Swedish police have raided a data centre near Stockholm, Sweden, hosting notorious The Pirate Bay magnet and torrent site used for sharing files legally and illegally.
And, it's true: thepiratebay.se is down along with associated web sites like suprbay.org, bayimg.com and pastebay.net - TorrentFreak was as usual first to spot that the torrent site had gone offline.
TorrentFreak's report of the police raid is confirmed by Sveriges Radio, the national radio network in Sweden which spoke to one of the country's special file sharing prosecutors (no really), Fredrik Ingblad, who said that several servers and other computers were seized from the data centre.
Inglad was not able to say exactly what type of crime The Pirate Bay was suspected of and which led to the police raid, nor would he say if anyone had been arrested.
This is the second time The Pirate Bay's been raided by the police - first time was in 2006, and that resulted in charges being laid against the file-sharing site's founders and operators Fredrik Neij, Carl Lundström, Per Swartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, all of whom were sentenced to prison and hefty fines for contributory copyright infringement.
Is this the new raid the last final curtain for The Pirate Bay, which is now run by unknown people?
Read more:
• Pirate Bay co-founder arrested at Thai-Lao border
• The Pirate Bay sails to a new domain
I spoke to Peter "brokep" Sunde about the raid, and to my surprise, he said he hopes this is the end for TPB.
"I don't know if it's over for TPB. I certainly hope it is. I don't think they worked hard on it, since TPB has always rather been arrogant than clever," Sunde said.
There were safeguards put into place to prevent a police raid from taking out the site. The Pirate Bay ran on some twenty virtual servers in different countries, the idea being that if one or more computers were seized and/or turned off, it was easy to switch over to others outside the reach of the law.
That doesn't seem to have worked for TPB however. It remains to be seen if the anonymous operators behind the file sharing site are able to reanimate TPB, although Sunde thinks the police got lucky and managed to find a server or other device that was necessary for the operation of the site.
Sunde noted that while people took to the streets to protest against the first police raid eight years ago, this time around, hardly one cared.
"I'm one of them," Sunde said.
"For multiple reasons, I'm not a fan of what the TPB has become," he added.
Lamenting that the TPB had become "an institution that people just expected to be there", Sunde said nobody was willing to take the technology of the site further.
"The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design," Sunde said.
What the new operators focused on were filling up the site with increasing number of ugly ads, which Sunde called distasteful.
We'll see what happens over the next few days, whether or not TPB decides to lie low or have another go at it.
If it dies, while it's surprising TPB lasted as long as it did, the tenacity of rights holders wanting it closed is quite amazing too.
They have targeted TPB and other file sharing sites with legal sanctions, to the point that laws have been rewritten in many countries (yes, NZ) and set up a worldwide surveillance machine on the internet that tries to figure who's torrenting what copyrighted material.
That's the negative effect, would we have had all the legitimate internet music and video services we do today without The Pirate Bay and file sharers? You might disagree with me on that, but I don't think we would have.
Chromecast comes to NZ
Google's little media streamer is finally here - officially, that is: I know lots of people who've imported Chromecast sticks from the US and seem happy them.
The device will cost $61 RRP, output 1080p high-definition and has 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi built in.
New Zealand partners for Chromecast include Quickflix and Pandora as well as the usual Google services like YouTube, Play Music and Play Movies. If you're a developer, Google has a software development kit for Chromecast that lets you integrate apps and websites with the service to make content available for downloads.