Eureka PC - An Interview With A Pirate Yarrr

A special treat for our readers today. I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter from The Pirate Bay. I hope you enjoy the questions and answers as much as I did.

Sheri: When did The Pirate Bay launch?

Peter: Late 2004 I think

Sheri: What where the initial goals of the project?

Peter: To promote the new technology of bittorrent to the world and to make sure people had a place to actually share their files!

Sheri: How, if at all, have they changed since then?

Peter: First, we focused on the Scandinavian people - actually, the site was in Swedish. When other trackers started to get legal problems (shut down etc) we had a lot of foreign users. We grew and grew and eventually decided to recode the whole site. When that was done we added language functionality - we want the whole world to be able to share stuff, not only those who might be able to talk English (... or Swedish). Today we boast about 30 languages.

Sheri: Do you feel you have achieved those goals?

Peter: Yes, but we still have work to do. We can't get stopped by the dark forces on the other side.

Sheri: Representing the best of torrent sites online, what leading edge technologies do you use to keep everything running smoothly, and dare I say, ahead of the pack?

Peter: Thanks for the kind words! Most of the software we use is our own. We've done our own torrent tracker, our own web-server (right now though we're trying out Lighttpd, because it's really good). We do a lot of performance tuning all day long, I think we actually have less hardware then most other sites of our size to be honest, and we run trackers as well, which most of the other sites doesn't do.

Sheri: Given the raid some time ago and ongoing size issues a site like the Pirate Bay faces on a daily basis; What kind of resilience or backup methods do you employ (database clusters, load balancing etc.)

Peter: We've distributed our servers all over the world. They are at different ISP's and even we don't know where they put them. Most of the ISPs don't know what they are hosting as well. But, I don't want to go in detail on how we manage this or what software we use ;)

Sheri: Could you give us an idea of the 'social life' of a popular torrent. I.e. its growth to peak time, its user base at peak and its time to decline.

Peter: This depends a lot. There are some torrents that are popular a week or two or even three - especially TV-shows. Other stuff like movies or games can be popular up to a year. I've seen some torrents that are like 15 seasons of a TV-series that has been popular for about 3 years (!) in the top list on the site.

Sheri: What, if any, policing is there to ensure that torrents that have say child pornography or any other questionable content don't end up on the site?

Peter: We don't do censorship. People really get upset by this, but I would like to explain why. Consider us as the postal office - if you put a letter containing some illegal (or immoral) content in the letter, they will not be responsible for what you put inside. We figure we have the same role - the one to make package X move from place A to B, basically. We can't be held liable for what people share and we are not the ones to say what is right or wrong. If we would start censoring content the whole idea of a free tracker with free cultural exchange would be lost! And if someone is stupid enough to put child porn on an open system like The Pirate Bay, the police will probably just be really happy as they would get tipped of by the users in seconds, and then they would catch the user by just checking his IP. The scary part about child porn is that - yes, it's a problem that children get abused, it's really bad - but the government and the music/movie industry are abusing the child porn for their own sake. They help out in getting people all excited about stuff as the child porn filter (which in my world is a really stupid move since it doesn't do anything besides move the paedophiles to darknets instead, and then it's harder to catch). Then when the child porn filter is installed - the major companies go and say "hey, we need a filter for copyright breaches as well... and it's already in place for child porn, so just add this URL to the filter..."

Sheri: How do you answer the always present voices that claim you are stealing, hurting, taking something away etc? From the people who make the music or movies on your site?

Peter: People who make the music or movies that are copyrighted on our site are usually (99.9%) always glad to see it there. It's their stupid record labels and movie studio owners that see it as a problem! And we tell them basically to fuck off.

Sheri: How did your site get hacked? (eg. MySQL injection in comments on blog or other)

Peter: It was an SQL injection in the blog, a stupid mistake of me. We usually don't have that sort of programming faults, but when there's too many people and too much stuff to do, one can tend to get stupid. Anyhow, we've had thought about this stuff before, so we basically encrypted the e-mails and other sensitive data in the database in case this happened. One layer of security is not always enough...

Sheri: Do you know who did it, and is the information they stole safe?

Peter: Yes, we know, and we've talked to them. The information that got out is just the usernames, which is kinda useless. So the information is safe.

Sheri: Have you implemented any new security measures to ensure it does not happen again?

Peter: We've fixed the hole, but it's hard to say that there are NO bugs on the site. There probably is some bugs left, but we're doing all we can to find them all the time. Also, we're using for instance prepared statements, encryption in the database and so on, for this not to happen.

Sheri: What are your plans for the future of The Pirate Bay?

Peter: Continue to grow, be a pain in the butt for the industry and to evolve into other exciting projects that we see as a good extension to our current setup. For instance, we're doing a new video streaming site; I do a new music site called playble.com and so on. Most of the stuff we do is based on changing the copyright-based industry to something based on value instead.

Sheri: Do you have any kind of estimate of the number of legal threats you've received? I noticed the Legal Threats portion of the site hasn't been updated in a long time.

Peter: The boring part is that since the raid last year people tend to understand that they are stupid to send us legal threats. We get some, sometimes, but they are so boring and we just answer a small email back to them and we never hear from them again.
We get a lot of automated stuff, but we just ignore those. It's a couple of normal ones a week, but they are really like... boring. :) If there would be something funny we'd put some up.

Sheri: Do you have any worries at all about the threats you have received?

Peter: Nah. We're legit.

Sheri: Any chance of some inside information on the video streaming site you have been talking about? If not at least all the information you can give us in as much detail as possible. Take this time to promote your new project anyway you see fit, we will publish it all.

Peter: Well, the basic idea is that, youtube and the other sites kinda suck today. They are too influenced by the major labels, they offer too low resolution and they are morally censoring stuff from the site to not make enemies. That's just stupid. We'll have a technologically advanced platform, based on anycasting and servers across the globe when we reach the need for it, we'll do a good looking site with nice features and we're there for freedom of speech. We can't say exactly how it's gonna look or behave, since we're working out details. It's exciting for us, but of course, we're not gonna revolutionize the world or something... I think. :-)

Sheri: Thank you again for taking the time to answer our questions.

I hope this interview gives our readers a little insight into what goes into a site like Pirate Bay. It'll be interesting to see what comes of the planned video streaming solution.

Update: The upcoming video site http://thevideobay.org will be uncensored by the Pirates and will be user generated. The users will be the censors. The Pirate Bay is expecting some copyright problems, but believe they have ways around that. It will be free of course. Δ

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