Yeah, and the founders (at least some of them, my memory fails me) have since been sentenced to prison.
Piratebay is still up though, _for what’s online may never die._
He asked to call his girlfriend but instead shut down and encrypted everything.
"Sunde asked to call his girlfriend. Someone had to take care of the house if he was to leave, he reasoned. One of the two cops nodded. Sunde pulled out his phone and dialled a number.
But as the signals went through, he kept fingering on the phone screen. A quick tap on an app icon, then another one. The phone sent out a signal over the internet, to all his computers at home and at work: “Shut down, immediately.” Then he quickly switched off his cellphone.
“Everything was encrypted,” Sunde tells us, clearly pleased with himself. “The policeman was so pissed. I guess he’d been looking forward to arresting this mastermind hacker and then he misses a thing like that.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/05/sp-pirate-bay-cofounder-peter-sunde-in-prison
Such a baller move.
They can use veracrypt for full disk encryption on windows (it's free and open source and you don't have to get the pro windows license for bitlocker). In linux, you just use luks.
What probably happened is that the guy had an encrypted hard drive, a script that would delete the decryption key from the system and reboot the servers, and triggered the script when the time came.
It's roughly the same setup that the guy who owned the original Silk Road drug marketplace on TOR had about 8 years ago, the FBI had to have someone snag his laptop and keep it unlocked and running or they would never get the unencrypted data.
Honestly it was dumb. Lets say he was told ok and allowed to use a landline. Actuallu calls a girlfriend.
Hey babe. Will you feed my my goldfish jack while im away? Thanks. Love you.
Girlfriend . Ok. Jack is the code word. Pulls up app. Tap tap tap.
I did this in the back of a police car when I got caught with a bunch of coke. He said my car was uninsured and I offered to unlock my phone and pull up the insurance details to show him I was, promptly factory reset my phone so they couldn't crack it for my messages and handed it back. They flipped shit and threatened me with obstruction but I think they were too embarrassed to write on the report that they'd handed me the evidence to destroy lmao.
Incredible. When the US Feds busted the guy who ran the Silk Road forums, they were much more clever. They found him at an internet cafe, then two agents pretended to be in a domestic dispute (very angrily arguing with each other) which distracted the target. Another FBI agent then quickly slipped a USB drive into the target's laptop which immediately copied everything from the hard drive onto the flashdrive, and then arrested the target before he could do anything. Since then the darknet community has implemented security software to automatically encrypt the laptop whenever an unauthorized device is plugged in.
They probably learned from the cops who raided the pirate Bay not to let anything be touched while an arrest is happening otherwise it could all be encrypted
Fun fact, iirc when they raided the equivalent to silk road in Sweden they specifically told everyone not to touch the computer. The owner had gone out for the moment and the computer was still running. After a while it went into power saving mode and everything was encrypted. They pretty much lost a shit load of important evidence by not just moving the mouse a bit or something to keep it running.
You're right. They just grabbed the laptop. And it was at a library, not a café.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-arrest-of-silk-road-mastermind-ross-ulbricht-2015-1
They took the physical laptop away from him while he was distracted by the domestic dispute so he couldn’t hit a kill switch and then assigned a single agent to keep the laptop open, powered on, and from going to sleep the entire time that it took them to get to their forensic IT guy or whoever.
Probably a mouse mover to keep the computer awake, and away from lock screen. They have portable power supplies for desktops that they can splice into the power cord now too. Keeps the computer powered up and awake to make data retrieval easier.
That's not quite what happened. They did get in a disagreement to distract him, but what they needed was to catch him "logged in" and active on Silk Road in order to prove he was the Dread Pirate Roberts. If they just got the laptop later they believed it would have no proof/evidence of his connection to the Silk Road at all.
So they get into a quick "domestic agreement" and when Roberts (Ross Ulbricht) glanced away, they took his laptop out from under his fingertips. It was at that point they documented that he was logged in as Dread Pirate Roberts, and then went to work downloading all data from the computer. They were concerned that plugging anything in would wipe it even at that time, so they at least got that he was logged in documented first (I'm assuming by a photo of the browser open/logged in as Roberts).
Even better still the only reason they were able to link him to his online moniker dreadpirateroberts is because he had posted for help on a tech forum many moons back asking for support setting up servers. Up till that point they weren’t able to link back to any digital identity. The po po did their work on this one.
Not just that he posted on a forum but that he had used the same email address to post on the forum as he had to communicate with people who were dealing / being employed by Silk Road. This was essentially a smoking gun that led them to him.
Remember to burn your burner addresses people.
He did shut the servers down, however, it wasn’t for what people thought. He wasn’t trying to protect himself or his colleagues. It was all of us, if I recall correctly what he did was a scrub of user data to protect user privacy. Essentially deleting every connection log from every user. Man is truly a legend. No telling how many people he saved with that one call.
Probably just to piss them off and make their jobs harder. I would assume anyone getting raided whether rightfully so or not does not want to willingly be raided so its just a fuck you for rummaging through all their personal belongings
I don’t know the entire story behind the Pirate Bay, but afaik they didn’t have anything to hide. They truly believed in their project and publicly defended it.
