The most famous torrent site in the world, The Pirate Bay, has ditched its old and mostly unreadable Onion domain for something more recognizable and potentially more permanent. The switch was reported to TorrentFreak after Pirate Bay proxy sites noticed extended downtime on the old domain.
The Pirate Bay has been operating one of its original domains – thepiratebay.org – for well over 15 years. During that same period, it has also burned through countless others due to anti-piracy action all around the globe.
The Pirate Bay is also one of the most blocked platforms on the planet for the same reason, something that has led to the creation of hundreds of proxy sites, set up to facilitate access to the index, regardless of which official domain is in use.
Last evening the operator of a site that indexes links to some of these proxies told TorrentFreak that their owners had noticed that The Pirate Bay’s Onion site had been down for several hours, which is unusual. After further investigation, it was discovered that the site had switched from the extremely messy uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion to piratebayztemzmv.onion.
Accessible via the Tor browser, for example, Onion domains grant access to the so-called ‘dark web’, which is a fancy way of describing sites and services that aren’t visible using a normal search engine or accessible by regular means. In the case of TPB, being hidden inside the Tor network also provides extra security for the raid and lawsuit-prone index.
While there has been no official announcement from TPB’s operators about the Onion domain switch, the new address can now be seen when hovering over the ‘Tor’ link on the site. Exactly why the site’s operators made the change isn’t entirely clear, however.
The new Onion domain is certainly easier to read than the old one, but still not easy to remember. That being said, it is an improvement over its predecessor and now is probably a very good time to get everyone familiar with it.
As reported here recently, the Internet Society is in the process of selling the Public Interest Registry which currently controls The Pirate Bay’s .org domain. As a result, there are concerns that the new owners may throw the infamous domain overboard on copyright grounds.
If that does indeed happen, the Onion domain will certainly come in handy, as will the hundreds of pre-existing proxy sites currently doing a dance around dozens of blockades, all around the world.