For the experienced pirates out there, thepirate-bay.org needs no introduction. But for those who don’t know- The Pirate Bay is a torrenting site established in 2003 by a Swedish anti-copyright foundation Piratbyran.
The site acts as search engine for the world famous p2p network torrent/bit-torrent.
Torrent is a world-famous Peer-2-Peer network. What it does is allows sharing of files, but these files are not stored in a typical server to be accessed at the request of a user, instead torrent is a communication protocol that allows peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing, what it means is it allows you access files stored in devices across the world given that they use torrent as well.
Torrent is extremely powerful since it does its transfers in small quanta – this allows for the downloads to be both pausable\resumable as well as make data extremely redundant, and facilitates sharing between users across the entire world, the users which upload this data are usually known as seeds. Due to the redundancy of data, it does not matter if a seed goes down, as you will automatically be connected to many others. Since a whole lot of people are involved in this, it is basically impossible to stop this kind of file sharing, therefore it is used for the illegal sharing of copyrighted material primarily.
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But, how does your computer or torrent software know where to find these uploaders. That is where websites like the Pirate bay enter the picture. True to its name, Pirate Bay is one of the go-to places for internet pirates looking to illegally download copyrighted content, the site’s server contains not the data itself but information regarding the seeds and fellow peers of a required file, this file can then be downloaded using a torrent download manager, which pieces together the fragmented data to basically re-assemble the file on another device. The uploaders of the file do not usually get any benefit from uploading the file.
Since most of the content on the site is copyrighted content, the site has experienced a lot of legal backlash by the world in the past, so much so that at one point the heads of the site even had to spend jailtime and pay a hefty fine. These legal issues make monetization a little difficult for the website, as most of the website is free to use its principle source of revenue was advertisements – as most advertisers don’t want to advertise on a site that may not even be legally accessible in their country. Yes, you read that correct, it comes as no surprise that many countries have pirate bay banned from legal access, including pirate bay India. While the sites still remain accessible by the usage of proxies, it blemishes the overall market reputation of the website. Given this, the website is now using a different tactic to make money viz. cryptocurrency mining.
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What is that? Cryptocurrency mining is a method to earn cryptocurrency by using your processing power to maintain the currency’s functions on the internet, though it is not always necessary to use your own processing power to do this.
What pirate bay does is it requests the computer for a huge amount of processing power when the site is accessed, after being allotted that, the site allocates a major amount of it to mine bitcoin. So don’t be shocked now the next time you see your memory usage spike when you visit the pirate bay.
Another aspect of torrent sites, especially nowadays – is the presence of a lot of malwares that come hidden in the seeming harmless downloads, these malwares may range from data thieving spywares to the currency mining softwares as mentioned above.
Irrespective of the legal and security-related aspects, the pirate bay is the biggest torrent site on the internet, and despite the fact that many companies and organizations in the world want it dead (As claimed by the Pirate Bay Itself), it continues to persist. The Pirate Bay also accepts donations, so people who want to keep the torrent scene alive can contribute.
