When The Pirate Bay first came online during the summer of 2003, its main point of access was thepiratebay.org.
Since then the site has burnt through more than a dozen domains, trying to evade seizures or other legal threats.
The torrent site eventually returned to the .org domain which remains the official home today. While there are hundreds of Pirate Bay proxies online, none of these are operated by the TPB-team.
Pirate Bay’s .Onion
The only official backup address for The Pirate Bay is its .onion domain. This is accessible over the Tor network, which is often referred to as the ‘dark web’. The Pirate Bay has had an onion domain for years but in recent weeks, many visitors have started to receive warnings.
The Pirate Bay has been using an old v2 .onion domain which is less secure. The latest version of the Tor browser started warning visitors to these domains last month and later this year they will stop resolving in the stable release of the official Tor client.
The switchover to the more secure v3 .onion domains has been in the works since 2015. The Pirate Bay is relatively late to the party, but it eventually made the change a few days ago.
“With the tor project V2 Onion Services Deprecation many visitors are getting warnings visiting the Pirate Bay v2 onion address,” TPB admin Moe notes, encouraging visitors to update their bookmarks for the new v3 address.
Bookmark Required
A bookmark will come in handy indeed, as v3 onion addresses are expanded to 56 characters which makes them pretty hard to memorize. The first nine letters of TPB’s new onion domain are not really a challenge, but what follows is pretty random.
piratebayo3klnzokct3wt5yyxb2vpebbuyjl7m623iaxmqhsd52coid.onion
Accessibility is Key
Some people may find it odd that The Pirate Bay didn’t support the more secure v3 earlier. However, there wasn’t much urgency for the torrent site, which doesn’t really use the .onion domain for its cryptographic advantages.
The main advantage for The Pirate Bay is that a .onion domain can’t be seized or blocked by outsiders unless the site’s infrastructure is compromised. This makes it possible to easily circumvent site blocking measures.
There is not really much of a privacy advantage for people who use Pirate Bay’s .onion domain to download torrents. While ISPs may not be able to see what pages they visit, their residential IP address is still publicly broadcasted when files are downloading through a torrent client.