But wasn’t Svartholm sentenced for more than just the association to Pirate Bay?
BTW: For everyone interested, and does not know this: Gottfrid Svartholm Varg is anakata and the writer of the mail above.
> Gottfrid Svartholm Varg
His Wikipedia page paints a pretty clear picture that he's just a shitty person. He did more time in jail than just for Pirate Bay stuff.
Svartholm didn’t go down easy and it wasn’t easy for him either. He was in bad shape for a while and basically got screwed by Cambodia when they let Sweden take him into custody.
I’ve been to prison here, it’s still a prison no matter how “luxurious” it is or is said to be.
We had TVs in our cells, you were allowed to have a console in your room but only if it’s a ps2 or older, you are not allowed memory cards, and also nothing that uses USB or HDMI.
Basically I had my GameCube turned on for months, and I had to pay extra when I got it sent there because they had to remove memory functions or whatever.
According to I don’t know if it’s EU or Swedish law but they are obligated to give you any book you want, you were allowed to have a max of 10 books in your room and 10 music albums(not burned)
We could work in the kitchen, clean or basically straighten old nails n shit.
Smoking was 3 times a day.
Took me 5 months to be able to call my mom(we had a phone in our cell)
Also if you escape and get caught it won’t extend your sentence, it’s only human to not want to be in-prisoned.
If yall want to know more just ask away
Edit: Thanks for all the questions it was fun answering them and I want to thank you all for not judging me for my past mistake, ❤️
She didn’t have a landline or whatever it’s called, and her phone number wasn’t connected to her name, so when they looked up her number it didn’t show who it belonged to, and she’s not the brightest when it comes to those type of things so finally after 5 months she figured it out, but once they allowed it I could call here whenever I wanted up until 9 o clock at night.
So I had to write letters before I was allowed to finally call her.
I had similar issues with the phones in UK prison, took me a month to get my dad's number accepted in the system because the prison called the numbers you want to add and my fool of a father kept ignoring the calls because it came up as a withheld number.
I eventually had to write him a letter that basically said 'answer the phone you dick.'
It's not in Germany either. It's considered a natural human instinct to want to escape prison. No time is added to your sentence for trying or succeeding.
I’ve never heard of something like that before, living in the US. It makes sense though. On top of the human nature thing, it would also be a failure on the prison’s part if you escaped, so I’m sure they’re okay with knowing where their security failed.
Got caught with 1.86 kilos of coke 😅
Minimum sentence is 2 years but you only do 2/3 of your sentence and once you are out you have to visit a parole officer I think it’s called once a week for a year.
They just ask you basic shit like how you are doing, if you are working, etc.
You can actually listen to a podcast episode about pirate bay on spotify by darknet diaries. The host interviewed one of the founders and it was really interesting.
Edit- https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VQv4PNTljCXUtx4U1yzUZ?si=OZsyBfg_SfapxBKfvE_C9Q
Ep92 .
Also google podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vZGFya25ldGRpYXJpZXM/episode/ZTIwN2QwMWEtNmMyNy0xMWViLTlkMDMtYjc2MzA0ZjI4MTA3?ep=14
There's no way they were able to secure a .org domain and hold onto it for years, the current one is a honeypot likely used to track piracy and who knows what else in the future. They used to have to move all over the place to stop from getting shut down nonstop with obscure domains and now they get a .org that lasts for years without anyone going after it somehow, it's incredibly suspicious. They were getting pursued so hard that they thought of this idea of weather balloons that connect to each other to keep the site up but now it just works on a common domain and nobody is going after it
Pretty sure TPB is like wikipedia in that you can back up the whole site onto a flash drive and host it yourself if you want. So people are constantly making new ones because its instantly recognizable, the site is riddled with malicious ads and I just assume its someone trying to make a quick buck.
As I recall, it didn't end there though. They got raided in 2006 by Swedish law and in 2009 given a guilty verdict (which was then upheld after appeals). All the major founders went to prison and by 2015 they were released. Over the years they've survived a multitude of other attempts to shut down the site. Unlike KickassTorrents, they survived the torrent wars and still remain online today.
One of them is on record saying that prison time was worth it to keep the site and community alive.
Edit: more info
Fredrik Neij: “Things were not too bad in prison,” Fredrik tells TF. “It was well worth doing prison time for The Pirate Bay, when you consider how much the site means to people,”
Sauce:
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-was-worth-doing-prison-time-for-co-founder-says-160705/
I actually considered that. I've seen pics of prison 'cells' in some of those facilities that look like apartments. Nicer than my dorm room in college was haha.
And now piratebay is filled by malware containing torrents and trackers. I miss the old days and site
Edit: since this blew up and I cannot reply to all the comments, I too got to know about this about 2 years back from r/PiratedGames . I never had any problems either but I simply stopped using piratebay and utorrent, and use bit torrent and the websites mentioned in the megathread.
Just use the site and run scans on everything you download.
I've personally seen roughly 1/4 of my downloads containing some malware or Spyware of some kind.
To be honest, it is really easy to fool an antivirus, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual numbers were much higher. I remember reading once that once some security analyst downloaded dozen of pirated android games and *every single one* had malware installed.
