am a one-man army. I am not a hacker. I am a security killer."

Yesterday we revealed that The Pirate Bay was being targeted by a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that disrupted the site’s activity in a number of locations worldwide. As we suspected, Anonymous didn’t have anything to do with the attack.

“YES The Pirate Bay is down. YES it's under DDoS attack. NO we don't know who from. We'll update as we hear more,” read a tweet posted on YourAnonNews.

A court in The Hague, Netherlands has ordered Internet providers to block the The Pirate Bay website or face large fines, a ruling that means accessing the Swedish-born site directly will soon be impossible for most Dutch consumers.

The Pirate Bay (TPB), a popular BitTorrent website, experienced a brief stint of downtime this week. After restoring service, the site's operators confirmed that the outage was caused by routine maintenance and not a law enforcement raid. According to a blog post published by TPB, system upgrades were needed in order to accommodate the website's continuing growth.

The Pirate Bay is facing a second round of criminal investigations by the Swedish police.

Their domain registrar, Binero, has confirmed today that an investigation is under way against the Pirate Bay after receiving a letter with questions relating to ownership details/registration details for the Pirate Bay's two new .se domains. 

The Pirate Bay could be blocked in the UK, after a High Court judge ruled that the torrent site and its users are committing copyright infringement.

The case was brought before the court by a coalition of major record labels, including Sony, EMI and Universal. They want the court to force internet providers like Sky, BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media to block the website. No operators of the Pirate Bay were in court for the hearing.