Skip to main content

Blockades shmockades: Pirate Bay traffic reportedly doubles since 2011

lsu to begin punishing fining students who pirate stuff piracy bay the
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Despite many efforts by anti-piracy campaigners to take down and/or marginalize the Pirate Bay, the site’s Web traffic has increased by 100 percent in the last three years alone, TorrentFreak reports.

Even though the Pirate Bay has come under heavy fire in the form of blocks in multiple countries, including the U.K., Denmark, and the Netherlands, both the site’s number of unique visitors and page views have been rising steadily since 2011, and there’s no reason to believe that this will change anytime soon. Though the Pirate Bay declined to share exact figures, but it is estimated that their monthly page view numbers are in the “hundreds of millions” range.

Recommended Videos

So how can the Pirate Bay’s popularity be increasing if ISPs and nations are blocking access to it? Simple: with the use of proxies. The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that roughly 9 percent of the site’s visitors do so with the use of proxy server or service.

While organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have been some of the hardest firms pushing for blocks of Pirate Bay and other sites like it, much of the traffic that the site gets originates from here.

A lot more will have to be done to sink the Pirate Bay’s ship, and even then, the site, its users, or both will probably just take yet another detour, and keep sailing right along.

Topics
Konrad Krawczyk
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…
Nvidia celebrates Trump, slams Biden for putting AI in jeopardy
The Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU.

In response to new export restrictions placed on AI GPUs, Nvidia posted a scathing blog criticizing the outgoing Biden-Harris administration. The administration's Interim Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion largely targets China with restrictions on AI GPUs, according to Newsweek.

Nvidia disagrees. "While cloaked in the guise of an 'anti-China' measure, these rules would do nothing to enhance U.S. security. The new rules would control technology worldwide, including technology that is already widely available in mainstream gaming PCs and consumer hardware. Rather than mitigate any threat, the new Biden rules would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the U.S. ahead," wrote Nvidia's vice president of government of affairs Ned Finkle.

Read more
This new DirectX feature could completely change how PC games work
A scene from Fortnite running in Unreal Engine 5.

Microsoft has announced that neural rendering capabilities are coming to DirectX soon. Cooperative vector support, as it's called, will lead to "cross-platform enablement of neural rendering techniques," according to Microsoft, and it will usher in "a new paradigm in 3D graphics programming."

It sounds buzzy, but that's not without reason. This past week, Nvidia announced its new range of RTX 50-series graphics cards, and along with them, it revealed a slate of neural rendering features. Neural shaders, as Nvidia calls them, allow developers to execute small neural networks from shader code, running them on the dedicated AI hardware available on Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm GPUs. Microsoft is saying that it will enable these features on all GPUs, not just those sold by Nvidia, through the DirectX API.

Read more
This gaming PC with an RTX 4060 is on sale for $1,000 today
The iBuyPower Trace 7 on a white background.

Best Buy often has some great gaming PC deals, with one highlight available today: Right now, you can buy the iBuyPower Trace 7 gaming PC for $1,000 instead of $1,300. The PC includes the RTX 4060 GPU, so it’s ideal for mid-range gaming. It even comes with a keyboard and mouse, so you only need to make sure you have a screen to add to it. If you’re looking to upgrade your gaming PC for less, here’s what it has to offer.

Why you should buy the iBuyPower Trace 7
You won’t see anything from iBuyPower in our look at the best gaming PCs, but don’t let that discourage you. This is still a good option for those on a budget. This particular model has great hardware for the price. It has an AMD Ryzen 7 5700 CPU teamed up with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage. More pivotal for a gaming PC is its graphics card: a GeForce RTX 4060 with 8GB of VRAM.

Read more