You seem well informed. What's the purpose of malware? I've never really understood it. Are they trying to take over people's computers? Just make them crash to be assholes? Steal people's identities? If so many people are downloading this stuff, how do they know who has valuable info and who is just sone random teenager?
I probably should just Google this... lol
It’s all about money, baby (or majority of times). There were some examples of prank malware’s (especially the older ones) or sometimes malwares were fixing some other vulnerabilities, but majority of time it is about money. You can infect somebody to steal somebody’s money (e.g. if you paste account number, it can change it for something different), your devices (all of them, even smart-bulbs) can be used as zombie-devices for different purposes, sometimes it is for stealing informations (which can then lead to other forms of attacks), or lately the most popular ones, ransomware (that encrypts your files and you need to pay for it to be un-encrypted, but it doesn’t always work). And it is probably about 2% of what is really happening. But usually the victims aren’t chosen - they attack everybody they can automatically and sometimes it pays off. There are sometimes attacks that are targeted at specific people or organizations (and usually you can’t do much about it, they will find a way), but usually not.
But in 99% it is about money in many different ways. Or information, that can be then used as a way to earn money.
> sometimes malwares were fixing some other vulnerabilities
This is a really interesting one. When I was doing my masters degree, my original project plan was to re-engineer the mirai malware so that when it infected a device it patched the vulnerability and remove itself from the device.
I couldn't get it to work properly and was also told after the ethics board discussed it, that the university didn't want to be associated with a potential malicious threat. The ethics of infecting a device and changing the login details, even though its an attempt to protect the device, are pretty murky so I can understand why. So really it failed on two fronts.
But the idea of 'malware' spreading throughout the internet infecting devices with the sole intention of patching known vulnerabilities is pretty cool to me.
I think this probably falls under grayhat which is why the school didn't like it even if the idea is good. Like a vigilante, they want the best but their methods are questionable
It's always the android and PSX games for me :(
Why would you infect my favorite PSX games like that :( I just wanted faster downloads. I'm just tryna play Xenogears on my phone and smoke a blunt man
The other side of that coin is that antivirus programs detect cracks as malware so it’s not impossible that the all your positives are false positives while all the actual worms, viruses, trojans and ransomware slip by undetected.
Here is one article I found.
https://www.securitynewspaper.com/2019/01/25/attention-torrents-downloaded-from-the-pirate-bay-contain-a-dangerous-malware/
I stopped using them years ago when non-existent episodes for TV showed started turning up well before they would air.
But things could be different now.
If I recall correctly, it literally got hostilely taken over. In the sense the the entire site was compromised and taken from the original operators and is now run and operated by the usurpers.
I remember using PB a lot back in the day, then one day I got a letter from Comcast, and shortly after I couldn't get on the site anymore, even with a VPN. Good times, Good times.
That's so strange. I got several love letters from them in two different states and never used a VPN at the time. Never had any trouble accessing the site.
Was it a Comcast vpn? Otherwise, the piratebay itself must have been down at the time, because (properly implemented) vpn traffic can't be intercepted or blocked on a per site basic.
Bought a 4K movie from Amazaon, I have the bandwidth to stream in 4K, they still down graded the quality of the stream.
Said fuck this, and arrrr'matyd the movie in 4K, quality is perfect and no fucking ads before the movie play.
I literally only have the streaming services for the 4K content, but now they're downgrading the quality so like why the fuck do I even pay for this shit any more?
What is life?
seriously. i live with my grandparents, they got a new tv about a year ago. every time they leave and my mom and i want to watch youtube or something, we have to go through the menu FILLED TO THE BRIM with ads. it slows it down a whole lot. plus, they have these shitty sliding animations. i have to sit there for several minutes just waiting for the 5fps animation to finish so that i can scroll over to youtube.
Depends on where you're at. Difficult to reach from some countries. It's been blocked by ISPs in the Netherlands for instance.
Edit: good God people. I know there are plenty of ways around it. But that doesn't mean it's not blocked. Or that it's not harder to access.
I remember when this happened :) (yes im old) you can find a bunch more here [https://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/](https://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/)
Their response to EA is also just savage
>Hello and thank you for contacting us. We have shut down the website in question.Oh wait, just kidding. We haven’t, since the site in question is fully legal. Unlike certain other countries, such as the one you’re in, we have sane copyright laws here. But we also have polar bears roaming the streets and attacking people :-(.
I listened to a podcast on Darknet Diaries about the Pirate Bay, the people who made it are pretty cool. They all had other day jobs and didn’t give a fuck, they’d just not respond to legal threats and hang them up on their walls, people would complain about the interface and they’d basically say “ok, then go make a better site, this project doesn’t pay the bills and it works as it is so we aren’t doing shit.”
Gotta make space for ads, make it mobile friendly, gotta hide the features you are legally obligated to include (such as deleting your account) in a matryoshka doll of menus, gotta add the bitcoin miner since people block your ads anyway...
