LONDON: While everyone knows it’s often used for shady purposes, there’s nothing inherently illegal about the act of torrenting itself. So when BitTorrent juggernaut The Pirate Bay was fully taken down by Swedish police last December after over a decade of occasionally interrupted service, you didn’t necessarily know who to root for. But it looks like the battle is far from over as an intrepid Redditor has finally cracked the mysterious code hinting at The Pirate Bay’s return, Terminator-style.
The code first appeared when the site itself returned two weeks after the raid. Instead of the plethora of torrents users were used to, all they found was a waving pirate flag and an “aes.png” image file containing an encrypted message. More hints appeared and users became would-be detectives obsessed with solving the case, perhaps because the sudden lack of terabytes of free media left them with a lot more free time.
Eventually, super sleuth Redditor “dakfy2000” discovered that the page’s source code contained strings of irrelevant HTML tags and made the connection between the “aes.png” image file clue and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) technology. With this new knowledge, he decrypted half of the message with password hashing algorithms, took a much needed sleep break, and returned fresh to finish the job. “I love a challenge and that hit the spot,” he said in an interview with TorrentFreak. And what was the result of all his hard work? A link to “The Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘I’ll Be Back’ Supercut” video on YouTube. Watch.
As it turns out, not all fans were satisfied that the solution was merely a funny little teaser for future news. Some had speculated that the answer might involve a secret backup of Pirate Bay files hidden beneath the deep web, or maybe the site’s new strategy to spread and store files locally using its PirateBrowser P2P network making it much harder for outside forces to crack down on copyright infringement.
However, we may now know exactly when more news is on the way. After the mystery was solved, The Pirate Bay homepage added a timer counting down to February 1, so whatever the next step for the site is, we should hear about it next month. The Pirate Bay has bounced back from takedowns in the past, and it looks like this time will be no different. If they can make a riddle that stumped its diehard users for this long, they can probably stay a few steps ahead of law enforcement.
