Piratebay down?

At this point it's nothing more than a rumour, but word on the streets is that The Piratebay has been raided by police again. I can ping their IP and their tracker seems to be working fine, but such rumours are inevitable whenever the site goes down. Who knows?

I'm passing it on anyway because I'm irresponsible that way.

1st update: Given that my blog views have more than doubled since I posted the above (not a difficult feat, mind you), and everyone visiting is searching on some variation of the words piratebay down, I'd say the problem is a widespread one.



Dammit! Just let me finish this Battlestar Galactica torrent!

Seriously, though, I'm still pinging through successfully.

--- thepiratebay.org ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 176.535/202.730/270.733/34.598 ms

--- tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 21131ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 160.589/221.843/339.991/75.557 ms

If the servers had been seized or shut down, they wouldn't ping back. I'm sure the site'll be back up soon. Don't panic.

2nd update: I popped into the IRC channel.

[04:08:21] * Topic for #thepiratebay.org is: thepiratebay.org is down atm. http://bayimg.com back online 
[04:08:21] * Topic for #thepiratebay.org set by [NoFate]!Nofate@bnc.gamehotel.dk at Wed Dec  5 03:19:27 2007

Deluge BitTorrent Client

I loved BitComet as a bittorrent client, but that was on Windows. When I switched to Linux I missed it something fierce. Kirby suggested running μTorrent under Wine, and that did well enough as far as transferring files went, but the interface wasn't emulated properly so it was ugly to look at. Yeah, I figured that was important enough to keep looking. I'm shallow.

Everyone likes Azureus, but at the time I only had a low-end computer, which would choke on it. I eventually settled on KTorrent, using it for the past year or so. But it always stuck in my craw that I was forced to use a KDE app in Gnome just to get the features I wanted.

When I accidentally blew away my Ubuntu install last week, it was as good a time as any to search out new options. That's when I wandered back to the Ubuntu forums after a long absence and spotted a 3rd party forum for Deluge, a GTK based bittorrent client written by a couple of Ubuntu geeks. It's got all the features I like in KTorrent, and none of the features I don't (an aqua-wannabe interface, mostly, but I already said I was shallow). It runs on Linux, of course, and it's been ported to OS X. Someone's working on a Windows port, too, which is good because the only way to affordably run software in Windows is to steal it, so they need bittorrent clients.

If you're running Edgy or better, it's in the repos. A more recent .deb is available at deluge-torrent.org. It works, I'm happy, and that's all that matters.