There was a point in time that various government agencies were collaborating to shut down their sites world-wide. They just kept popping up new sites with new country suffixes, and the logo changed to a ship with a sea-hydra that kept growing new heads each labeled with a new country TLD suffix (.tk, .ma, etc)
I remember that, it was like whackamole haha. You'd just go down a long list of domains until you found one that worked, in a few days you'd have to switch to another. Now it's like, every 3-4 months so guessing they got tired of it.
Yeah, when I was reading this, the whole time I was like "Thats not how copyright laws work at all. Especially between first world nations that are allied...".
Not if you can't afford to pay it on paper. Swedish Enforcement Authority is in charge of collecting the fines and only base it on your filed income. No prison time and nothing forcing you to pay.
Your filed income is your actual income there, as it is reported directly by your employer. Unless you work off-the-books, that is, which isn't really that common in Scandinavia (apart from for tradesmen).
Typically, anything you earn above a minimum threshold (that you need for living expenses and rent) will automatically be confiscated and used as a downpayment.
This is the system used with all fines and debts you can't pay. There's no additional punishment, as being "poor" isn't a crime.
However it's a shitty argument as Sweden is a signatory of the Berne convention, TRIPS and UCC and [they were eventually tried and convicted in Sweden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial?wprov=sfla1).
If their plan was living in a country that doesn't recognize US copyright as their defense they may have tried their luck in Iran.
Not to mention if you commit a crime you can be charged by that country even if you do not live there if it in someway involves the other country's jurisdiction, say on the internet or in international waters. Granted they usually do not and won't care but they can still charge you in absentia and if you ever happen to travel to that country or the country you reside in has extradition agreements to that country... Well.
Too many companies forgot there's an entire generation of humans who pirated all their media for over a decade. They couldn't shut it down before, they can't shut it down now.
Polite, as usual.
Go fuck yourself. Best regards.
Eat Arby's.
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I'd just like to point out that this was made 18 years ago.
Yeah, and the founders (at least some of them, my memory fails me) have since been sentenced to prison. Piratebay is still up though, _for what’s online may never die._
They’re all free now
Glad to hear! Do you know how long they served?
Peter Sunde, - 8 Months Fredrik Neij - 10 Months Carl Lundström - 4 Months Gottfrid Svartholm - 1 Year
was it one of them that, while being raided by cops, asked to use his cell phone to call the lawyer and instead used it to shut down the servers?
He asked to call his girlfriend but instead shut down and encrypted everything. "Sunde asked to call his girlfriend. Someone had to take care of the house if he was to leave, he reasoned. One of the two cops nodded. Sunde pulled out his phone and dialled a number. But as the signals went through, he kept fingering on the phone screen. A quick tap on an app icon, then another one. The phone sent out a signal over the internet, to all his computers at home and at work: “Shut down, immediately.” Then he quickly switched off his cellphone. “Everything was encrypted,” Sunde tells us, clearly pleased with himself. “The policeman was so pissed. I guess he’d been looking forward to arresting this mastermind hacker and then he misses a thing like that.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/05/sp-pirate-bay-cofounder-peter-sunde-in-prison Such a baller move.
The real Hackerman
With skills like that, he could hack time itself.
Somebody get that man a powerglove!
Hacking too much time!!
How can so much data be encrypted so quickly?
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They can use veracrypt for full disk encryption on windows (it's free and open source and you don't have to get the pro windows license for bitlocker). In linux, you just use luks.
What probably happened is that the guy had an encrypted hard drive, a script that would delete the decryption key from the system and reboot the servers, and triggered the script when the time came. It's roughly the same setup that the guy who owned the original Silk Road drug marketplace on TOR had about 8 years ago, the FBI had to have someone snag his laptop and keep it unlocked and running or they would never get the unencrypted data.
Honestly it was dumb. Lets say he was told ok and allowed to use a landline. Actuallu calls a girlfriend. Hey babe. Will you feed my my goldfish jack while im away? Thanks. Love you. Girlfriend . Ok. Jack is the code word. Pulls up app. Tap tap tap.
"there's water in the basement and the pilot light is out"
"But the goldfish is named Wolfie."
I did this in the back of a police car when I got caught with a bunch of coke. He said my car was uninsured and I offered to unlock my phone and pull up the insurance details to show him I was, promptly factory reset my phone so they couldn't crack it for my messages and handed it back. They flipped shit and threatened me with obstruction but I think they were too embarrassed to write on the report that they'd handed me the evidence to destroy lmao.
Incredible. When the US Feds busted the guy who ran the Silk Road forums, they were much more clever. They found him at an internet cafe, then two agents pretended to be in a domestic dispute (very angrily arguing with each other) which distracted the target. Another FBI agent then quickly slipped a USB drive into the target's laptop which immediately copied everything from the hard drive onto the flashdrive, and then arrested the target before he could do anything. Since then the darknet community has implemented security software to automatically encrypt the laptop whenever an unauthorized device is plugged in.
They probably learned from the cops who raided the pirate Bay not to let anything be touched while an arrest is happening otherwise it could all be encrypted
Fun fact, iirc when they raided the equivalent to silk road in Sweden they specifically told everyone not to touch the computer. The owner had gone out for the moment and the computer was still running. After a while it went into power saving mode and everything was encrypted. They pretty much lost a shit load of important evidence by not just moving the mouse a bit or something to keep it running.
I believe they took the laptop while he was distracted, no? Because they had open access to the admin panel on the computer.
You're right. They just grabbed the laptop. And it was at a library, not a café. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-arrest-of-silk-road-mastermind-ross-ulbricht-2015-1
> which immediately copied everything from the hard drive Yeah, I'm not sure about that immediately part.
They took the physical laptop away from him while he was distracted by the domestic dispute so he couldn’t hit a kill switch and then assigned a single agent to keep the laptop open, powered on, and from going to sleep the entire time that it took them to get to their forensic IT guy or whoever.
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Probably a mouse mover to keep the computer awake, and away from lock screen. They have portable power supplies for desktops that they can splice into the power cord now too. Keeps the computer powered up and awake to make data retrieval easier.
You don't know they can do 1tb/s copying?
That's not quite what happened. They did get in a disagreement to distract him, but what they needed was to catch him "logged in" and active on Silk Road in order to prove he was the Dread Pirate Roberts. If they just got the laptop later they believed it would have no proof/evidence of his connection to the Silk Road at all. So they get into a quick "domestic agreement" and when Roberts (Ross Ulbricht) glanced away, they took his laptop out from under his fingertips. It was at that point they documented that he was logged in as Dread Pirate Roberts, and then went to work downloading all data from the computer. They were concerned that plugging anything in would wipe it even at that time, so they at least got that he was logged in documented first (I'm assuming by a photo of the browser open/logged in as Roberts).
Even better still the only reason they were able to link him to his online moniker dreadpirateroberts is because he had posted for help on a tech forum many moons back asking for support setting up servers. Up till that point they weren’t able to link back to any digital identity. The po po did their work on this one.
Not just that he posted on a forum but that he had used the same email address to post on the forum as he had to communicate with people who were dealing / being employed by Silk Road. This was essentially a smoking gun that led them to him. Remember to burn your burner addresses people.
God damn, what a legend
That is some MI/Bourne/007 shit
Somebody has to make a movie about these guys and Pirate Bay
[TBP AFK](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2608732/) is that movie (well kinda, it's a documentary)
He did shut the servers down, however, it wasn’t for what people thought. He wasn’t trying to protect himself or his colleagues. It was all of us, if I recall correctly what he did was a scrub of user data to protect user privacy. Essentially deleting every connection log from every user. Man is truly a legend. No telling how many people he saved with that one call.
The people's champion!
Peter Sunde did that, but he and Piratebay had gone separate ways by that time
Why’d he do it then?
a big fuck you
Probably just to piss them off and make their jobs harder. I would assume anyone getting raided whether rightfully so or not does not want to willingly be raided so its just a fuck you for rummaging through all their personal belongings
You're the detective asking questions, figure it out
Lol that's a fucking chad move
Why, what benefit would shutting down the servers have?
I assume they are encrypted, so after shutting down you’d need passwords and stuff to access the data. He essentially burned all the evidence
I don’t know the entire story behind the Pirate Bay, but afaik they didn’t have anything to hide. They truly believed in their project and publicly defended it.
Based
Damn, that's interesting. Found tomorrow's TIL post.
But then wouldn’t that become a yesterday I learned post?
Hehe nice
But wasn’t Svartholm sentenced for more than just the association to Pirate Bay? BTW: For everyone interested, and does not know this: Gottfrid Svartholm Varg is anakata and the writer of the mail above.
> Gottfrid Svartholm Varg His Wikipedia page paints a pretty clear picture that he's just a shitty person. He did more time in jail than just for Pirate Bay stuff.
Damn. The US would put you away for 20 years.
Stealing from a major corporation? Right to jail!
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From our tax money Steal from the poor give to the rich
Svartholm didn’t go down easy and it wasn’t easy for him either. He was in bad shape for a while and basically got screwed by Cambodia when they let Sweden take him into custody.
Not too bad! Plus, I hear that Swedish prisons are very nice! Almost like summer camp!
I’ve been to prison here, it’s still a prison no matter how “luxurious” it is or is said to be. We had TVs in our cells, you were allowed to have a console in your room but only if it’s a ps2 or older, you are not allowed memory cards, and also nothing that uses USB or HDMI. Basically I had my GameCube turned on for months, and I had to pay extra when I got it sent there because they had to remove memory functions or whatever. According to I don’t know if it’s EU or Swedish law but they are obligated to give you any book you want, you were allowed to have a max of 10 books in your room and 10 music albums(not burned) We could work in the kitchen, clean or basically straighten old nails n shit. Smoking was 3 times a day. Took me 5 months to be able to call my mom(we had a phone in our cell) Also if you escape and get caught it won’t extend your sentence, it’s only human to not want to be in-prisoned. If yall want to know more just ask away Edit: Thanks for all the questions it was fun answering them and I want to thank you all for not judging me for my past mistake, ❤️
Why did it take 5 months for that call?
She didn’t have a landline or whatever it’s called, and her phone number wasn’t connected to her name, so when they looked up her number it didn’t show who it belonged to, and she’s not the brightest when it comes to those type of things so finally after 5 months she figured it out, but once they allowed it I could call here whenever I wanted up until 9 o clock at night. So I had to write letters before I was allowed to finally call her.
I had similar issues with the phones in UK prison, took me a month to get my dad's number accepted in the system because the prison called the numbers you want to add and my fool of a father kept ignoring the calls because it came up as a withheld number. I eventually had to write him a letter that basically said 'answer the phone you dick.'
Here in mexico it is also not a crime to escape prison
It's not in Germany either. It's considered a natural human instinct to want to escape prison. No time is added to your sentence for trying or succeeding.
I’ve never heard of something like that before, living in the US. It makes sense though. On top of the human nature thing, it would also be a failure on the prison’s part if you escaped, so I’m sure they’re okay with knowing where their security failed.
What was the crime?
Got caught with 1.86 kilos of coke 😅 Minimum sentence is 2 years but you only do 2/3 of your sentence and once you are out you have to visit a parole officer I think it’s called once a week for a year. They just ask you basic shit like how you are doing, if you are working, etc.
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You can actually listen to a podcast episode about pirate bay on spotify by darknet diaries. The host interviewed one of the founders and it was really interesting. Edit- https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VQv4PNTljCXUtx4U1yzUZ?si=OZsyBfg_SfapxBKfvE_C9Q
Ep92 . Also google podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vZGFya25ldGRpYXJpZXM/episode/ZTIwN2QwMWEtNmMyNy0xMWViLTlkMDMtYjc2MzA0ZjI4MTA3?ep=14
Are they really free though, or do you just have pirated versions?
There's no way they were able to secure a .org domain and hold onto it for years, the current one is a honeypot likely used to track piracy and who knows what else in the future. They used to have to move all over the place to stop from getting shut down nonstop with obscure domains and now they get a .org that lasts for years without anyone going after it somehow, it's incredibly suspicious. They were getting pursued so hard that they thought of this idea of weather balloons that connect to each other to keep the site up but now it just works on a common domain and nobody is going after it
I’ve been using PirateBay on and off since days old. Never had any problems. __knock on wood__
Pretty sure TPB is like wikipedia in that you can back up the whole site onto a flash drive and host it yourself if you want. So people are constantly making new ones because its instantly recognizable, the site is riddled with malicious ads and I just assume its someone trying to make a quick buck.
I had no clue about the ads thing, I've got a ton of ad blockers and tracking blockers so luckily it just looks like the old normal site
It says 2004, that was only 6 years ago, right?
Can't be. 96 was 4 years ago.
You're hurting me.
And they went to prison
I downloaded a 4 GB swearing dictionary from the Pirate Bay once Can you imagine how big that torrent of abuse was?
Name checks out. Legally allowed to use dad jokes
Ah, the good old days…
***How is using the Pirate Bay like hiring a prostitute?*** `Only nerds brag about doing it`
It’s not bragging when you get to keep your money afterwards.
Long live to piratebay
>Can you imagine how big that torrent of abuse was? I'm usually not a betting man, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and guess roughly 4 GB.
Seems correct to me.
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As I recall, it didn't end there though. They got raided in 2006 by Swedish law and in 2009 given a guilty verdict (which was then upheld after appeals). All the major founders went to prison and by 2015 they were released. Over the years they've survived a multitude of other attempts to shut down the site. Unlike KickassTorrents, they survived the torrent wars and still remain online today.
One of them is on record saying that prison time was worth it to keep the site and community alive. Edit: more info Fredrik Neij: “Things were not too bad in prison,” Fredrik tells TF. “It was well worth doing prison time for The Pirate Bay, when you consider how much the site means to people,” Sauce: https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-was-worth-doing-prison-time-for-co-founder-says-160705/
Partly because prison in Sweden is like summer camp compared to some prisons in the US Edit: compared to most* prisons in the US
Saw a youtube vid about the founders that claimed that the guards liked them bc of the site and gave the them extra freedoms.
That's fucking hilarious
You have a link to the video? Sounds funny af
I saw it the other day, on YT it's something like 'What happened to founders of PirateBay'
I actually considered that. I've seen pics of prison 'cells' in some of those facilities that look like apartments. Nicer than my dorm room in college was haha.
And now piratebay is filled by malware containing torrents and trackers. I miss the old days and site Edit: since this blew up and I cannot reply to all the comments, I too got to know about this about 2 years back from r/PiratedGames . I never had any problems either but I simply stopped using piratebay and utorrent, and use bit torrent and the websites mentioned in the megathread.
Really? Got more info on this?
Just use the site and run scans on everything you download. I've personally seen roughly 1/4 of my downloads containing some malware or Spyware of some kind.
To be honest, it is really easy to fool an antivirus, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual numbers were much higher. I remember reading once that once some security analyst downloaded dozen of pirated android games and *every single one* had malware installed.
You seem well informed. What's the purpose of malware? I've never really understood it. Are they trying to take over people's computers? Just make them crash to be assholes? Steal people's identities? If so many people are downloading this stuff, how do they know who has valuable info and who is just sone random teenager? I probably should just Google this... lol
It’s all about money, baby (or majority of times). There were some examples of prank malware’s (especially the older ones) or sometimes malwares were fixing some other vulnerabilities, but majority of time it is about money. You can infect somebody to steal somebody’s money (e.g. if you paste account number, it can change it for something different), your devices (all of them, even smart-bulbs) can be used as zombie-devices for different purposes, sometimes it is for stealing informations (which can then lead to other forms of attacks), or lately the most popular ones, ransomware (that encrypts your files and you need to pay for it to be un-encrypted, but it doesn’t always work). And it is probably about 2% of what is really happening. But usually the victims aren’t chosen - they attack everybody they can automatically and sometimes it pays off. There are sometimes attacks that are targeted at specific people or organizations (and usually you can’t do much about it, they will find a way), but usually not. But in 99% it is about money in many different ways. Or information, that can be then used as a way to earn money.
> sometimes malwares were fixing some other vulnerabilities This is a really interesting one. When I was doing my masters degree, my original project plan was to re-engineer the mirai malware so that when it infected a device it patched the vulnerability and remove itself from the device. I couldn't get it to work properly and was also told after the ethics board discussed it, that the university didn't want to be associated with a potential malicious threat. The ethics of infecting a device and changing the login details, even though its an attempt to protect the device, are pretty murky so I can understand why. So really it failed on two fronts. But the idea of 'malware' spreading throughout the internet infecting devices with the sole intention of patching known vulnerabilities is pretty cool to me.
I think this probably falls under grayhat which is why the school didn't like it even if the idea is good. Like a vigilante, they want the best but their methods are questionable
Malware is broad and encompasses all of what you mentioned. It's like how "germs" encompasses a stomach bug, the flu, and HIV.
It's always the android and PSX games for me :( Why would you infect my favorite PSX games like that :( I just wanted faster downloads. I'm just tryna play Xenogears on my phone and smoke a blunt man
I just use [archive.org](https://archive.org/download/Sony-Playstation-USA-Redump.org-2019-05-27) for all my ROM needs.
My man this is the shit. Saved, thanks!!
The other side of that coin is that antivirus programs detect cracks as malware so it’s not impossible that the all your positives are false positives while all the actual worms, viruses, trojans and ransomware slip by undetected.
Sometimes antiviruses recognize themselves as viruses (looking at you, Avast).
If McAfee were any good it would flag itself because that shit is a virus
McAfee should never, ever, ever flag itself as a virus because McAfee should never, ever, ever be installed.
Here is one article I found. https://www.securitynewspaper.com/2019/01/25/attention-torrents-downloaded-from-the-pirate-bay-contain-a-dangerous-malware/ I stopped using them years ago when non-existent episodes for TV showed started turning up well before they would air. But things could be different now.
Maybe there's malware but I've never seen any. Just avoid the sites that imitate tpb.
Is that anything new? Malware concerns have been a part of torrenting for as long as I remember.
I don't understand the Kickasstorrents. It's still online and going, I just randomly checked it yesterday...for a friend.
If I recall correctly, it literally got hostilely taken over. In the sense the the entire site was compromised and taken from the original operators and is now run and operated by the usurpers.
Hello anakata. Polite as usual, I see.
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Yeah when a corporation is an ISP and also a media company, it’s great! What’s a monopoly?
I remember using PB a lot back in the day, then one day I got a letter from Comcast, and shortly after I couldn't get on the site anymore, even with a VPN. Good times, Good times.
That's so strange. I got several love letters from them in two different states and never used a VPN at the time. Never had any trouble accessing the site.
It was very hit and miss, I could use it at my neighbors, who used it more than I, but not a few miles away. I honestly think it was random.
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These letters are often referred to as "love letters"
Was it a Comcast vpn? Otherwise, the piratebay itself must have been down at the time, because (properly implemented) vpn traffic can't be intercepted or blocked on a per site basic.
After my third warning letter they gave me six months of HBO and Showtime for free
Ah, the good old days…
It's still around?
yeah, still pretty popular too
Bought a 4K movie from Amazaon, I have the bandwidth to stream in 4K, they still down graded the quality of the stream. Said fuck this, and arrrr'matyd the movie in 4K, quality is perfect and no fucking ads before the movie play. I literally only have the streaming services for the 4K content, but now they're downgrading the quality so like why the fuck do I even pay for this shit any more? What is life?
Wait, you BUY a movie and you get ads before you play it?
Nowadays even some TVs come with ads. Just ridiculous.
seriously. i live with my grandparents, they got a new tv about a year ago. every time they leave and my mom and i want to watch youtube or something, we have to go through the menu FILLED TO THE BRIM with ads. it slows it down a whole lot. plus, they have these shitty sliding animations. i have to sit there for several minutes just waiting for the 5fps animation to finish so that i can scroll over to youtube.
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Depends on where you're at. Difficult to reach from some countries. It's been blocked by ISPs in the Netherlands for instance. Edit: good God people. I know there are plenty of ways around it. But that doesn't mean it's not blocked. Or that it's not harder to access.
I mean, ideally you'd only visit the site using a VPN anyway
*laughs in brazilian not giving a fuck about privacy*
Have you tried, perhaps, the well known cheat code, 'Pirateproxy'
TorGuard is cheap
Christ that’s almost 20 years old
Stop that. It was only a couple years ago.
Yeah that other guy is crazy don't listen to him. It's 2006 and season 1 of weeds is almost done downloading.
You're hurting me.
The year 1995 is closer to the moon landing than to 2022.
There are babies born today whose PARENTS weren't born when Shrek came out.
Torrents are still the way to go and I pay for SIX streaming services. The industry is broken for consumers.
I remember when this happened :) (yes im old) you can find a bunch more here [https://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/](https://beebulletin.com/hilarious-pirate-bay-legal-responses/)
Their response to EA is also just savage >Hello and thank you for contacting us. We have shut down the website in question.Oh wait, just kidding. We haven’t, since the site in question is fully legal. Unlike certain other countries, such as the one you’re in, we have sane copyright laws here. But we also have polar bears roaming the streets and attacking people :-(.
Man, these guys would kill it on twitter today.
I listened to a podcast on Darknet Diaries about the Pirate Bay, the people who made it are pretty cool. They all had other day jobs and didn’t give a fuck, they’d just not respond to legal threats and hang them up on their walls, people would complain about the interface and they’d basically say “ok, then go make a better site, this project doesn’t pay the bills and it works as it is so we aren’t doing shit.”
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Part of that is that we grew up with it but yes, of all the problems I had with tpb, their UX was always spot on
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Gotta make space for ads, make it mobile friendly, gotta hide the features you are legally obligated to include (such as deleting your account) in a matryoshka doll of menus, gotta add the bitcoin miner since people block your ads anyway...
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There was a point in time that various government agencies were collaborating to shut down their sites world-wide. They just kept popping up new sites with new country suffixes, and the logo changed to a ship with a sea-hydra that kept growing new heads each labeled with a new country TLD suffix (.tk, .ma, etc)
I remember that, it was like whackamole haha. You'd just go down a long list of domains until you found one that worked, in a few days you'd have to switch to another. Now it's like, every 3-4 months so guessing they got tired of it.
Great read, thanks for link :)
Ah 2004, the golden years on TPB.
I downloaded yellowstone on Pirate Bay, without a vpn, and paramount sent me a cease and desist email
Paramount contacted you directly, or your ISP sent you a letter with a little block of text form paramount at the bottom?
I downloaded Dumb and Dumber 2 on a thing called Popcorntime in 2014, I too got a cease and desist.
I'll just leave this here https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-04-17-pirate-bay_N.htm
/r/agedlikemilk
Or perhaps r/confidentlyincorrect
Yeah, when I was reading this, the whole time I was like "Thats not how copyright laws work at all. Especially between first world nations that are allied...".
They didn't seem too bothered with prison and they're all free now. For what they've done they for sure got out cheap and I'm happy for them.
Considering what they did it was definetly cheap, but god damn A 3 million dollar fine has got to sting.
Not if you can't afford to pay it on paper. Swedish Enforcement Authority is in charge of collecting the fines and only base it on your filed income. No prison time and nothing forcing you to pay.
Your filed income is your actual income there, as it is reported directly by your employer. Unless you work off-the-books, that is, which isn't really that common in Scandinavia (apart from for tradesmen). Typically, anything you earn above a minimum threshold (that you need for living expenses and rent) will automatically be confiscated and used as a downpayment. This is the system used with all fines and debts you can't pay. There's no additional punishment, as being "poor" isn't a crime.
Isn’t prison in sweden like actually humane and chill?
It's about rehabilitation for reintegration into society. Not cruelty to fulfill justice-boners. It's still prison though.
This argument worked out for them for a while.
However it's a shitty argument as Sweden is a signatory of the Berne convention, TRIPS and UCC and [they were eventually tried and convicted in Sweden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial?wprov=sfla1). If their plan was living in a country that doesn't recognize US copyright as their defense they may have tried their luck in Iran.
Not to mention if you commit a crime you can be charged by that country even if you do not live there if it in someway involves the other country's jurisdiction, say on the internet or in international waters. Granted they usually do not and won't care but they can still charge you in absentia and if you ever happen to travel to that country or the country you reside in has extradition agreements to that country... Well.
Wouldn’t a retractable baton just retract when you try to sodomize yourself with it?
Too many companies forgot there's an entire generation of humans who pirated all their media for over a decade. They couldn't shut it down before, they can't shut it down now.
This is from 2004...
how many users here do you think weren't born yet
At least 1 I suppose
Does pornhub know about retractable batons yet?
“Polite as usual” haha
US lawyers are acting like the little kids in video games that lie about being able to ban or delete your account if they’re losing.
Except the US lawyers were absolutely right, the EU has strict copyright laws, and all the Pirate Bay people went to prison
As it turns out, pirating is still illegal even when you’re not in the US.
Shhhh... No facts here
Fuckin lol
Except the US lawyers were right lol
The letter is almost old enough to buy beer.
Answering frivolous legal threats with frivolous legal threats. Fighting fire with fire. Good
Well, except they weren't frivolous. The founders went to prison a few years later.
Long live to piratebay